Desire and Longing: A Dominant’s Psychological Tools

Desire and longing, on the surface you might think they’re the same thing. However, the subtle differences between them can feel psychologically different and create different sensations in our bodies. A skilled Dominant uses desire and longing as two of their most powerful psychological tools to shape a Dominance experience. Desire is the immediate thing the submissive wants. Longing is the emotion underneath that desire. It’s the ache to be seen, to be claimed, to be chosen, cared for, or allowed. Longing is less about the object of desire and more about what someone getting their desire met might feel.

The Dominant whispers in the submissive’s ear about what they desire, slowly drawing out the scene. Or they may intensely describe every detail of what’s coming to the submissive, creating a fever pitch. These are two psychologically opposed ways to work with the tensions of desire. They do not immediately satisfy the submissive’s desires but use them to sink them deeper into subspace.

Specific things become the target of desire. A submissive may desire a person, a sensation, to be sensually touched, or a particular outcome or experience. Once a Dominant is aware of the object of desire, they have something to shape their scene with. They can delay, intensify, grant, or withhold this object to psychologically cradle or torment their submissive. A submissive’s desire tells their partner what they want, but it does not always tell their partner what craving or emotional need underneath that desire wants to be met.

When the thing we want feels somehow out of reach, it creates an ache, a sorrow that feels maybe like a drain or a draw. We often feel that this is something that is unlikely to be fulfilled. Sometimes our longings are so ingrained or so repressed that even when the desire has been met, the sensations of longing remain.

Understanding longing is a little trickier. We must first look at the desire and then uncover the emotional need coupled with that desire. So when someone desires restraint, looking for the emotional need that they want to have met is the next important step. Do they want restraint because they long to no longer decide what happens next, or because they desire praise for the uncomfortable position they were put in while under restraint?

So the identified desire of touch is then more fully realized as a longing to feel chosen. When the Dominant weaves the idea of being chosen throughout their scene, perhaps through touch or through a ritual at the end where the submissive has earned being chosen, the same touch that was used at the beginning now has weight behind it.

This is not to say that every kink has some secret meaning that we must uncover. Sometimes the current emotional need is healing or rewiring something from a past trauma or history. But sometimes it is simply what you’re feeling in the moment and it doesn’t need to mean anything more than that. The key is to not pass judgment on what comes up or to overthink and label it, but to just feel what your body wants in the moment without adding the why.

Often other languages have words that express an idea more succinctly than English. The German term Sehnsucht may help us think about longing as carrying incompleteness, idealization, emotional complexity, and symbolic richness. So if you’re looking to sharpen your psychological domination, looking at the symbolic richness or incompleteness of what your submissive desires will help you hone your craft.

We have to move desire from something conceptual to the embodied experience. A submissive may know what they want, have many ideas about what they want, or even give us a long list of possibilities, but that is different from dropping into one desire strongly and owning that they want it. Creating the environment for that shift is another skill the Dominant develops. Once you have your submissive in their body and feeling, you are able to move them through a richer experience. You create more chemistry, more connection, more trust.

We all face resistance, Dominants and submissives alike, when what we want does not align with how we like to see ourselves. It’s easy enough to admit that you want affection. It’s much harder to connect with wanting to be humiliated. Nobody cringes when they hear that you want pleasure, but wanting someone to deliberately deny orgasm is more complicated. Giving away power so someone has enough authority that your own preferences become irrelevant challenges an identity built around being a capable, independent human. While I’m speaking to submissive roles here, the inverse can also be true for Dominants.

As humans, what we really love to do is judge something as soon as we are able to label it. So we feel a desire and we label that desire, but then we rush to judgment, explanation, fantasy, or repression. Just natural human tendency. The process of slowing that down helps us create space for the unconventional.

So the important thing to remember is that just because you desire something in a moment, that is not your identity. It is something that you have a drive to experience. A part of you has an interest, but that desire alone does not define who you are or how you move through this world morally.

The Dominant, of course, is not deciding what the longing means, but is creating hypotheses that they are testing. The submissive’s responses in the scene are what cue the Dominant to the longing. Psychological Dominance that drifts into projection might be fulfilling for the Dominant but cause disconnection for the submissive.

Desire and longing are two of the tools the Dominant uses to create richness in their scene. They can create more intensity psychologically instead of relying on more physically intense experiences. When a submissive is deep in both psychological and physical modalities, we’re able to create peak D/s experiences.

Now you’ve identified the desire and longing. This is the first layer. Once you have your submissive feeling the aliveness of desire and longing, then you work with what they do with it. Feel it? Chase it? Suppress it? Experience it?

Source

Scheibe, S., Freund, A. M., & Baltes, P. B. (2007). Toward a Developmental Psychology of Sehnsucht (Life Longings): The Optimal (Utopian) Life. Developmental Psychology, 43(3), 778–795.

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