My Journey to Submission Pt. 03

Then, completely blind and deaf, I bent as far as I could over the horse's padding, straining to reach dangling padlock. I barely caught the lock with my fingertips, but with a bit of effort I managed to manipulate it through the rings on my wrist cuffs.

Click. I was immobilized and helpless, alone in blackness and silence.

The effects of a couple of hours of sensory deprivation are different for everyone. Those I experienced that day were fairly typical for me.

First, the reality of my vulnerability set in. Ellen was at home to supervise me, so she had not left me any way to free myself in case of emergency. I was completely at her mercy. Should she decide to leave me -- for the rest of the day, overnight, forever -- there would be nothing I could do but wait and suffer and quite literally go insane. By this time, however, she had trained me to breathe slowly and deeply, and to focus on my trust in her, until this initial wave of panic subsided.

After a while, my brain began to rebel against the unnatural lack of stimuli. I struggled against my cuffs, not trying to free myself, but trying to feel something -- anything -- in my limbs. To reassure myself that I, a flesh and blood human being, actually existed. I rubbed my tongue around the inside of my mouth, biting it from time to time. But these limited tactile sensations were not nearly enough to compensate for the loss of my sight and hearing, and I soon gave up.

I started to lose touch with reality. I could have been anywhere, or nowhere. I struggled to stay connected to my consciousness.

I focused on the only reality I knew: that of my impending punishment. And as I did so, my dread slowly morphed into outright terror. Not because I didn't know what was to come, but because I did. I wouldn't hear or see Ellen enter the dungeon and pick up the thin maple switch. I wouldn't sense her standing behind me, no doubt smiling in cruel amusement at my ridiculous, exposed body, as she prepared to use it on me.

My only warning that she was ready to begin the session would be the fire of the wood striking my skin for the first time.

Ellen had learned to be diabolically cruel in her application of pain. She always hit me completely at random -- sometimes harder, sometimes softer; sometimes a single blow at a time, sometime several in rapid succession. This meant that I never had any way to predict when or how the next blow would come and to prepare myself mentally. A long pause without a strike might mean that she was finished, but it might just as easily prove to be merely a pause before another, fiercer round of blows. She never told me in advance how many stripes I was to receive, so counting was irrelevant.

When she was in one her more sadistic moods (as she appeared to be that day), the only thing I could be sure of was that she would stop only when she was convinced that I would break under any further punishment.

I don't know how long Ellen left me alone to wait for her. Half an hour? An hour? Three hours? It doesn't really matter, because to a person under sensory deprivation, time loses any meaning. With nothing whatsoever to grasp onto as a reference, hours seem like minutes, and vice-versa.

But in the end, the moment arrived when my waiting ended, and my suffering began. My world of blackness and silence was obliterated by the excruciating sting of the first blow of the switch. She'd hit me very hard, and it felt as though she might have already broken my skin. After a few seconds, the sting dulled to an intense burning sensation across my buttocks, as my first stripe was etched onto my skin. The next blow came just seconds later, then the third, then the fourth. Then many, many more.

Long after there was no more virgin flesh left on my buttocks or thighs, my wife continued to beat me, adding welts upon welts upon welts. By then, I must have been groaning in agony, but I could not hear myself. The only stimulus that Ellen allowed to enter my consciousness was pain.

Extreme, gut-wrenching pain.

The randomness of the beating combined with the lack of any other stimuli to distort reality. I felt myself float in and out of my body, the way people often talk about doing in books about near-death experiences. My mind wandered to all kinds of strange places -- childhood memories, fragments of tastes or smells, snatches of music that I'd forgotten -- and I began to see and understand things with a most extraordinary clarity.

It was during one of these interludes that I had my great revelation.

I'd wanted Ellen to catch me cheating.

Wait, what? Why?

Because I knew that if she did, then she would do to me exactly what she ended up doing. And deep down inside, I wanted her to do it. Needed her to do it.

The analogy that I use to explain this is that I was living my life like some bandit in an old western movie -- on the run from the law, hiding behind thick barricades of self-deception. My so-called sexual dominance was nothing more than a defense against my own deep-seated feelings of inadequacy and insecurity. But subconsciously, I could sense those feelings closing in, and I knew that my defenses would ultimately crumble, just as Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid knew that they couldn't hold out forever against the entire Bolivian army.

I thought that I wanted was, like Butch and Sundance, to go out and meet my fate in a blaze of glory, a six-gun in each hand. But what I really needed, even if I couldn't see it for myself, was to surrender.

Surrender to Ellen.

***********

Ellen figured out that I was still cheating on her in all the usual ways. Texts sent to the wrong phone number, hotel charges showing up on our joint bank statement, that kind of thing. The details aren't important. A Freudian might theorize that I'd left her the clues on purpose, subconsciously hoping that she'd find them. Who knows?

I'll also elide all but the conclusion of our huge blow-up, when she finally confronted me with the incontrovertible evidence that she'd collected. My lame denials. My grudging confession. My even lamer pleas for understanding and forgiveness. It's all too horrific to recount.

In all my time as a sexual dominant, I never came across an aphrodisiac anywhere near as powerful as female tears. The more a woman cried as I made her writhe in agony and degradation, the harder my cock would become.

But the tears that Ellen shed that night tore my heart from my chest.

Ellen's "fantasy" pain in the context of BDSM gave us pleasure that we both craved. But her "real life" pain was unbearable to me. And the thought that I was the one who had caused it was even more so. My actions were vile. Despicable. Unforgivable (although, of course, I begged shamelessly for the forgiveness that I would never have shown her, had our places been reversed).

I grew sick with self-loathing, as she recounted the heartache that she had suffered as a result of my repeated betrayals.

In the end, she threatened to leave me. Well, she didn't really threaten. She simply stated, in a voice completely bereft of emotion, that it was her intention to do so. The thought of losing her left me in a moral panic. And through my waves of guilt- and fear-induced nausea, one thought became crystal clear in my mind:

I'll agree to anything -- anything -- to keep our marriage alive.

"There is no marriage to keep alive," she retorted coldly, when I voiced this thought. "At its heart, a marriage is simply an expression of trust between two people. And between us, there is no trust left. None. Because you destroyed it."

"Then let me build it back up again," I pleaded. "I'll agree to whatever it takes for you to keep me in line. You can make me text you every hour on the hour. Put some kind of tracking app on my phone. We can hire someone to follow me around and report to you, for Christ's sake. I don't know. There must be something."

She looked at me, her eyes still red with anger and grief, and she was silent for what seemed an eternity. Then, her fingers started tapping the table, and I knew that her final offer was coming.

"You always talk about empathy," she said. "How important it is to be in tune with your submissives' feelings. But I see now that that's just a load of horse manure. It turns out that you care fuck all about how I feel." Her words cut deep, but I listened closely, desperate to hear some glimmer of hope. "Well, if you want me to trust you, then you're going to have to learn empathy for real. You're going to feel what I've been feeling."

That didn't sound too bad. "Alright," I agreed, "what do you want me to do?"

She looked me directly in the eyes and spoke very firmly. "If you want me to stay with you, then you must submit to me. Completely."

Holy shit. I didn't see that coming.

"What do you mean?" I asked, incredulous.

She laughed bitterly. "You're the expert on dominance and submission. You tell me."

"Sure, sorry," I replied. "Of course, I understand the concept. But I mean, how do you see it working out for us? Do you want it to be our new lifestyle? Twenty-four seven? Or just, you know, during playtime? And for how long --a month, a year, forever, what?"

"I haven't decided yet. But the point is, I will be the one to decide. About everything." She said this definitively, then continued, "If we've learned one thing during our marriage, it's that left on your own, you make shitty life choices. So I'm pretty sure that any decisions I make will be better than whatever you'd come up with. But even if they're not, I don't care anymore. I'm done."

She reached behind her neck, undid her leather collar, and handed it to me. "Here, this is yours. You're not my dominant anymore. Right now, you're not anything to me. If you want to be something, then you may ask to be my submissive, and for me to be your Mistress. But that's your only option. Otherwise, I'm leaving. Those are my conditions. Take them or leave them."

I looked at her, and I was overwhelmed with guilt. How could I have treated her so badly, when she had given me so much for so long? And also, utter, complete love. The depth that my feelings for her had reached over the years astonished me. And now, the thought of waking up to a day when Ellen was not my wife -- when I was nothing to her -- was excruciating.

But to live my life as a submissive? To let a female control me? To accept any humiliation that she might want to inflict on me? Even Ellen? How could I agree to that?

I don't know how long we sat in silence, as my gut roiled with these thoughts. I really felt as if I were going to lose the contents of my stomach, but I didn't dare run off to the toilet. She looked at me for a while in silence, her face utterly devoid of emotion. Then she made to stand up. It was time to decide.

"Alright," I said.

"Alright, what?" she demanded.

"Alright, I accept your conditions," I said. She said nothing, just looked at me and waited for me to continue. Then I said the words. "I ask you to take me as your submissive. I ask you to be my Mistress."

She paused before answering. "OK," she decided. "I'm willing to give it a try if you are. But for how long, depends entirely on you. I'll show you a path to follow if you want to rebuild the trust that you destroyed. And I'll walk it beside you. But if you deviate in any way, then I'll leave -- no warning, no questions asked. Do you understand?"

"Yes, Mistress." It was the first time I used the phrase. And so, I'd submitted myself to Ellen.

But had I really? Or did I still think subconsciously that my so-called submission was temporary, and that soon the world would be set right with Ellen again under my thumb?

In any event, that's all the backstory needed to understand how I found myself bound in my own dungeon and subject to the whims of my capricious wife. The time has come to relate what happened next.