Being a Heavy Submissive Bottom

I have heard the term heavy bottom used to talk about people who can take a lot of impact (or whatever kind of play they engage in). For me, it brings to mind canes and bats wrapped in barbed wire, or instant bruising, or the bottom ending up on the floor a happily broken mess. I wouldn’t have generally labeled myself a heavy bottom in that regard. I know that I like pain more than most of the bottoms I have encountered. I don’t shy away from sting. Some of my interests tend to reside on the dark side of things, edgier, pushing limits and boundaries of safe and sane.

When I step outside of the above definition and define a heavy submissive bottom as someone who NEEDS an element of BDSM in a significant portion of their life, then yeah, I qualify. I find it very difficult to maintain vanilla relationships. I know that if I go too long with pain stimulus, my brain leans more to the chaotic, emotional side. It’s like the “sharpness” of the pain slices through the noise that clouds my thinking. The command of my dominant to focus on a particular task overrides all executive dysfunction. The existence of a power exchange in my life changes how I treat myself, how I think about myself, how I behave in the world.

When my marriage (and D/s dynamic) ended months ago, most of the advice I received from others was that I should be my own dominant, be alone in my submission for a while before I committed to another dominant. It is difficult to explain the feeling that experiment leaves me with. It’s like I’m floating in the middle of the…