I do a bimonthly blog at my Patreon. After a few days I’ll crosspost them to here, too!
Like anything else in life, part of being a hypnosub is making mistakes and learning from them. I made a really bad one at Charmed, so I’m going to talk about it a little–how it happened, why it was a mistake, and what I learned.
I was very enthusiastic to volunteer for demos at Charmed. I go under easily–in the group hypnosis class, the teacher actually said early on “Now, I don’t expect any of you will go under for every induction, except Jenny”–and I enjoy it, plus I trusted the people who organized the con, and knew many of the people running the classes. I assumed anyone running a class would be safe enough for me to go under for.
What didn’t occur to me was that the unconference was, by its nature, not as well vetted as the rest of the con. Honestly, I really didn’t understand what an unconference was until it actually started, even though I had a scene planned for it with my Mistress. I realize I didn’t explain what it is last time, so really quickly: it’s a con (or chunk of a con, in this case) that has no preplanned schedule. Everyone gets together at the beginning and brainstorms class ideas, then votes on them and arranges them into a schedule.
So that’s part of the problem: I should have been more cautious with the less well-vetted class concepts. A bigger part: the person running the class I went to (whose name I don’t remember) apparently has a fondness for very intense experiences, and a very high threshold for such things, and doesn’t always grok that other people might not. And they were running a class on… well, I don’t really remember the term, but it was basically anti-hypnosis. As they described it, if hypnosis is “down,” the point of this class was to go “up,” into a state of heightened awareness and consciousness.
It sounded neat, so I attended, and eagerly involved to be one of the people put into that state.
It was not neat. Others enjoyed it, but I found it overwhelming. I was taking in too much, and it made me feel anxious, strained, and a little nauseous. But whatever, I came back down and appeared to be okay, so I went to the next thing on my schedule: the bimbo professor scene I told you about last time. And that was immense fun!
Here’s the problem: I always require intensive aftercare after doing anything bimbo-related. I don’t know what it is, but something about being a bimbo leaves me needing snuggles and soft words after. Fortunately, the con has an aftercare area for exactly this purpose!
Unfortunately, my Mistress is an important member of con staff, constantly being called on to put out fires, and therefore I had to wait a little for that care, and we had to keep it short. I knew it wasn’t enough, that something was still wrong, but I didn’t want to keep her from what she needed to do or divide her attention. I decided I’d grab my Switch and go find somewhere to be alone and recharge with some Smash Bros., while she went and dealt with a crisis.
What neither of us realized was… well, I’ve got this psychological condition called avoidant personality disorder. You can look it up if you really want to know about it, but for our purposes, the part that matters is that one of the symptoms is something called hypervigilance. Basically, I am always on the lookout for threats–physical ones, but especially emotional ones. I can. not. stop scanning my environment for danger at all times. I can be chilling on a comfy couch in a familiar place with an old friend, and part of my brain will still be watching their face and body language, analyzing their actions, their words, background noises, scanning for danger as if I were in a murder basement with a serial killer.
And I’d just been in a trance to heighten awareness, followed by one that required a lot of aftercare I didn’t entirely receive.
Over the course of the next hour, I became a full-on paranoid conspiracy theorist. I knew I was jumping to conclusions, knew that I was being irrational, but it didn’t matter: my brain honed in on the idea that this crisis was a pretext, a part of someone’s scheme to persuade my Mistress to leave me forever. At the same time, I felt like I couldn’t reach out to her for reassurance, because then she would “find out how crazy I am” and DEFINITELY leave me. I couldn’t help it; my overstimulated, hypervigilant, inadequately-aftercared brain was stitching itself a reason to be frightened and deeply miserable, and I was being dragged along for the ride.
Eventually, crisis dealt with, Mistress asked me how I was doing, and recognized my vague non-answer for what it was. She took me behind the Ops desk and held me while I bawled my eyes out, assuring me that I was hers, that I was loved, that I wasn’t “crazy,” and she wasn’t going to get rid of me.
I made several mistakes, and learned a lot for the future. First: check with Mistress before I volunteer to go under for anyone else, to make sure there’s nothing about the person I need to know. (She knows most people in the community.) Second: make sure she knows what I’m up to before and after an intense scene. Third, a lesson for both of us: I really do need a lot of aftercare after a bimbo scene, and EVEN MORE after a public one. And fourth: Don’t try to make things “easier” for Mistress by pretending I don’t have a particular need, it just makes things harder for both of us down the line.
The biggest lesson, the one I’m always learning and relearning, though: Trust my Mistress. Tell her the things I need her to know, the things she needs to know to be a good Mistress–and trust that she will tell me the things I need to know to be a good sub.
This is the last post about this year’s Charmed. Is there anything you’d like me to talk about in a future post? Have any questions or comments? Let me know in the replies!