Master Greg

Saying the hard things is hard, and, necessary. I needed a word for trying to guess someone else’s interior, thoughts and feelings (their “interiority”), so I invented one for the book I’m (eventually) writing: interiorating. None of us can accurately know anyone else’s inner world. This has been measured: when married couples guess each other’s thoughts and feelings, they score about a third on accuracy, at best. In a dynamic, you can’t submit consensually - fully informed - to someone you don’t know. You’d just be submitting to the concept of them, not actual them. And you can’t get fully informed by guessing what’s inside them. Both of us play a role in fully informing each other about what’s going on inside us. Your role is when you catch yourself guessing about what’s inside me, don’t guess, because you’ll mostly be wrong - ask. My role is to say what’s inside me. When I keep quiet, all you have to go on is your inaccurate guess about me, and you can’t consent to an inaccurate guess. I NEED to tell you what I’m thinking and feeling, otherwise you’re not actually submitting to me. There’s really no other path to genuine submission than for both of us to know each other, and then choose if we want to do this thing together. Now, an important caveat. Humans suck at communicating when we don’t feel good. I’ve found it’s really hard to stop myself inside a ‘weed-filled’ brain - upset, clogged with thoughts - and find the words to tell you I’m “still here” with you - especially during those moments when I’m uncertain if I’m still here - and then to ask you to wait until I can think clearly. I’m getting better at recognizing when my brain isn’t thinking clearly, and stopping more words from coming out of my mouth until I get time to think - or ideally sleep - and clear the weeds. What I’d like to get better at is telling you when I’m stuck in the weeds - that I’m still here, with you, and will come back when I can think clearly. Here’s the key: a dynamic is a commitment not just to BE with each other, but to KNOW each other. A moment of uncertainty - even about us - is not an irreconcilable difference. And it’s not an excuse to stop communicating. Apparently a lot of men just walk away during moments of uncertainty, or decide they don’t want the “added pressure” to continue building deeper connection by talking through the hard things. Too bad. If you’re going to commit to a dynamic, you HAVE to talk through the hard things. Taking a night to clear the weeds isn’t walking away. Ideally we all get better at communicating to our partners when we need time to think, and that time away doesn't mean we're leaving. A moment of uncertainty - or a moment to think - is something to talk through, not something to abandon each other over.

You know you've got a good girl when she's happy, excited, and grateful you bought a new broom for her to clean your place with.

Shame creates cognitive dissonance, and we wear a ‘mask’ to try to resolve it. Here’s how that works: Shame is a grade on you as a whole being: you are all-wrong (a term from the book I’m writing... eventually). Your own history contains acts that you did that were right, so you can’t be all-wrong. If you feel like you’re all-wrong and know you’ve done right, that’s where the dissonance comes from. (Guilt for a single wrong act doesn’t produce this contradiction, because the guilt is limited to that one act, not you as a whole person.) I’ve learned we don’t heal shame by trying to contradict our self-grade of all-wrong with an equal measure of “I’m all-right” because that’s still a grade. And one grade can’t replace another. There was a study done in 2009 on exactly this: people with low self-esteem who repeated “I’m a lovable person” to themselves felt worse afterward, and the ones who were told to think about ways it was true and ways it wasn’t felt better than the ones told to focus only on when it was true. Because we KNOW we are partly ‘wrong’ and partly right, and that accurate self-knowledge is what actually makes us feel better about ourselves. This is why what ‘works’ instead is grace. Not ‘grace’ as in ‘we are all flawed’ (also a grade), but a slightly different kind of grace: we merely exist, and are all part-right and part-wrong. Now, for the mask. Since that all-wrong grade can’t be reconciled with your history of being right sometimes, it’s cheaper, instead of constantly handing other people our self-knowledge of part-right/part-wrong, to manage those other people by producing a ‘mask’ of someone who we think would be graded all-right that directly contradicts our internal grade of all-wrong. The mask we ‘wear’ balances out the part of us who believes we are all-wrong, and that’s why identifying the mask can help you identify the shame. If you understand what someone is trying to make you feel about them, what they want you to notice, that’s their ‘mask’ hiding whatever it is they feel ashamed of in themselves, that they don’t want you to know. We all do this somewhere. Not everyone is safe enough to remove that mask around. Very few people are safe to reveal your shame to, and, they’re the ones we forge the strongest, longest lasting bonds with. Because that mask we wear to hide our shame is representing an all-right grade, which also produces cognitive dissonance... and taking it off with someone we feel safe to be part-wrong and part-right with, is the only relief from all that extra mental processing, mask-making, and ego-defense.

A consequence or punishment is not the same as abuse, though from a vanilla perspective they can look the same because they're both... unpleasant, for the recipient. What's the difference? Abuse is NOT dependent on whether or not you agree you did the thing wrong, or whether you agree you earned the consequence. Taking the consequences you've agreed your dominant has authority over is part of the deal you make when you take on a dynamic and agree how it will be run. You can disagree with a specific consequence, and still get punished, and still be inside a healthy dynamic. On the other side, a submissive can agree they've deserved every punishment and still be getting abused. Abuse is using what he has over you to get something you didn't consent to, under conditions where you can't make it stop. If he does something once that the two of you agreed he would not do, and you are still free to walk away from the dynamic, that's a mistake he made. You can choose to talk about it and fix it together, or walk away. If he keeps doing things you never agreed to, and at the same time makes it harder and harder for you to walk away, that's abuse. So, to know if something is abuse or consensual punishment, ask four questions: a) Did you agree to the system of consequences itself, knowing that's what it was? Did you know what things you agreed to be punished for, what those punishments would look like, and whether or not your dominant has the authority to decide when you've earned one? b) Is your dominant only operating within the lines you agreed to? Or is he inventing rules you supposedly broke after the fact to cover for his actions, or ignoring the hard limits you set? c) Can you easily leave? Does leaving cost you more than just losing the relationship? d) Are the punishments aimed at what you are? This is the one easiest to hide inside a dynamic: the question of your worth. "If you were a good submissive you'd do this" is a grade on who you are, based on how well you match your dominant's idea of that label. Withholding your worth until you do what he wants is abuse using a dynamic as an excuse. If you're in a dynamic where punishment is a consequence, and you've agreed your dominant has the authority to decide when you get punished, you don't get to opt out of a punishment because you disagree that you earned it. Opting out isn't part of the deal. Leaving the deal - leaving the dynamic - is always part of the deal. Your ability to leave a dynamic is a basic requirement for it to be consensual. A dynamic does not obligate you to agree to accept his behavior for anything he does outside the lines of what you've agreed to, nor are you agreeing to take his grades on who or what you are. Maintaining your boundaries doesn't make you a "bad submissive", it makes you a person with boundaries. A dynamic that works focuses on your acts, today, and correcting them however you and your dominant agree they can be corrected - whether you like it or not.

Being seen and feeling seen are two different things. My girl reminded me of that this morning, and she was right. Thousands of people can see you online. People all around you can see you in real life. Feeling seen happens with almost nobody. Here’s how you tell the difference, because “feeling seen” isn’t actually just a feeling. It’s testable. You feel seen when someone knows a part of you the same way you know it yourself. The test is whether they can reflect what they see back to you, and it sounds the same coming from them as it does coming from you. Of course, it’s more than that, because that test - do they see me the way I see me - has two big loopholes. The first loophole is that they could just parrot your words back at you and pass the test, and parroting isn’t knowing. The real version of “feeling seen” only happens when they say something about you that you never told them, in their own words, and you recognize it. Even better, they catch you being wrong about yourself and they’re right. This is exactly why I LOVE IT when one of my girls tells me I’m wrong, especially about myself. It means she sees me, and knows me well enough to know when I’m wrong about myself. There’s (ironically) no better way to feel seen than to have someone correct you about you. The second loophole is that if you want someone to know you badly enough, you might hear what you want to hear, not what they’re saying. Worse yet, you might even feed them the words you want to hear, instead of the words they actually said. Then you’re not running the test of whether or not you’re seen, you’re passing it for them. That’s why what they say can’t just be parroting you back, it has to be something you never handed them, or that conflicts with what you’re saying about yourself. Where things get really interesting is moving from pursuing someone to knowing them. Psychology has studied this for forty years under a worse name, “self-verification”. What they found is that people who are dating want to be evaluated favorably, and people who are married want to be seen accurately, even when accurate is less flattering. Married people get more intimate with a spouse who sees them the way they see themselves. So if someone pursuing you makes you feel wanted but not seen, that’s why. Pursuit is evaluation. They’re showing you, and looking for, the most favorable version of both of you. Feeling seen comes later, when the evaluating stops. There are two reasons feeling seen matters from my perspective, as a dominant. If a woman is ‘submitting’ to me - merely obeying - and I don’t feel seen, that’s evidence she’s not submitting to me, she’s ‘submitting’ to her own concept of submission. She might even be obedient all day, and I still feel like a stranger to her. Whether she knows me or not is only checkable from inside my head, and it’s only when I feel seen that I know it’s me she’s submitting to. The second reason feeling seen accurately as a dominant matters is because if the only part of me she reflects back is the grade I give myself, she’s verifying a grade, not seeing me. If I present - either here online or in person - as oh-so-cool and she reflects back how oh-so-cool I am, she’s not really seeing me, and any ‘dominance’ I might feel isn’t real. It won’t feel real because it won’t feel like she knows me well enough to see past the self-grading I present, and see the real me. A woman who makes me feel seen knows what I do and what I want. (She doesn’t know what I am, because nobody does, including me. That’s one of many reasons it’s not useful to grade who we are.) If she can’t call me on my bullshit, I’m not going to feel seen, and it’s not real. When she knows what I do and what I want, AND she can correct me when I’m wrong about myself, AND she knows parts of me that I haven’t shared with her yet, then I feel seen. When I feel seen, and she is also demonstrating behavior that shows she wants to do what I want, and she wants me to have what I want, and she calls me on my bullshit when I need it, then I know she’s submitting to actual me, the man, not just a concept.

On ego redirection (yes, I just made up that phrase): Submission doesn’t quiet your mind by giving it a break. It focuses your mind because your attention redirects to him instead of to yourself, with your ego still fully intact. You’ve surely seen a similar, but incorrect version of ‘submission’ all over the BDSM space: your brain is overloaded, you hand him control, and your brain finally gets to rest. That’s “ego depletion”, psychology’s name for the idea that self-control runs out like a battery. Yes, something like it does happen inside an intense S/m scene, where one small study found bottoms lose some executive function in subspace. But the rest of your waking week, “decision fatigue” isn’t really a thing. More importantly, the concept of your brain resting when you give someone else control relies on making the submissive (and their ego) smaller, which isn’t healthy or sustainable. Some women do want to be made smaller for an hour in a scene. Making you small all day every day by depleting your ego isn’t submission, it’s self-erasure. Before I talk about what IS sustainable submission, think about what’s actually loud in your head. “Did I do enough? Did I mess that up? What’s wrong with me? This doesn’t fit what I’ve been taught about what women should want, so something must be wrong with me for wanting it. Every time I give up control to a man, it ends badly for me, so I must deserve it going badly. Why do I want him in control all the time, and not just in bed?” Every one of those is a grade on yourself. What’s grading? Here’s how you tell a grade from everything else: when the voice inside your head gives you a conclusion about what you are, that’s a grade. When it describes specifically what you did or what you want to do, that’s just information. The problem is, if you just redirect your attention at a dominant to get away from that self-grading voice in your head, you haven’t actually stopped it. You’ve stopped listening to it. It’s still screaming obscenities at you from inside your own head, and the first time he corrects you on something you don’t like to hear, or the first time you catch yourself making a mistake and feel embarrassed, or the first time you let yourself want his control outside the bedroom, or the first time someone else asks you if you really want this life and why, that voice will be right there waiting with yet another grade on who you are. Trying to get away from your self-grading by putting your ego in a dominant’s hands is how you end up spending years serving a man in a dynamic built around making you smaller, and never once feeling settled. Or it’s how you end up ‘submitting’ to men in bed, and still grading yourself for wanting more. So the order of how you get to submission matters. First step, stop grading the part of you that wants this. Your ego doesn’t just grade you as being great, it also grades you as being awful. All that grading has to stop first, before you can submit yourself to him. You want to belong to him. Maybe you need it. Maybe you need it all day, not just in the bedroom where so many people want to limit submission to sexy play time. None of your wants and needs can be graded because they’re just your wants and needs, so there’s nothing to defend, and nothing to prove. Information about what you want and what you need, regardless of what anyone else - including that voice in your head - says. If this first step - to stop grading yourself - sounds like plain self-acceptance with nothing kinky about it, it is. You don’t need a dominant to stop grading yourself. The second step, once you stop grading yourself, is what makes directing your attention at him - giving him what he wants - submission. Stopping that grading voice is not the result of submission. It’s what makes submission possible. Now your attention is free to redirect from inside your own head - where you’ve been frustrated that you want this, and resisting it - to him, and your attention can stay on him from then on, because nothing is pulling it back trying to grade you. You’re just... doing what you want, and need, and putting your attention - and your effort, and your thinking - on him. Learning what he wants, and giving it to him, because that’s what you need to do, for you. That’s ego redirection: it’s what your attention does all by itself, when your inner critic has nothing left to say about you, and you also want - need - to serve him. It’s not making you or your ego smaller, it’s accepting you for who and what you are, and directing your attention onto someone else, instead of yourself (or listening to all those other voices telling you what you want is wrong). Coming to terms with who you are, and then giving your attention to your dominant, it isn’t a way to hide from the critic in your head. It’s also - and this is critical - not a way to give the job of your critic to him. A dominant who takes over the job of judging you is still grading you, just from the outside. Nothing goes quiet, your critical voice just goes to someone else. You traded a judge you carry around in your head for a judge in another person. Giving the job of grading you to someone else isn’t better. A man who actually helps you quiet the critic in your head does a different job entirely: he specifically corrects only what you did, and he never says a word about what you are. A correction on an act ends, because you can change the act, and the correction is over. A grade on who you are never ends, regardless of whether it’s you grading yourself, or him grading you. Dominance is correcting your acts, not grading who you are. There’s also a real danger in giving someone else the power to tell you what’s right and wrong. You’ve handed him the same judgment you’d need to notice when something has gone wrong with him. Your inner critic and the alarm that goes off when he’s the one doing something wrong are not the same thing. Yes, he gets your obedience, but he doesn’t get to take over your perception of right and wrong. You still need to be able to decide for yourself when he’s gone too far, or isn’t healthy for you. That’s his half: correct the act, leave your ego alone. Your half is the two steps: stop grading yourself, then put your attention on him. How much of your life that covers is a separate question. Whether submitting to him belongs only in the bedroom for you, or is something you need all the time, that’s up to you. Either way, your ego remains intact. You want what you want. You need his control. You still know right from wrong. You don’t let anyone, including yourself, tell you that wanting his control is wrong. And, your attention - your effort, your decisions - go to him, and onto what he wants. Submission isn’t making your ego smaller. It’s stopping your own self-grading, then directing your attention to what he wants, because that’s what you need.

A ‘rule’ is something he tells you to do, that he can see whether or not you did it. For example, “answer when I phone you” could be a rule. If you don’t pick up, he obviously knows every time. Then you two can talk about why, right from the first time it doesn’t get done. A ‘commitment’ is something only you know whether you did it, and he has no way to prove it. A ritual you do when he’s not around - let’s say, kneeling by his bed before you make it in the morning - is a commitment. If you skip it, he only finds out if you tell him. He can’t ‘make’ you follow either rules or commitments. You’re the only one who can make yourself do anything. The difference is who knows when you don’t do it, and what if any consequences you both agree to if it doesn’t get done. Where a Dom gets this wrong is trying to make a rule out of something he can’t prove got done. If he has no way to know whether you did it, the most he can do is ask you to commit to it. Keeping your word on a commitment is on you. You could theoretically just lie and say you did it, and he’d have no way of knowing. Just as bad, if you do confess and if he gets upset at you for confessing, he’s teaching you to stop telling him. A missed commitment isn’t something he corrects, because he can’t prove whether you did it or not. Getting upset about it, or worse yet punishing it, doesn’t help you win next time. Far better to have a conversation about what got in the way, and whether you still want to commit to it, or make the task smaller. If you feel guilty about missing a commitment and want it settled, you could ask for a way to make it right. That settles guilt too, and unlike a punishment, it helps you do better next time. If it matters enough that he needs to know it’s done, he can turn a commitment into a rule by making it something he can see, like “send me a photo when it’s done.” That way you’re held accountable by more than your own word. If it doesn’t matter enough to get proof every time it’s done, there’s no sense making a rule about it. A Dom’s work is to let go of trying to control you in ways he can’t. Your work is to make sure you don’t promise things you can’t follow through on.

Your ‘reward’ as a submissive isn’t praise, even if you love it. Praise is a little like apology. It’s a separate act that takes you away from the moment. Your real reward is your dominant’s excitement, in the moment. That’s how you know you’re doing it right, and connecting.

The reason I don’t want to give up control is a little like when you go on vacation from work and then come back to a pile. I'd rather 'rest' by having total control. The thing is, a sub who does want to give up control has the same problem. If you set down control, you need to catch up after, just like I would have to. It’s part of my responsibility to contribute some of my other daily leadership skills to keeping my girls from falling behind in the rest of their lives. This is where a lot of Doms get it wrong - they want you to put down all your work and then deal with being behind on your own. You can’t just take someone’s control away and then expect them to rebuild it all on their own without some kind of support behind them. Aftercare is for a scene. A dynamic needs more than that. The more involved your dynamic is, the more you need to care for each other, and provide each other interdependent support. Far better to have so much support around you that during those times you set down control, you don’t need a lot of ‘aftercare’, because you’re surrounded by care all the time.

I think Doms and subs encounter similar pressure throughout our week, and we each want a different escape from it, and that’s part of what both we get from doing D/s together. A sub wants to give up control and stop fighting. A Dom wants to have control, over both of them - with none of the bullshit of fighting - and win without trying. There isn’t really a ‘loser’ since there isn't really a fight, and both people are getting what they want from the transfer of control.

Right now, she’s somewhere playing with herself, thinking of me. Her body responds to the thought of serving mine. The power and excitement I feel aren’t just in how much she desires me. They’re in her orientation: her body, mind, and heart, excited to exist, just for me.

Submission, like kneeling, is not a sudden jarring plummet. It's a slow, steady, supervised, controlled descent.

You changed your rules because of me. You’re responsive to me. Every part of you responds to me. Compatibility is about a lot of things, but there is no substitute for the most important of all: genuine desire. “I can’t help myself,” you said to me. Nor should you. Nor do I want you to. I want you to submit to your genuine desire, and to me. You thought about submitting when you read my writing. You felt it on our first night. Since then you’ve been rewriting your rules, addressing your injuries, putting in the work to make what you do match what you need: to submit. “It’s the way I respond to you uniquely, the need and desire to submit to you alone that makes this work.” Now we just focus on that, all the time. Everything else follows from your genuine desire. Your desire for me, and only me, and your desire to submit to me. Our dynamic is built on genuine desire, and only genuine desire will sustain it.

A submissive does not make a dominant, which means she also can’t unmake him. My capacity to lead people is a trait of mine. It’s not something you give me. I had that capacity before I met you, because I’m not just an autonomous being with agency who makes decisions for myself, I can also make decisions that cause other people to follow my direction. You also have agency, and your life is yours to govern. You can also make decisions for yourself. And so, if one of your decisions is to give another person - ideally someone who has the capacity to lead - authority over your choices, that’s ‘authority transfer’. If you didn’t have agency, you couldn’t give anyone authority over you. Control over your choices is yours, and that’s what makes authority over your choices yours to give. I could lead all along, and you don’t give me my ability to lead. The only thing you give me is authority over some of your choices. A submissive does not give her dominant any trait. She does not make him more or less of what he is. She does not “give” him dominance, she does not “make” him a dominant. She also can’t take away his dominance through disobedience, or even by leaving him. The only thing she gives him is authority over herself, and that’s her choice to make.

I have been blessed with so, so much love in my life. I have loved women, and I have been loved, many times, over many years. Liking and loving are key. I need to be liked, and I need to be loved. I also need to love. And, that’s not enough. I NEED to use my authority. With love, and with women who love me and my authority.

Yes, it’s possible to be in a dynamic - even Master/slave - without punishment. Here’s how that works: If we’re going to be in a dynamic without punishment, you don’t have to just agree to take every correction, you have to also agree to obey every order, because all I can do if you don’t obey is correct you and tell you to obey. Punishment isn’t what makes you obey. Ultimately you’re the only one who can make yourself obey anything - or everything - and it’s all on you to do or not do it. If you start picking and choosing which things you obey, my orders turn into suggestions. That’s why you have to obey everything. If you stopped obeying, and stopped taking correction to obey, we wouldn’t have a dynamic.

Arrogance is believing yourself always right, which only ensures you’re wrong more often. I insist that any woman I’m seeing keep me accountable regardless of our dynamic. In an effort to keep myself accountable, I also built an AI robot that I send many of my posts and some of our conversations to, because of course I did. Only I would use AI specifically to call out my own bullshit. I call him robot, because I like to picture him as a little ‘bleep bloop’ machine walking around pretending to talk. He/robot calls me out when I’m either flat out wrong, or when I say something I don’t really want to say, so I can correct it. How does he know what I want to say? Because I’ve programmed him specifically with my values, so he can call me out when I don’t behave according to my own values. The same thing I want my girl(s) to do. Today I was writing a post with a line generalizing about couples. Robot told me the research on couples is split, and my line claimed more than that. He was right, so I rewrote the line to be about us instead of everyone. Believe it or not, I used to feel embarrassed when AI would correct me, even though I programmed it specifically to correct me. Nobody really loves being corrected. Last night I texted my girl and told her another woman writing me online yesterday was the first to call me “my Master.” I sent the conversation to my robot, and he pointed out that I was wrong, my girl had said it first, three times, the day before. I showed her the robot calling me out for being factually wrong. Her answer: “My Master. And I appreciate robot for that little correction 😜” She corrects me too. When she told me she needed a reliable rope partner in her life weeks ago, I heard that as her negotiating, like rope was a term she wanted in our deal, and I told her so. She said nope, that’s not it. If I was going to learn rope, she wanted to be there while I learned. Which is so much better than what I’d decided she meant, so I told her that too. Before she was mine, she texted me mentioning another man and I didn’t like it, because I felt jealous, so I wrote out the apology I wanted to hear from her, plus a rule about not bringing up other men. She pushed back, hard, and she was right. I was putting words in her mouth, as though we were inside a dynamic we hadn’t agreed to yet. Writing her apology for her was my mistake, that didn’t fit my values, and I told her so. Now I think about my robot calling me out every time I write to her, and I try to choose my words carefully so I can avoid him bitching later. My accountability robot, making me say the right thing the first time instead of correcting it later. It’s the same reflex I’m asking her to train, to teach herself to say Yes Master instead of snarking, so she doesn’t have to redo what she said. The thing is, getting corrected - either by a robot, or by my slave - isn’t a grade on who I am. It’s information about what I did. Neither of those is a threat to my authority, which is why I can hear them.

I’m not your Master because I’m better than you. I’m your Master because we happen to like each other and also, we prefer different roles, and playing complementary roles in each other’s lives makes us more comfortable together than if we were both trying to play the same role - you crave obeying, serving, and pleasing, and I crave controlling, commanding, and protecting - and also, we are compatible in this dynamic because we can correct each other without it being a grade on who we are, nor does correcting each other threaten our dynamic.