Introspection ... Six Months Into Our Journey

Most of my latest posts have been fun little stories ... I hope you've enjoyed them. Now it's time to get a bit more serious. We are at a point where I think an update on our ttwd journey is due.

Here's a bit of a recap, in case you are recent to reading this blog ... the main reason we ventured down this ttwd road six months ago was a desire to see if practising a DD lifestyle would enable us to bring our long time bedroom D/s dynamic into our mainstream life. For 20 years we have had some form of the D/s dynamic as a regular part our love/sex life. It wasn't an always thing ... 2-3 times a month one or the other of us would need it and it would happen. It retrospect I might call it a D/s lite type of dynamic. Other times we were strictly vanilla. Frank would often push for us to practice more, especially outside the bedroom, but mentally I was just not able to go there. When I brought DD to him, he was immediately on board to give it a try. 

When Fledgling HoH Meets Bedroom Dom ... 

This was the original title to this post when it was started a while ago. We were only in ttwd land a few months. Although we are retired and it's just the two of us living in our house, we are surrounded with family ... kids with keys being the biggest issue, along with cousins as neighbours and other neighbours who often drop by. It makes us a little bit cautious about taking openly ttwd/D/s activities out of the privacy of our bedroom. A perfect opportunity arose where I knew we would be entirely alone for an evening. Frank was 'in town' for a bit so I took the time to have a bath, mow the lawn (ok, a bit of humour :>)), put on an attire that I knew would get his attention (short skirt, crop top, knee highs, hair in a pony tail). I greeted him at the top of the stairs when he got home. He grinned and the night was on. I had appies and wine laid out at the dining table, a favourite dinner in the making and toys were laid out in the bedroom. We talked ttwd talk, ate and laughed ... then he  would point me in the direction of bedroom and Dom Frank would take over and we'd play as we have for many years. Then we'd head back out to the dining room, talk again over food, etc and then again, back to the bedroom for another interlude. At one point, in the back and forth, I laughed and said ... "Hi there Mr HoH ... meet Mr Dom" ... because there were subtle differences between the two personalities. The HoH Frank was less sure of himself. However, Dom Frank was as confident as he'd been for years. 

Fast forward to now ... 

As of now, Frank has undergone a mindmeld of those two personalities and  Dom Frank has definitely come out on top. There are times when some of our discussions or his Domly directives have me doing a double take ... like 'where the hell did that come from'! because I know he's not reading 'How to be a Dom' books. He's a learn by doing guy not a learn by reading. Yes, he has been doing Domly things in the bedroom for years but the way he now acts and responds in every day life is new. I asked him the other day where it's coming from. His response ... he thinks it's always been there ... just stuffed down inside because in his words, "if I'd tried any of this way back when, you'd have just told me to eff off" ... yes, he's right, I would have :>)

I am a life long learner and book worm so I have not been sitting idly by waiting for our ttwd D/s to evolve. I've been reading 'back in blogs' of those whose kink is obviously a D/s lifestyle (our Abby at finally finding "me" is one). Recently, I've also read a couple of books ... one as a result of an interview Jlynne did with Anton Fulmen and published in her blog "Becoming His: Our Journey into a D/s Dynamic". To read the interview go here. Anton's book The Heart of Dominance is intended for Dominants but enlightening for submissives as well. 

From the resource section in that book I found Conquer Me by Kacie Cunningham, written for submissives. 

I am not planning on putting either of these books under Frank's pillow but I am currently doing a reread of both with my yellow highlighter in hand and will share the bits and pieces with him I think he might find interesting or I would like him to become interested in :>)

All of my reading and research has been enlightening. However the biggest impact for me have been three nuggets I found within Abby's blog. Nuggets that have really turned my thinking on its head ... and just so you know, Abby and her M have been practicing their D/s lifestyle for 16 years and she has been writing about it for 8 of those 16 years so there is a lot of experience in that blog! The nuggets are as follows:

obedience is not necessarily submission ... if you are a singer and someone directs you to 'sing a song', you could do it off key, in a soft voice that is barely heard, facing away from your audience and all that action could be seen as obeying the directive OR you could put your whole heart and voice into your song and as you can well imagine, the results will be very different. Submission comes from within. Obedience is an externally driven response.

the more submissive the submissive is, the more dominant the Dominant will become ... which then in turn feeds back to the submissive. It is definitely a dance (a reference I read in the two books numerous times). If I look closely at our previous D/s experience, I see my then self as a passive submissive, expecting Frank to 'do his dominance thing' to me as the recipient. I now see that the submissive must be an active participant in that dance. As a result I am trying very hard to approach our new dynamic with what I am calling my 'submissive heart', looking for opportunities to demonstrate my submissiveness to and for Frank. He has noticed my efforts and I in turn have noted an increase in his dominance.  

And from Abby's M, two key words ... follow through and consistency ... these words were also mentioned considerably in the two books I read as well. The key message for the Dominant being he/she needs to consistently follow through with enforcement of agreed to (negotiated) rules and expectations.

So this is where we are six months into our ttwd journey ... not long ago I wrote a comment in response to Windy's (When the Storm Whispers to the Wind) post about the ideal ttwd town with the ice cream named streets. I said then we were living at the corner of French Vanilla and Rocky Road. Well now I can tell you ... we are looking at a little two storey further up the hill on Rocky Road, with a Moose Tracks cottage in the back for my studio ... and a dungeon in the basement ... interesting times they are ahead!

thanks as always for dropping by ... nj