My first experience with emotional S/m could have been catastrophic.
It was ~8 years ago and I was on a week-long visit home during a months-long stay out of the country. Our relationship wasn’t on its most stable footing for reasons both related and very unrelated to that distance. We were, as we are now, very in Love. We were, as we are now, very dark in the way we play[ed].
What happened that night hadn’t been discussed much ahead of time. It was a lot. I spent most of that night crying on one side of the bed, rolled as far away from Him as I could.
This wasn’t a failure of His. He knows me well, we’d long since agreed to work through any complications that came from our mutial preference to no longer explicitly negotiate, and He was right that in His judgment that I’d prefer not be “built back up” after emotional play as some like. This also clearly *wasn’t* catastrophic, after all. But it *could* have been quite easily.
Over the next few months, however, something strange happened: I found that that scene was often what popped into my head as I was getting myself off. It did so more and more as time went on, as we communicated more and our dynamic got back to focused on us as opposed to all life’s other insignificancies. And soon enough, I was home and we were playing in this way more than any other.
So what changed?
There’s a concept that I have hard of used to reference what makes certain recreational activities good or bad: set and setting.
Such activities as the term was coined in alter your headspace. Not in quite the same way to how play does but… in a way that might be comparable for a number of reasons. At the very least, I think this is one.
“Setting” isn’t always a where in this case. In fact, it rarely is. It’s a social and personal context: a when, a who, a *how; the external factors that very often end up interwoven with the internal ones. The internal ones are—you guessed it—the “set,” which is short for “mindset.”
I want to be clear that by “mindset” here I don’t (necessarily) mean “the bottom must have a mindset that they are not the things the top makes them feel like in the scene to not have a badbad time.” There are some of us who would not even *remotely* get what we wanted out of emotional S/m if this were true—to me, my Owner picking on actual insecurities or beliefs is hot, and Him saying things that I don’t believe He could believe at all feels silly. Others, they don’t want that. This is something that varies for everyone and can only be known through explicit discussion and/or deep, intimate knowledge of each other. What I do mean is that the mindset going in should be one where the play doesn’t cause harm—whatever that is for you.
For me, in that first scene, I had a mindset of “I am not ultimately someone my Owner wants to prioritize.” This made things badbad. Today—through a combination of therapy, action, and time—along with the right “setting,” which for me is “living together in a functional, stable, communicative relationship with agreed-upon needs” (and more importantly isn’t “the opposite of all those things”)—I have a mindset of “I am who my Owner wants to be with in any reality.” This means that He can say the horrible things and make me do the embarrassing things and they can all be real and true and weaponize my own beliefs about myself and it simply doesn’t matter. I am who He *wants* to be with: Me, the validation-seeking slut. He *wants* to be with me, the shameful little thing who gets off to [redacted.]
(Note that I personally like to have an internal locus of control here. Although my set has to do with the partnership, it’s still about me. This is important. It isn’t “My Owner wants to be with me in any reality;” it’s about who *I* am. It’s a subtle difference but it’s one that matters.)
Mine is a mindset that works for our play. If I were approaching emotional S/m through pick-up play (a wildly different setting that wouldn’t be right for me personally with any set), that wouldn’t be my priority. It might be something more like “I am a successful person regardless of how others feel about me” or the like—Whatever it is most important to you that your emotional play not harm, that’s what the right set and setting should reflect. And as you’ve probably figured out by now, these things relate to each other deeply. They can be considered separately but one may relate to the other: my friend @Venerant on Fetlife did a risk breakdown for play after her personal context changed due to the loss of a beloved pet. In her writing, she demos considerations of how her SETTING is affecting her SET might look quite well.
In any case, only you can know the setting and set you need. But I hope you find one that’s conducive to all the best, hottest, most liberating outcomes.
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