Finding comfort in sexting

I’m sorry it’s taken this ling for someone to respond.

I can’t relate. I’ve not been in your situation; I never got into humiliation, or homosexual play. I can theorize about what is going on, though. You engage through the screen, you keep a barrier between your real self and the fantasy. You like the fantasy because it is exotic, forbidden, and it’s exciting, in a way, to pretend it can be real because it makes the experience more intense. You always back out of bridging the fantasy into reality, though, because you know you aren’t going to like the actual experience. You won’t be protected from the negative consequences. You instinctively know the sex fantasies are like eating a whole party sized bag of Doritos at once; it sounds kind of awesome but you know you’re going to feel sick after. You don’t want to be that person, because you know you aren’t that person. There are aspects of that person that are intensely enticing, but trying to be the totality of that person will not fit.

What you need is to figure out what it is about the fantasy that is enticing. Then deal with satisfying that need and/or countering that anxiety, in a non-sexual context.

I don’t know a lot about kink psychology, I just know kinks are expressions of normal needs or anxieties, but with a sexual component that acts as an accelerant. Humiliation is a counterintuitive kink. One would think there would be more sadists than masochists, more people craving control over others than craving being controlled. That’s not the case, not in the US anyway. Researchers have found more buyers in the sex trade looking for doms than willing subs, and they claim the best doms are good at what they do because they are natural subs, knowing exactly what a sub wants. Further, they found more paying subs in the Washington D.C. area, a center of real world power. It appears during the day, these johns are lawyers, lobbyists, and legislators with disproportionate responsibilities, with real world control over people’s lives, with high pressure to do a good job, to lead people into better lives. In their off time they want zero responsibility. They want to be told what to do. They want to be punished, immediately and severely, for making mistakes and they want to be told that they are the only person who suffers consequences for their mistakes. They want to be told they are low value, that it doesn’t matter what they do, and that they are fully capable of delivering what little is expected of them.

I don’t think you have to be a high performer, in any objective sense, to feel like the pressure to succeed outpaces your capability to deliver. I think a regular person can find relief in humiliation, when he feels he is incapable of meeting even simple expectations. The answer, I think, is not in doubling down on that anxiety and embracing humiliation as “your” kink, as your identity, because it feels bad. Because there’s no resolution offered in it, because there is no character arc in it, no room for improvement, no hope. It’s just a downward spiral that leads nowhere but more humiliation, eventually to suicide. The answer, I think, is to clean your room.

It’s a simplistic solution, but it works. You might be incapable of supporting a family right now, or doing whatever your end goal is, but you can clean your room. You can assume responsibility for the small things in your life, and take control, and meet that expectation. And it’s important, it’s vital, to not cheat yourself out of the pleasure of that victory. You need to give yourself full credit for cleaning your room, as nominal an achievement as that may be. And as you become accustomed to managing that small thing, as you master that life skill, you are given room to grow and take on more responsibility. One at a time. You master those as well, and you gradually take on more until you are capable of supporting a family. So instead of taking the lazy way out and wallowing in and embracing your incompetence, you reject that identity and build yourself, one step at a time, into a person you can justifiably be proud of.
This is how they did it in basic combat training, by the way. The Drill Sergeants, they yelled and screamed at us about making our beds and folding our laundry, and they were right to do so because we were doing it wrong. Then we learned to do it right, and in a matter of weeks we went from being a lot of undisciplined yahoos who couldn’t organize our socks, to a unit capable of managing automatic weapons without getting one another killed.

Who are you going to be? That’s the question. Not who do you want to be, who you wish you were, because you’re ambivalent about that. But who are you going to be? Someone different than you are now, that is certain. You want to be someone better. There are choices you can make today to guide yourself toward that end. Reject the lies from these fantasies you lurk in; you are not that person. Even at your worst, you have more value than that. This man you are involved with, he may or may not have good intentions, but he’s definitely not helping you. You need to renounce him, kindly, and end that relationship, because he is not helping you be the person you want to become, or will be. He is a distraction, an obstacle, a hinderance.

Go attempt hard things, and discover that you are capable. At the same time, don’t overdo it. Be realistic about the challenges you set for yourself, and slowly, sustainably, build yourself into something mighty.