Different wiring?

February 16, 2008

Different wiring?

Recently another sub has been emailing me, and during the course of those emails the subject of abuse came up. she believes that being abused as a young child caused her brain to get 'rewired' and made her into the submissive person she is today.

i've been thinking about that a lot, so i had a chat with flamesoul, and we decided that there's 2 different kinds of submissive - those who do it because they need it (those whose brains were wired up for it since they were born), and those who do it because it's what they know to be 'normal' (those whose brains got rewired early on due to abuse or some other cause). Apparently 75% of subs were abused as children, compared to 20% of the population as a whole, so there does seem to be a definite link between abuse and developing a submissive personality (sorry if those figures are wrong because i couldn't find confirmation of the 75% one, but the 20% one i got from here.)

So i fall into the first category, the 25% of subs who were just born with a brain wired up to seek out, need and find fulfillment in a BDSM relationship. For a while i thought this meant that my brain was 'wrong' somehow, because if a desire to be involved in BDSM relationships is the outcome of being abused when young, then surely it can't be a 'natural' or 'normal' way for the human brain to be? But then i came to see it as not being a 'wrong' brain, just a different one. i see nothing wrong with BDSM relationships or those who take part in them, so i can't really see that there would be something wrong with having a brain wired up for them either. i'm not 'wrong' just differently wired :)

i came across something today, posted by a therapist who is also a Dom. He believes that Dominance and submission are basic behavioural traits seen in animals, which humans may have evolved to possess because they were useful survival mechanisms in some instances. Therefore, everybody has these inherent characteristics, just that they will be more prominant in some people than others, and that certain events and experiences while we are growing up can trigger them. Interesting, huh? In that case i'm not differently wired at all, just more prominantly wired to be submissive than other people, but i possess the same basic wiring as everyone does :)

Any thoughts on this?
Edited to add: luna has written a post about this here.


Mood: reflective