Rethinking Dominance and Submission: Kasia Urbaniak's UNBOUND
One of the best books I have read this year
I found the book, "UNBOUND: A Woman's Guide to Power," by Kasia Urbaniak to be such a powerful and unusual book, that I felt compelled to write up a summary of it as fast as possible so that my friends could also gain trickle-down benefits of me reading it.
Getting right to it:
INTRODUCTION: THE CALL TO POWER
Kasia talks about learning to differentiate between real authority and a performance of it. She describes her background working as a dominatrix while paying her way to travel and train as a Taoist nun. She started a Bene Gesserit style academy in her Manhattan apartment over 10 years ago.
"When you play skillfully with power dynamics, the world changes. You stop being a servant of the life you're living and become a creator of the world you want. Let's get started."
Creating your own world, versus being swept along or under by somebody else's desires becomes a continuing theme of the book. Creating your own world also means you can create a world to lead others into. This use of power is not a bad or a mean thing but can actually help people around you relax and restore themselves, and give them space to do important self-healing and self-repairing. You can expand your options for decisions in a situation by training your attention and learning principles of how your attention affects another person. This will be described in depth.
Not only will you learn to create worlds for yourself and others, but you may notice that certain kinds of really difficult problems to untangle suddenly become manageable:
comforting a partner, child, parent, or friend may become easier as you understand what kind of attention they are looking for from you. "You don't see me!"
you may learn to pay attention to yourself in the right contexts, and access feelings that are important to share with another person for them to know what to do next. "I didn't know what you wanted!"
you may find leads for questions such as "I have no idea why they are unhappy with me! I did what they said they wanted!" or "I have no idea how to make them happy!" by learning signs that what a person wants is for you to take control of a situation, versus following their instructions (thus leaving them in control).
when somebody gets mad at you for "asking for too much"—you may learn from this book what they actually mean, and how a slight tweak may help other people know how to accommodate you more often
CHAPTER 1: THE CONVERSATION UNDER THE CONVERSATION
Power dynamics should not be seen as a dirty word, or as something scary, but rather it is the underbelly of interactions. In fact, being told to ignore these dynamics is how women end up being gaslit so much!
"There is a set of mechanics, invisible to most of us, but consistent in every conversation, whether high stakes or low. These mechanics determine who has control—who leads, who follows, what is under discussion, and where the conversation will go next."
"We don't have to wait to dismantle the patriarchy to put our hands on the levers of power."
"Power isn't a feeling. Power is influence, which means it must take place in a dynamic."
"Power means doing and receiving. Power requires us to control the direction of the conversation. It means keeping the topic focused on your concerns, despite someone else's discomfort or insistence on another direction. It means being able to move another person—staying curious in the face of someone else's entrenched resistance, and staying with your desire until they change their minds."
"You know when you're really going to feel like you're strong and powerful? When you can rely on yourself to speak, no matter how inappropriate the question or how badly it triggers you."
TIP 1: "The next time you find yourself speechless and on the spot, opening and closing your mouth like a goldfish without the slightest idea of what to do or say next—Ask a question.
GAME: HAVE SOMEONE ASK YOU A QUESTION. NO MATTER, WHAT, DO NOT ANSWER THE QUESTION. BUT ASK ONE BACK. (62)
An example in dog training sets up a major theme of the book: You do not often do anybody a favor by giving up your power. In fact, sometimes giving up your power creates major challenges for the people around you.
"Your dog doesn't understand words; he registers what your body and tone communicate. So if you tell him to stop eating the couch in a soft, pleading voice, it reads as praise; he's listening to what your body and tone are saying, not your words. And the message he gets is that he's the alpha, in charge of the pack. Which means you've put him in an imposisble situation: how can he lead his pack, feeding them and keeping them safe, when food arrives unpredictably and in bowls, and enemies approach constantly, delivering FedEx packages and pad thai? Also what the fuck is a couch?
We think deferring to the dog is a kindness, but all it does is confuse him, setting him up for stress and failure—which is how so many people end up with neurotic dogs. But what happens to the vast majority of dogs when an experienced trainer walks into the room? They relax.” (19)
Reading this manual in a dungeon after an entire week of exploring the energy body, it came to me: "This is exactly what I'm doing with these men! They say they want bondage, or a foot-fetish session, but what they really want is to be fully held in somebody else's attention—somebody with enough energetic authority that they relax and begin to feel themselves."
CHAPTER 2: DOMINATION AND SUBMISSION
This is the real gold that sets up the rest of the book. Submission is not pathetic, and domination is not predation. Kasia lays out a framework of domination and submission that is much more clear and much more useful than anything I had ever heard before.
The Usual Definitions:
Dominant: violent, toxic, creaming, bullying, "acting like a man," cruel, inconsiderate, selfish, predator, abuser
Submissive: subservient, obsequious, meek, cutesey little-girl, passive, pathetic, mewling, weakling, doormat
The Real Deal:
Dominant: instructive, corrective, truth-telling, caring, ruthless, formal, strict, playful, grounding, oriented, trusted
Submissive: surrendered, inward-looking, penetrating veil of unconscious, receive, give over completely, connection
In the usual definitions, both the dominant and the submissive seem like they kind of suck. In the Real Deal, both the dominant and the submissive seem pretty cool to be. What is the difference?
The difference is whether you place your attention on the self, or on the other.
The dominant should have her attention on the other, and the submissive should have her attention on the self. When these get mixed up, you get bad effects, and you get the bad stereotype versions of dominant and submissive!
A good dominant is paying attention to the other and knows just how to modify her asks based on how her submissive is responding to her. She knows when to be more strict, or more playful, or to make a joke, or to change instructions. She knows how to ask for information to get updates on how her submissive is doing. "When a domme is completely seated in her energetic authority, her sub can relax." (60)
"In the dominant state of attention, your job is not just to see the person in the submissive role in the dynamic, but to move them."
How do you know what to do next? "In the present, moment by moment, you will feel and be able to pursue signs of what's alive in the other person. Following those signs dictates what's next. It's an open-book test, and they are the book—everything you need to know is right there." (60)
A good submissive is paying attention to the self and is connected to her internal state. She feels what she wants so completely that every cell in her being is saturated with it. She may be touching herself or have her hand over her heart. Her body is soft and pliant, and there will be a luxurious quality to her voice. She knows exactly what she wants and needs. Her desire is pure, and will be expressed clearly because she feels it so strongly. She doesn't have resistance to what others have to offer and becomes a pleasure to help.*
"In the submissive state, you create a world in which your desires have already come true, and invite the other person to join you in it."
"A submissive ask should feel very, very good."
It is when the dominant places her attention on herself that she becomes commanding, inconsiderate, and boorish. A bad dominant is not paying attention to his submissive.
It is when the submissive places her attention on the other that she becomes mewling, annoying, complaining.
Nobody is either a sub or a dom all the time. Everybody switches. In fact, people switch between the two every few minutes in the process of a normal, good conversation!
"This dance is essential. Without this polarity, there's no movement, no life to your conversation. The dynamic between two people has to move. If your friend were to spend the entire dinner telling you about her own life without ever checking in with you, then she'd be deathly boring. Conversely, if you never took the reins in order to offer your own thoughts and impressions, she'd leave your interaction depleted and resentful; you'd be dead weight in the dynamic.
This is true about every working relationship and every romantic one; it is true about every sexual encounter, every negotiation, every creative collaboration, and every Thanksgiving dinner. And when relationships or dynamics get stuck—any time there's a lack of connection and intimacy and movement—it's generally because fixity has set in.
This is a Taoist principle, and the truest thing I know. In Chinese medicine, stagnation is the cause of all illness. The yin/yang symbol—the circle with the swervy line separating the light and the dark?—is a representation of a wheel in motion. Life must move.
When I first started teaching power to women, I used yin and yang to describe the two states of attention, as opposed to submission and dominance. It was a beautiful teaching tool when applied to relationship dynamics because it revealed the little bit of surrender—the yin—inside the domme, the yang; and the strength and immovable truth—the yang—inside the yin, or the sub."
The chapter ends with closing thoughts:
"As we will see, the states strengthen each other. And it's not about one state of attention being stronger or weaker than the other; it's about which we use when, and for what."
CHAPTER 3: THE GOOD GIRL DOUBLE-BIND
This chapter introduces an important term: THE SMUSH
It starts off by discussing the Good Girl conditioning that most women have experienced. Don't want too much. Don't be too loud. Be helpful. Don't yell. Don't embarrass people. Why didn't you say something?
THE SMUSH gets in the way of having your attention in the right place, because you are paying attention to weaving your energy through the needle of a million contradictory social demands instead of paying attention to either how you are feeling or how the other person is doing.
There were serious punishments for women taking on a role that was too dominant, and many are still present today. Women would often end up in situations where it is easier to complain about the absence of something, rather than request it. They would often end up in situations where it is easier to take pain, and deal with the self-damage later.
"And we haven't even gotten to Good Girl's newest and most insidious iteration: the Independent Woman, or Good Girl 2.0.
The Independent Woman brings home the bacon and fries it up in a pan. She doesn't ask for help; she doesn't need it! She's got this—and if she doesn't, she's a wizard at MacGyvering what she needs from nothing.
Of course, it's a trap. Whereas the Good Girl is supposed to behave and not want anything, the Independent Woman can have whatever she wants—as long as she can get it herself. She doesn't burden anyone. She doesn't ask for help or favors. She's endlessly resourceful and competent, which usually means that she ends up helming the ship. No wonder she's utterly exhausted."
"Women used to be property—and yes, that sucked for a whole lot of reasons I don't need to detail for you here. Now we own property; that's better. But as we move from noun to verb, we're doing so without many of the structures that used to support us. And we're doing so without any new ones in place, or, indeed, any of the invisible support systems that men rely on. (Like wives.)" (49)
In navigating being some combination of the Good Girl or the Independent Woman, women encounter THE SMUSH.
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"I'm hardly the first person to point out these unfair binaries. But the real problem, and my real concern, is what happens to your body—what happens to your energetics, to your vibe—when you're smushed.
It gets smushed.
When you're walking the impossible tightrope strung up between Bossy and Needy, a request or communication you make has to wind its way through that compression. And what that sounds like to the animal of someone else's body freaks them out."
"A Good Girl doesn't want to seem pushy or domineering, but she doesn't want to seem helpless or pathetic, either. Contortions—verbal, physical, energetic—ensue." (51)
THE SMUSH is introduced as a barrier to making congruent requests. A congruent request is one where internal intention, desires, words, and your animal body are all saying the same thing to another person. When we try to walk a tightrope of all of these social asks, we end up being incongruent, and incongruence makes other people feel weird because they do not know what is going on or what they are supposed to be doing in response! This applies to men as well, as men also navigate contradictory social demands.
"Anger is an outward-moving emotion. When it gets trapped in the Smush—when all that rage and attention are driven inward instead of moving up and out, the other person feels like they're standing next to a suicide bomber. You're no holding them in your attention and giving them an instruction on how they can heal or rectify the situation, but threatening to self-detonate." (55)
CHAPTER 4: EMBODIMENT
"Ultimately, this is the goal: that vital feeling of being fully awake. This is why we have to shed our Good Girl bondage and the compression that comes along with it. This goes past congruence and the ability to communicate in a clean way. In a contracted state, it is not only difficult to fully access power, but it's hard to feel fully alive."
"Logical or not, a woman who is truly standing in her power will always choose the option that burns brightest, the one that fills her body with energy and expansion." (69)
Regarding the exercises in the book:
"You may find that I am pushing you to the extremes of too much and too little. We are doing this to break this ancient compression, the agent of inner censorship...allow yourself to imagine and feel the outer extremes of some of these exercises, and you will find not the middle path, but your own unique voice: sometimes ruthless, sometimes nurturing, but always powerful and precisely calibrated to the situation at hand." (67)
GOAL: IMAGINATION OVER EFFORT (67)
END OF PART ONE
*Quoted material, shortened, and rearranged
thank you> do a part 2, please. i want distinctions between submissive and dominant actions, as it is hard to differentiate them. some of the information Kasia gives is self negating. for example: is action dom or sub? how about speaking to another person? dom or sub state?