Can you teach submission?
One of the reasons I love twitter is the ability to have conversation with people around the world and get inspired by what others are experiencing and talking about.
So when Domina Dynasty posed this question on twitter, I was intrigued…
Can you teach someone to be submissive?
It’s a really interesting question and like so many aspects of kink, prompts more questions before an answer can be found.
First it got me thinking about the huge variety in submissives who have served me over the years. This is yet another example when language matters and individual definitions matter the most. The way that I define submission very likely could be different than the way that you define submission.
Yes, I know that I talk about this all the time but it’s that important.
This all boils down to one of my core concepts and it’s this –
Focus on intention, not activity.
Submission is an emotional state. Submission can look very different from person to person.
- Crawling & groveling
- Quietly respectful
- Bratty & defiant
- Obedient & obsequious
And to really blow your mind, sometimes submission looks like dominance but I’ll get to that more thoroughly in a future post.
However obedience is one of the most obvious expressions of submission, so we’ll start with that.
As a dominant, you can teach obedience. You can teach someone to submit to your commands, and you can teach someone how to do different tasks and actions. You can use punishments, rewards and bribes to encourage or require that someone “acts” obedience, because obedience is an action.
You can also teach someone how to model emotional submission with body language indicators such as keeping their eyes to the ground or crawling or always walking two steps behind.
Those are indicators of submission, but they don’t in any way guarantee the emotional state of submission.
Forcing someone to crawl might put them into the emotional state of submissiveness, but when you force someone else to do the same thing, they’re just crawling. It may not have any have any connection to the way that they are feeling inside.
The action and the activity is not where the energy lies. It is inside of the individual themselves.
Yes, you can teach someone to model submissiveness. You can teach them obedience. You can teach them to express emotional submissive indicators, but there is no (healthy*) way (that I know of) to externally teach someone to be submissive internally unless they want to achieve that headspace. They are the ones that have to put in the internal work no matter how much time or energy the dominant spends on the training.
So the person has to have at least a kernel of submissive desire even if they find it difficult to express that submissiveness. It’s not always easy behave submissively, even when it is desired.
But if they are motivated then there are definitely ways to develop submissiveness. There are ways to cultivate the mindset of submission and to use external actions to create internal headspace.
With the combination of consistent training from the dominant and sincere effort on the submissive it’s possible to grow a desire to be submissive into actual submission.
What do you think? Are you a dominant that has trained someone to BE and FEEL submissive, not just ACT submissive? How do you know? Are you a submissive that has been trained to deepen your internal experience? Tell me about it in the comments below!
* I’m sure that there are ways to teach someone to be genuinely emotionally submissive, but I am unsure of the healthiness of those methods. What I’m talking about right now is consensual and either relationship/emotional submission or sexual submission.