Or how to train a submissive to react without using words.
Everyone, at least quite likely, knows about non-verbal communication. It is after all what we do every day, a lot of the time even without us being aware of doing it. It is so common and normal to us, in the same way that it is for us to speak. “hold on” you’ll say; I know when I speak. This is of course true. Yes you are aware of you speaking, you can hear the sound, you give form to thoughts. But how often do you stop and think about the process of speaking, how air is pushed out past our voice box, how that vibrates and those vibrations that give form to sounds, how we further manipulate those sounds with our mouth and tongue. That is what I mean with ‘not being aware’.
Truth is, our language as much formed by what we say, as by what we do not say, but by what we show. We use our body in its entirety to express a multitude of non spoken clues to convey meaning to what we say with facial expressions, gestures, eye contact, posture, and tone of voice—that that quite often speak the loudest.
So, no while I do not want to talk about that kind of non verbal communication, or even suggesting that that can be trained (I am sure to a degree it can but I think there is a whole lot of reactions we do very subconsciously, and that would be pretty hard to over ride with training). So if that is not what I want to talk about?
Perhaps non-verbal communication was too ambiguous a term to start with. Non verbal submission is perhaps closer to what I want to talk about tonight. So what is non-verbal submission? Very simply put, it is acting through your actions, rather then words and talking. Letting your body, your attitude, your actions be your words. A prime example perhaps of “walking the walk“, instead of “talking the talk“. In this blog I will examine the various uses of non verbal communication and submission.
There can be various advantages to training a submissive to be able to serve without words needed. Mind you, it does not necessarily mean that it the submissive that not just talks. Dominants can use non verbal signals and commands to have a submissive do what they want. There is actually a lot of power and strength involved in that.
Imagine that you are somewhere out in public, and you get a signal from your dominant. Everyone may be perfectly oblivious, yet you are submitting to their desires and wishes. However it really goes deeper then that. It is not just about being obedient to their desires, it also means you have to pay close attention to what they are doing. Your attention would be quite solely focussed around them and their actions.
Yes, there are things you can do in vanilla that you can’t do in kink situations, but so many actions can be necessarily done without words. the way a hand is grabbed, the way to ask permissions for certain things, the order not be able to allowed to talk until talked to, not being allowed to order food, holding on to your dominant while navigating a store. As you can see many of these things can convey orders, dominance and compliance and submission
But that is vanilla settings, and of course, you should always be careful that you should not be to overt in your display of kink in public and vanilla settings. After all there are others who have not consented to be part of your play and exposing them to it, is highly unjust and unfair to them.
Of course, there are a lot of advantages in being able to act and obey silently, as well as given commands silently in kink situations. This is of course where we are heading. Many would know the interaction between a dominant and a submissive even if they were silent. Some would actually pay more attention to those interaction that those bellow orders. I mean from a certain point of view, there does not change much for the submissive, you still have to pay attention to the dominant actions and gestures. However in a kink situation, that is a lot more easier, because people will quickly catch on that you are doing so on the dominants orders, which can give you as the submissive an enormous amount of freedom to focus on that.
Within BDSM, especially within high protocol situations and highly formalised relationships, there are rules that defines the behaviour of submissives. One of these is indeed that submissives are seen and not heard; or at least only answer in hushed tones when spoken to. I have written on the various levels of protocol before; where high protocol is of course the strictest sense of the way. You’ll often see that high protocol and formal relationships go hand in hand; at least for the majority of the time.
What are, then, the advantages of behaving in such a matter, where the submissive will be allowed little in the way of chattering away at the dominant and focusses on her behaviour, her actions through which she serves and shows off her submission? As I have elaborated on in my previous blog, familiarity can upset the balance, or head space that a dominant might want to achieve. As such, forcing a submissive to serve silently, and only through her actions and movements can re-establish that head space. It also allows a submissive to focus on that what she wants to do, to submit, and letting all the worries of every day at least for that moment fall by the way side.
The next question is, if you know the why, is the how. How do you train a submissive to react without words, with just using her body, her actions and such to show her desire to serve. The answer to this is quite simple; You set out the expectations for the submissive to adhere to. For a submissive to be corrected without knowing what she is supposed to do is very stressful. We like to please, yes, but we like to know what is expected of us in the first place. Line out, or set up the expectation and make sure the submissive understands so that we can adhere to it and strive to perfect it.
But just setting expectations is not enough. You need to train the submissive to do as you want, go through the motions with her where she is allowed to work out and falter, where you correct her. There is absolutely nothing to be accomplished with setting expectations of a submissive, without telling her what these are, but at the same time punishing her for failing to live up to unseen standards.
So, expectations, training, evaluation, adaptation. Figure out what works, what won’t work. Pay close attention to a submissives action and correct where needed. For submissives, pay attention to his gestures, make sure they are unambiguous, clear and easy to recognise, work with each other, negotiate and communicate about what is works and what does not and what can be changed to make it work.
To wrap things up I want to talk a little bit about the more practical side of this all. What kind of wordless domination and submission can you employ? Everyone knows I am sure several ways that this can be done, but still I like to give some examples.
For example when the dominant clicks their fingers and pointing in front of them. While the finger click is debatable as an effective tool or whether it is humiliating as it is the sort of gesture one would make to a dog. I have always find that it works really well to focus ones attention. Especially the finger click in the ear , can serve both as a reminder for the submissive in the case of eye restrictions being in place.
At the same, time, yes there is a large control element to it, a humiliation element as well. It is almost as to say “you are not worth spending words on, you will do as you say and if I click my fingers, you will obey and come to me.” Strangely enough, or perhaps not, that does work for me on several levels. I am not saying that it would work with any and all dominants, quite likely the majority would probably g et flipped off in the process, but for one I desire to submit to it would definitely not just work but also put me in the right head space.
Eye restrictions are another interesting one, it does entirely limit your field of awareness, making your world extremely small and focussed around the dominant. It does make the idea of following a dominants gestures potentially a lot harder. This does of course depends by and large where you are told to keep your eyes pointed at. Seeing however that most dominants when using this have a tendency to tell the submissive to keep their eyes pointed downward at the floor, it is a safe bet to say that following gestures without such a audible or tactile indication are much harder to pick-up.
One of the good things you can use non verbal commands with quite easily is positions, indicating the way how a submissive should stand, sit, hold herself, what to do if say she is leashed, where to go, and how to react. I have personally found there to be great strength in knowing exactly how to move, how to stand on what command. It gives me clarity and clear way to please. I can focus on the deeper truths behind my movement and make the movement as much part of my service as just simply “snapping too”.
The question I still want to answer before wrapping this all up: How do you translate these things to a virtual enviroment such as Second Life? How far do you need to go to say curtail speech. This is of course a little bit different in virtual environments as opposed to real life; since you are lacking the non-verbal communication that makes up so much of our daily interactions. In this case you need to allow a difference between describing actions and spoken word. Yes you can allow emotes to go – since they help someone both to describe parts of their motions that they go through as well as attitudes that can be gleamed from that.
Of course we have animations to help us look the part, but these are still by and large static and will only do so much, emoting and actively describing thoughts and feelings and the things we do, makes up for a lack of non-verbal communication that we have access to in our normal lives.
You have to make sure though, that you do not descend into telepathy. It is all to easily to “think” words and sentences directed at another person. It is also very easy to ‘god-mod’ in your role play for the sake of giving more context. The danger is here that most people are more then capable of making up how they think and feel, and while it can be used to nudge roleplay into a certain direction, I have also seen people who went on to describe entirely what I was feeling and thinking that it was easily enough for me to slip away for 15 minutes to have a wash and clean-up without my opposite knowing I was gone, so engrossed where they in writing what was happening in many terms that I was merely there for the view of it all. Talk about objectification. I did get a lot of reading and writing done that afternoon 😉 Just not where he was thinking it was happening. 😉
And on that note, I am going to wrap this up and post it and then head off for the afternoon. I spend plenty of my time behind the box and while I am more then likely to return to it, I think I am going to head offline and busy myself in real life for a little while. I hope you all will have a wonderful and pleasant week and I shall see you next weekend.
Take care, be awesome and be careful out there
lexi
As for my thoughts this week, it has been an entirely quiet week where I had not much chance to talk about things – so my thoughts on the various BDSM subjects are quite limited this week:
- Non verbal communication; The act of submitting, and working through your actions with your body to let that speak for you instead of your talking my mouth off. Something that obviously led to this blog.
- Serving silently; The idea of being told before hand that you are to go somewhere but not a word can be spoken, you have from that point until further order be silent
- Confinement; in conjunction with the above, to be directed to go somewhere, knowing that you will be locked up and will have to wait till you are being released.
- Missing people: Above all, someone in particular. It has made this week quiet. Soon, i hope.
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