Unequal By Design: Counseling Power Dynamic Relationships

By Raven Kaldera and Sabrina Popp, M.D.

Power dynamic relationships – meaning deliberately negotiated unequal relationships – are often misunderstood by mental health professionals as inevitably abusive. This anthology of essays by kink-aware therapists explodes that myth, and gives solid, practical advice for effectively counseling couples in these alternative relationships. Edited by a psychiatrist and a professional educator on power dynamic relationships, this book should be a cultural-competency reference for any mental health professional, because you never know who might be sitting on your couch someday.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Jul 21, 2014
• ISBN: 9781312373631

Raven Kaldera

Raven Kaldera is a Northern Tradition Pagan shaman who has been a practicing astrologer since 1984 and a Pagan since 1986. The author of Northern Tradition for the Solitary Practitioner and MythAstrology and coauthor, with Kenaz Filan, of Drawing Down the Spirits, Kaldera lives in Hubbardston, Massachusetts.

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Unequal By Design: Counseling Power Dynamic Relationships

Unequal By Design

Counseling Power Dynamic Relationships

Sabrina Popp, M.D. and Raven Kaldera

Alfred Press

12 Simond Hill Road

Hubbardston, MA 01452

Copyright

© 2014 Sabrina Popp, M.D. and Raven Kaldera

ISBN 978-1-312-37363-1

All rights reserved. Unless otherwise specified,

no part of this book may be reproduced in any form

or by any means without the permission of the author.

To everyone who ever turned down the idea of therapy because they were afraid of being misunderstood.

We hope that this book will solve a tiny portion of that problem.

Foreword

Sabrina Popp, M.D.

When my friend and colleague, Raven Kaldera, first asked me to consider editing this book with him, my first reaction was What will my other colleagues—the people who refer clients to me—think? That this was my first reaction was what ultimately made me realize that not only did I need to be a part of this, but that the book itself needed to be written. Frankly, it has needed to be written for a long time, and if someone has to do it, why not a shaman, spiritual teacher, and kink activist … and a quirky psychiatrist?

I run a very eclectic medication management practice, and I am considered by my clients and colleagues to be fairly knowledgeable and accepting of kink and alternative lifestyles, so the idea that I would be judged by them for my involvement in a book about power dynamics should have seemed ludicrous. Unfortunately, I know that this most likely won’t be the case. Very possibly, this writing will negatively affect my practice. I decided to go ahead with it anyway, because I feel it is critically important—especially now that we are beginning to understand the effects of even unconscious or non-malicious prejudice and discrimination—to open a discussion about this subject, so that other practitioners can learn to communicate with clients who choose to take part in a power dynamic relationship in non-judgmental, non-prejudiced, and practical ways.

Unfortunately, lack of knowledge about alternative lifestyles, and in particular those involved in things like BDSM, runs rampant in the mental health community, and in individual practitioners in varying degrees. There is very little to no training in sexuality or sexual behaviors in medical schools, and that continues in residencies. Common assumptions regarding those involved in a power dynamic relationship (particularly but not exclusively if the client is in a submissive role) can be that someone is taking advantage of the client, that the client is reenacting some prior trauma and needs to remove themselves from the relationship in order to work on the trauma, or worst of all that these types of relationships are inherently abusive, damaging, and dangerous. Very little positive content has been written about power dynamic relationships in psychiatric literature, and none that I am aware of has attempted to be an educational tool for the practitioners of these clients, especially when it comes to how incorporating the power dynamic into the treatment itself can be an essential tool.

I distinctly remember one client’s first meeting with me. I started asking my usual questions about her sexual history, and when we got to a certain point I noticed her looking at me quizzically. This particular client had been referred to me by a friend of hers because she had wanted someone who was open-minded. I asked if there was something else she wanted to tell me involving her sexual life, and luckily I seemed to have asked in a way that reassured her and allowed her to be open with me. She described a power dynamic relationship in which she and her female partner were submissive to a male partner. I asked a few questions and was moving on to her family history when she said, Wait a minute, you’re not shocked! I said no, and thanked her for her honesty. At that point, she burst into tears, and told me of several occasions where she had felt humiliated by other practitioners when she had disclosed even a few details about her sexual life, and told me with obvious relief, I’m so glad you get it.

I am not this woman’s therapist, but the medications I prescribe can have significant side effects, including ones of a sexual nature, and (unfortunately for clients who are into sensation play) a general dulling of physical sensation. It could have greatly interfered with my ability to help her if she didn’t feel comfortable sharing exactly what her problems with the medication were—and I’m not even a therapist, whose ability to help depends on their ability to make clients feel comfortable with being completely honest with them. Again, this demonstrates the necessity of being willing to hear what our clients tell us without bias or judgment. Without this, we are ineffective in providing treatment. If we go into working with a client with set ideas in our minds about what is healthy and what is not, we are treating people like machines, where there is always a specific problem and a universal fix for that problem.

When I asked some of my friends involved in kink or power dynamics what they chose to disclose about their sexual life to their practitioners, almost all replied, I don’t. I don’t want them to know/judge me/be disgusted by me/try to ‘fix’ me when I’m not broken. How can we treat clients effectively (or at all) when they are too scared or tired of arguing about it to tell us the truth? It’s impossible. My hope is that this book will be a step in the right direction. It is my belief that practitioners in general are well-meaning people who want to help their clients, and many achieve that. The problem comes when we treat all patients by the same set of standards, without acknowledging them as individuals, or even as a group of individuals who act differently than us. What I encourage you to aspire to be instead is an empathetic healer, someone who listens, doesn’t judge, tries to understand, and uses all the tools at their disposal for the benefit of your client.

As we grow and learn as children, we are taught about rules and systems, and how to solve problems with a set formula. But it is important to not get so stuck in one system that you forget that there are others, and that people operate within these other systems just as well as you operate within yours. This book is an attempt to help you understand those different systems and how to respect them while treating your clients, and I applaud you for having the courage and insight to attempt to learn as well.

Dr. Sabrina Popp

May, 2014

What Are Power Dynamic Relationships, Anyway?

Introduction: The Basics of Power Dynamic Relationships

Raven Kaldera

If you’re reading this book, you’re one of a very few professionals who are willing to expand your knowledge of human sexuality and relationships into the dark and difficult area of power dynamic relationships. Congratulations. You’re brave, and it’s not nearly as frightening as you think.

The term power dynamic, or the long form power dynamic relationship, is a recent term, and one that the individuals it describes are grudgingly beginning to accept it as a useful umbrella term. As you’ll read over and over in this book, some practitioners belong to supportive communities of other practitioners, and some are solitary couples who figured it out on their own. We define this term as: A relationship structure with deliberately chosen and negotiated inegalitarian power distribution. Some people use the term power exchange, but others dislike the word exchange, as they feel that the power goes one way rather than merely being exchanged. We prefer power dynamic, and will be using that term in this book.

I’m a professional educator and activist for alternative sexualities and gender expressions, and I am also a dominant and a master in a current power dynamic relationship. I have three committed partners in my long-term polyamorous family—my egalitarian wife of twenty-one years, my male slave partner of twelve years, and my male submissive partner of two years. I am also a spiritual counselor for my church, and I specialize in counseling people with alternative sexualities, genders, relationships, and spiritual practices. I began to solicit contributors for this book because of what I heard from my counseling clients, over and over. Sometimes they had problems that were beyond my scope of practice, and of course I’d do the right thing by suggesting a more specialized mental health professional. Oh, I couldn’t do that, they’d say. I’d have to hide everything about my relationship from them. They would just think I’m sick and try to get me out of it. I can’t trust anyone like that. I looked for kink-aware professionals who might help them, but those were few on the ground and mostly limited to large coastal cities, and just because one is aware of kink doesn’t mean that one has experience with, or is not made uncomfortable by, inegalitarian relationships. That’s how this book got started. We need more professionals who understand this controversial subject, and are willing to learn to take this journey with clients. We need you now, because people are going without help while you look away in discomfort.

I came of age in the mid-1980s, and joined the feminist peace-activist progressive-politics-and-spirituality jumble of a movement while still in my teens. I then lived for more than a decade as a committed member of that mixed political front, all the while tormented by guilt about my hidden sexuality. I did eventually leave that jumble; I am still committed to many of its tenets and consider myself a feminist and an activist, but I came to realize that some of the attitudes about sex and relationships promoted (sometimes violently) by leaders of that movement negated my place in it, and caused me to feel emotionally unsafe there. I slowly made my own way elsewhere, coming out first as queer, then as polyamorous, then as a transgendered intersexual, then as a BDSM practitioner (read: sexual pervert), and finally as a dominant and master of a slave.

That journey took another decade, and each step was critically examined in light of my own developing code of honorable behavior. In fact, each of those identities had been vilified by some early major influence in my life, from my parents to my friends to my political cohort. With the exception of being nonheterosexual, every other identity came with a warning that only sick people did that, and that it would inevitably be harmful to one’s self and one’s partners, no matter how hard one tried to do otherwise. Yet as I tentatively crossed each boundary, I discovered that those people had been wrong. There were others who were living these alternative lives, and they had put a great deal of thought into them. When I followed, at least in