“Poets Pixie dreamgirl”
I just want you to be what I want…
…and what if I thrive on being what you want,
because there’s a want in it, for me too
Drawing on Avgi Saketopoulou’s theory of Traumatophilia, Carolyn Elliott’s Existential Kink: Unmask Your Shadow and Embrace Your Power, and Jack Morin’s The Erotic Mind: Unlocking the Inner Sources of Passion and Fulfillment, we can explore how repetition, often pathologized as a compulsion to reenact trauma, can also be transformative and empowering practice.
Drawing on Jack Morin and his therapy of our Core Erotic Theme (CET), a woman who was never sure if she was truly wanted, or merely tolerated, especially in relation to her father, engaging in the so-called "girlfriend experience" (GFE), became a way to metabolize her so-called “daddy issues” - into an erotic and fulfilling practice. The fundamental insecurity of wondering whether she was merely in the way, or whether her presence was a burden, was alchemized into certainty. Men who sought her company would have to pay for it. Their desire was quantified, made explicit, there was no need to guess if they truly wanted to be with her; their investment was proof enough, "they put a price on her". This was transformative to her - It was not just about economic exchange, it was about relational repair, or - put in a more capitalistic way; financial compensation for the trauma.
The term "daddy issues" is often wielded as an accusation against women who have experienced dismissive, abusive, or absent fathers, and who struggle to trust men they encounter later in life and struggles in relationships. But the real problem, she realized, was that these men have "daughter issues". (*Regardless of a man's own relational wounds - the toxic masculinity forced upon him by the patriarchy - because yes(!), we do need to distinguish the individual man from the patriarchy - but I still think it's fair to say: "Stop blaming the victim! Stop calling it daddy issues, and start addressing their daughter issues! Don't let any(boy) refer to your emotional needs as needy because you have daddy issues. And just remember, safe men will treat woman with respect.
An other side of the coin; We have a “his-tory” of blaming the mother, but who asked about "her-story"? Often she was the one who was present, but also abandoned by the father, and perhaps (un)consciously blaming the child for his absence… a kind of Snow White jealousy complex. Parents, regardless of gender, give birth to an immense debt when they have kids, and they should honour that debt with love, dedication and respect. It is never the child who is responsible for being birthed into this world (or maybe that is the whole point of Karmic practice? We get what we need to solve from our previous space?).
But, I’ll stop pointing fingers and get back to my real agenda: Shifting the focus from the so-called "broken" daughter, but to the emotionally incapable or neglectful father, she reclaimed and re-wrote the narrative. She refused to be the one blamed for trying to make sense of her relational wounds.
What others might see as despair, a woman "selling" affection, was to her (surprice), also an act of mutual repairing. The men who sought her company often harbored their own insecurities. A quiet fear that no one could truly stand them unless they paid for it - and that was in fact, what they actually had in common. In those moments they met not “eye-to-eye”, in the conventional sense by staring into someone else's eyes, but I to I, as David Schnarch describes it in his book Sexual Crucible. They dared to have a soul meeting beyond pretense, through explicit transaction. It happened because of it, not in spite of it. It was beyond the societal pressure to “heal” in conventional ways. In that space they did not merely reenact their wounds (am I worthy enough?) they repaired them together - by feeling the other person's (bounded, but yet) authentic presence.
Do you think I'm romanticizing someones trauma? A kind of hidden internalized misogyny... well, by making it explicit, it no longer have the power over us - which is the whole point. It can be your existential kink, or if you are an emotional prostitute, you might as well get paid for it (?) even if you care for the work and the person you’re working with.
