Before you criticize someone, walk a mile in his shoes

Then when you do criticize that person, you'll be a mile away and have his shoes. ..

Seriously, there is so much wrong with the way we respond to all forms of sexual deviance that I decided to do just that, change shoes and try to understand exactly what was going on by living it.

There is no point in standing on the sidelines telling others how to play unless you are an expert at the game. Not just a paper or a vicarious expert, (expert in this case being defined as “Ex, an unknown quantity and spurt, a drip under pressure”) but someone who has actually had personal experience of the process.

I have lived the scene for the last year, met some wonderful, brave, creative and intelligent people, learned to avoid some very sick ones and helped and been helped by a wide range of practitioners.

Yes, you can argue that an oncologist does not need to have cancer, but a cancer survivor might be well placed to suggest more supportive and emotionally therapeutic ways of relating to the patient than the self-protective distancing a surgeon needs to practice in order to perform his kill or cure surgery. Both approaches are necessary for optimal results.

I have seen too many lives crippled by the intervention of therapists too scared and ignorant to look at what is being presented to them; too afraid of involvement, judgement or litigation to do more than spout the party line acceptable to religious, financial and social movers and pushers; too fearful that to understand all is to forgive all and that forgiveness is en route to acceptance.

I am reminded of an eminent neurologist who curdled my blood when faced with evidence that patients he had diagnosed as brain-dead were actually conscious and aware of decisions made to withdraw their life-support systems. "I do not accept it," he thundered. "To do so would be to admit that I had been wrong."

It has been demonstrated in psychological experiment that juries of men are harsher towards rapists than juries of women. This is not because women indulge secret fantasies of rape as some men would like to believe, but because we all tend to condemn those urges and practices which we fight hardest to resist in ourselves.

So the most outspoken opponents of homosexuality are often people who suppress the fear that they may have homosexual tendencies themselves. Because this is an unconscious fear, repressed and unexamined, it has very powerful effects. If it were brought out into the open and explored without fear, we should probably find that it originated in adolescence when we all go through a period of being attracted to the same sex as part of our socialization into the roles expected of us, falling in love with an ideal. Due to present-day media pressure, this is often polarized, condemned or embraced as a constant before we have given ourselves time to explore our feelings, understand, accept and decide what we really want to do.

I have become convinced that there is much in the best practice of alternative sexuality that is physically, mentally and emotionally extremely therapeutic.

There are many reasons why we adopt or reject the many variants of our innate sexuality, ranging from genetic, social and cultural predisposition through fear, curiosity, frustration, addiction, disillusion or rebellion, to the processes of maturity. Some of our behaviour is healthy. Some is not.

But instead of the kind of generalizations and arguments you can read in any popular psychological best-seller, I am going to concentrate on particular case histories and my own experience , so that you can think about the deeper issues involved.

Over the next few weeks I will be adding links, stories and comments and would welcome your feedback.

Like the parables, these stories allow you to see just as much as you are comfortably prepared to read into them, and will change with your own, personal perspective. There is no right or wrong response. I am only encouraging you to look, feel and understand.

Since I see no point in reinventing the wheel and there is a lot of very useful information already on the web, here is a selection of links I have found enlightening......

Society for Human Sexuality

http://www.sexuality.org/

Good practices in D/s

http://castlerealm.com/CastleRealm.shtml

Abuse and BDSM 

http://www.leathernroses.com/abuse/healingabuse.htm#bdsma

Transvestite theory

http://www.symposion.com/ijt/benjamin/chap_02.htm

a haven where you can explore and read about D/s,BDSM and similar topics without feeling anyone is judging you or criticising.

http://www.soulshaven.f2s.com/introduction.php3

The Healthy Submissive

http://www.enslavement.org.uk/yld-healthy.html

Safety considerations in alternative sexuality

http://web.ukonline.co.uk/roissy/safe_calls.htm

Erectile dysfunction, sexual anxiety, tantra

http://www.whitelotuseast.com/PerformanceAnxiety.htm

Narcissistic personality disorder

http://www.healthyplace.com/communities/personality_disorders/narcissism/index.html

Alternative Sexuality Resources

http://www.altsex.org/altsex-home.html

An explanation of Co-Dependency

http://www.coda.org/codapatt.html