Posting with Trepidation

I have been teetering back and forth about the wisdom of exposing much about this aspect of my/our life.

We have written, both swan and I recently, that I have returned, after a several year hiatus from switching roles in our SM power exchange, to my actively bottoming again. That dynamic has gone beyond my simply switching playfully to include my being corporally punished as a behavior support to help me achieve a behavior goal I am finding challenging, and that I need to control more effectively.

The issue is my alcohol consumption. I am hesitant to reveal this here in that each time this issue has arisen in our writing here it has resulted in a cascade or vitriolic comments by anonymous commenters and some even less that supportive or helpful comments from some of our more frequent correspondents here.

I think alcohol and our relationship to it is a difficult subject to discuss constructively especially for the demographics of this blog community. Most people who have been around BDSM for a while know that there is a higher incidence of alcoholism among people who practice BDSM. If you go to a BDSM conference you find in general that there are a higher than average number of smokers, a higher than average number of people in substance abuse recovery and/or actively abusing, and a higher than average number of morbidly obese people. If you had looked at me 10 years ago I fit that demographic stereotype perfectly. I was obese, heavily tobacco addicted, and used alcohol to excess on a regular basis. I have over the last decade managed to entirely end my tobacco consumption (tobacco free since January 2000), and my obesity ended once and for all with my loss of 160 pounds in 2009 after my gastric bypass surgery. The benefits for my health have been amazing for me.

I am determined now to get my drinking under control. Especially since my job loss, I have drank to excess regularly and daily. As I have written I have found my sudden career ending very difficult. I have experienced a range of emotions from fear for our future, to remorse, to ANGER, to depression, to feeling a sense of loss of control (loss of control I always a huge problem for me), and I have self-medicated with my good friend Jack Daniel. However, as I have written, this is not new behavior for me.

My drinking history since my gastric bypass has been "interesting." After my surgery I abstained entirely from any alcohol for seven months, which was a recommended time period by my medical team. Then I returned to drinking. A challenging aspect of all this is that after Rouen Y Gastric Bypass procedures alcohol you consume gets "dumped" into your blood stream in a "raw" form without the digestive processing a normal gastrointestinal system accomplishes when someone drinks alcohol. This intensifies the intoxicating effects of alcohol, and is particularly acute if one drinks rapidly. The other oddity is that the intoxicating effects of alcohol, while more acute after gastric bypass, are much more short lived than for "normal" people. It is estimated that even should you drink to excess after gastric bypass, if you stop drinking for 45 minutes you will be completely sober whereas, of course, if one drinks to excess normally sobriety takes much longer than that to achieve.

This is my last great health issue and I am determined to control it. Further more I am determined not to completely eliminate the behavior altogether as I did with smoking, but to moderate my consumption. I know this flies in the face of the belief system for many that total abstinence is the only acceptable option. That is not however my belief, intention, or goal.

We have established a limit on my drinking consumption and should I exceed it sue is empowered to do what she sees fit to punish me. This has happened once last Friday. One of the challenges in all this is that I am by nature very controlling..............Dominant. Disciplining, i. e., exerting external control on me is challenging. You need to be effective without causing me to tip over into defiance, which an almost reflexive response for me. In fact that happened last Thursday night. I reached my drink limit that evening and then became very defiant and announced that this whole issue of my having a drink limit is just stupid, I can do whatever the hell I want, and then quite rebelliously went ahead to exceed my drink limit. The next day swan and I discussed this whole business via email and IM while she was at school and she made it clear I was going to be punished. I had not been punished for years and years. I became quite emotionally upset. Having to give up control and accept that was difficult and quite frankly I was afraid. I have been very sadistic with swan at times in her discipline and I knew well she was quite competent and sincere about wanting to do this and to not having to correct me repeatedly. swan is, as you likely know, an educator. As she has put it frequently she does discipline professionally for a living, does not like that aspect of her career particularly other than that it is crucially necessary to achieve her goals, and particularly finds it egregious if she has to correct a behavior more than once. I was very afraid how severe she was going to be with me. I was feeling huge remorse, guilt, concern for how she was going to feel emotionally as she had to do this radical juxtapositioning of our power exchange etc.

Thank goodness she came home and, at my request, did not wait until Saturday to discipline me, as she had originally planned. At at my request she undertook to get "it" over with, seeing how emotional I was. As almost always happens for bottom partners, my punishment was not as severe as I had catastrophically imagined. It also was not a cake walk (25 severe licks with a rattan cane and several strokes afterwards with about a half dozen other high end severity implements to demonstrate for me just how much she could ratchet up the severity of my punishment should I make that necessary by my behavior.) I was relieved when it was over in that it had not been as harsh as I'd imagined. My pre-punishment emotions changed to feelings of huge gratitude to swan for her doing this in such a measured and serious way, while taking into account the feelings I was having. I felt, and have continued to feel, an intense reconnection with her since that time.

We had a nice weekend after that entertaining a couple of friends Saturday night (vanilla couple that has come to accept us in our polyamory) and with lots of playful erotic spanking between sue and I and lots of vanilla loving as well. Actually it was one of the happiest weekends we've had. And, BTW, no I did not violate my limits.

Then Sunday evening we settled in to watch some TV. For some reason I had a particularly intense desire to drink that night, and of course ran right into the limits that we have established. I did not violate the limits but I became like an angry child who could not have his way. I was aggravated, pouty, angry and on the verge of having an actual tantrum which thankfully I did not go to. While evenings with me drunk are not necessarily fun, this was not fun either, for either of us. I didn't behave angrily towards swan but just generally pissy. I knew this was not something she was doing to me, but rather, for me, at my request, as my slave. I also knew that last night at least had I not had the reinforcement available of inevitable punishment, were I to have violated my limit, I would have likely binged.

Unlike Friday night I did not become defiant, nor did I violate my limit. I simply was angry and passive aggressive about it, mostly making myself unhappy. I hate it when I cannot be in control. Of course the paradox is that when I drink too much I become out of control. Our disciplinary switching in this regard is my surrendering a degree of control to swan so she can help me gain much more important control over a serious health issue. As for my emotions last night, it is going to be up to me to choose how long I want to make myself unhappy because I CAN'T HAVE MY WAY............or for for me to recognize that not drinking to excess is my actually having me way. Stamping my foot and pouting is not a very adult or useful response. I'm lucky swan is wise enough to realize that I followed the behavior plan, and there is nothing in my plan that necessarily requires me to have to be happy about it.

So that is where we are in all this switching business. We have always been open about our lives here, good, bad and indifferent and this is just another example of that forthcomingness.

Tom

Go confidently in the direction of your dreams. Live the life you've imagined.