Young-at-Heart, I wanted to get back to something you said:
"What I tried to point out in my earlier post was something I learned recently about emotional overload causing my wife to emotionally shutdown and to also point out that being an alpha male in the bedroom is something that needs to be approached with caution by a reader of the SSM forum, as so many of us SSM-males are in a relationship where the bedroom is filled with emotional landmines. While a discussion on alpha males in the bedroom might be fine for other forums like newcomers, piecing it together, 180's, etc., it seems a bit much in the SSM area to me. I may be wrong in that, but that is how I saw it."
I was in the same situation as your W for much of the early years in our M. I agree, at that time I couldn't have coped with my H behaving like an alpha male--especially because sex sometimes triggered flashbacks to episodes of abuse that I'd never consciously allowed to surface, which I would then (unfairly) blame on his actions.
HOWEVER, the sort of sex where my H wanted to know if *this* touch felt all right or not, or what I wanted him to do next DURING sex was a complete and utter turn-off. It made it impossible to feel that I was a sexy woman being ravished by her man--which, now that I've moved past all the abuse, is what turns me on. Perhaps if these things had been discussed outside the bedroom they might have been acceptable, but when they intruded into the bedroom, they made it impossible to feel any passion. It was as though my H was reduced from a confident man to a pimply teenager asking, "Is it okay if I touch your breasts?"
It was only when *I* took responsibility for dealing with my past that things were able to begin shifting, and our SSM-days ended. At that point I started looking at this forum and reading DQ (among other)'s descriptions of what a truly healthy M would look like, as a sort of future goal. In that sense, I think this thread absolutely belongs here--as with everything else on this site, people need to learn to assess whether they're at the right stage to implement any given technique/concept.
I'm sorry that your wife is having such a difficult time, and hope that with the help of your therapist and all the books you're reading and changes you're making, you'll see some progress! Is there a possibility that your W was sexually abused? The degree of her emotional flooding, etc, seems extreme for just growing up in a sexually repressive household.
