Sh*t To Help You Show Up April 30, 2021
On Consent and Compulsivity
Trigger warning: If you find images of bondage or drug use take you to an emotional place that doesn’t feel safe, proceed with caution.
I’ve been thinking about consent, which is a long-overdue cultural conversation that we’re just beginning to engage in here in the United States. I suspect if you’ve found your way to this space then you are in basic, theoretical agreement that yes means yes, no means no, and anyone being forced, or coerced, into doing anything sexual without their consent is wrong.
It doesn’t matter if you’ve done a thing before, you’re inebriated, what you’re wearing, or if you started to and then changed your mind. It doesn’t matter if you know the person intimately or not at all. Everyone, at every point, deserves autonomy and sovereignty over their own body. Agreed?
But consent is a deeper question than simply no means no, and that’s where we could all benefit from the lessons to be offered by the BDSM community about consent culture and enthusiastic consent.
Consent Culture and Enthusiastic Consent
There is a difference between implicit consent and explicit consent. Implicit consent means if you’re breathing and not actively saying no to something, then everything must be okay. Within the context of implicit consent, silence implies consent to continue. This is the variety of consent, assuming we think about sexual consent at all, that most of us utilize in our sexual encounters with other people. We may attend to body language or other sorts of non-verbal or non-language cues, but we’re not really talking to each other.
Folks in the kink community, by virtue of engaging in sexual and sensual activity that can, or is designed to, be rough or potentially do some physical damage to the participants’ bodies, can’t afford to fall back on implicit consent. That’s how folks get hurt, and not in a sexy way. Therefore, the notion of explicit or enthusiastic consent has evolved to describe the affirmative, verbal negotiation and agreement that any and all participants have to engage in both before and during play in order to keep everybody safe.
If we’re not into kink most of us have not devoted much time or energy to develop the skills or self-awareness involved in explicit consent, which are much more complex than “I can say no or yes when I need to.” Before you can even get to saying “yes” or “no” you have to actually dig into what you want and don’t want. You have to believe that you deserve to get what you want, and you have to be absolutely committed to everyone’s constant right to choice and autonomy.
These ideas, when expanded beyond the bedroom to the entirety of the culture, have far-reaching implications for the integrity of all of our relationships. Knowing what we want (and don’t), our emotional patterns and triggers, and taking constant responsibility for communicating clearly and explicitly to the absolute best of our ability the truth of all of that, is fostering our own integrity. Respecting other people’s integrity, conversely, means honoring their separateness and sovereignty. They don’t necessarily want what we want and deserve the right, always and at all times, to revoke their consent to participate in whatever dynamic we’re part of together.
You must be in control of, and able to revoke, your consent at all times for that consent to remain valid.
Most of us can probably wrap our heads around the idea that force or coercion removes consent, but there are more subtle and equally damaging ways of invalidating someone’s consent. Lying and manipulation, even if it looks like “people-pleasing”, are also ways of negating the other person’s right to consent. If you are withholding or actively hiding information from someone that, if they knew, would change the trajectory of their life and choices then you are engaging in non-consensual behavior. It is wrong. Stop it.
We’re all (hopefully) working on our emotional baggage and trying to come to some deeper clarity about who we are, what we want for ourselves, and whether or not we believe we get to have it. Within the context of that work we often act out our repetitive, internal scripts unconsciously. There is no shame in that. As a wise friend of mine said recently, “We’re designed to follow the templates we’ve been given”, and most of us were given shitty templates to use in navigating the world and our relationships with wholeness and integrity.
However, once you’re conscious of what’s going on with you, how your emotional patterning is playing out, you have to take responsibility for yourself, no matter how uncomfortable or painful it may be. You have to stop aggressively, or passive-aggressively, controlling other people’s choices.
You cannot disrespect anyone’s sovereignty over their own life and be in your integrity.
The Compulsivity Conundrum
The biggest obstacle, in my experience, to people being able to create a consent culture in their relationships is compulsivity. Alcohol and drug addiction are pretty commonly understood examples of habitual compulsivity, but people can also be compulsive with sex, romantic love and infatuation, gambling, shopping, food, lying. If you are repeatedly engaging in behavior that you know is destructive or harmful and you can’t stop, or you have complicated justifications why you just have to, then you are in the grips of a compulsion.
People in the grips of compulsion cannot maintain or respect boundaries. Without boundaries, consent— sexual or otherwise— goes right out the window.
Compulsion is fueled by avoidance of discomfort, fear, and pain. We encounter some situation that triggers a deep wound in us, all sorts of overwhelming feelings come rushing in, and we look for an emotional or physical off-ramp that will provide some relief, a hit of dopamine or adrenaline to distance ourselves from the threat.
The desperate desire to connect combined with the inability to do so also sits at the heart of compulsion. It is an attachment issue. Attachment issues often connect all the way back to childhood and represent deep wounds that we cannot heal without outside help, whether it be talk therapy, pastoral counseling, or somatic healing.
Again, there is no shame in any of this, but there is responsibility. Only you can do the necessary work to heal yourself and reconfigure your patterns and behaviors. Time will not fix it for you. No other person is going to magically remove the necessity of the work either. The only way is through, my friend.
“Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.” — C.G. Jung
For some of us, the challenge of compulsivity comes from the other direction. Often we’re raised in families of addiction and have deeply imprinted patterns of enabling and submission. We are so habituated to not having our needs met, assuming we can even remember what our needs are, that it’s hard to even admit what is happening. We’re so used to having our boundaries violated, it barely even feels like violation anymore. Submitting to dynamics and stories we didn’t consent to just feels like love.
We carry people’s potential and damage with us like treasure— protecting, guarding, making excuses, hoping that someday we will love them enough that everything will be fixed. They will be fixed, so grateful for their salvation, and our suffering will be redeemed and meaningful.
What a never-ending trap it all is, this enabling, this never-ending self-denial. We also have work to do— on our self-worth, our relationship and family history. Ultimately, we must do what Western Hermeticists call aligning our will, which means digging deep into our own shadow material and working to make it conscious so that what we say we want consciously and what we unconsciously manifest can finally start to be in accordance with each other.
None of this is easy, my friends, but it is absolutely possible. I can attest that the work to own myself entirely— my desires and my baggage— is continual and never-ending, but it does get easier, like any constructive habit. Doing the work has allowed me to build the most amazing, resilient, enfolding community of chosen family that lifts me up even when life is harder than I anticipated. They steady me when I get in my own way and stumble, and when I occasionally go ass-over-tea-kettle into a ditch they climb down in there with me and keep me loving company until I figure out how to climb out.
We are a joyful coalition of powerful, sovereign souls that enthusiastically choose each other over and over again. I wish the same for you. I wish the same for everyone.
Friends, I sent this out later today to see if a time closer to evening would put it in your inboxes when you have more time and inclination to read. Please let me know what you think. Do you prefer the newsletter to appear at noon? Is afternoon better? Morning?
As of the publishing of today’s newsletter, we have reached 237 SUBSCRIBERS. Can you help me reach 250 this weekend? Please share this, or any other previous newsletter that really struck you, with someone specific in your life who you think would benefit. Blanket postings to your social media channels also help, but personal invitations can be powerful gifts.
As always, like (click the heart!), comment, subscribe below if you haven’t yet. You cannot imagine the way you all lift my heart. Thank you. XO, Asha
Lovely! This speaks to me exactly where I am right now! In my own work, I have adopted explicit consent to guide me in forming close relationships. It provides me the safety to be authentic, maintain boundaries and integrity. How wonderful it would be if it did expand to the entirety of the culture!
"We carry people’s potential and damage with us like treasure" - how poignantly beautiful and accurate. Compulsion and other non-consensual behaviors are not only obstacles, they can decimate the hard-fought work and obliterate the integrity of all involved. As I gather the broken pieces of my life (again), your words bolster me to show up, do the work and continue the Journey.
Asha I'm going to read this one a couple of times over the weekend. There is a lot to dig into in this post. There many soul rippling moments in this piece but to pause too long in the first read would mean I wouldn't finish and to reach the end brings such completeness. It's like when you watch a movie that is so funny you have to watch it more than once because you laughed through some of the jokes.