When Being Directed Is Not Submission

During a recent session, a client mentioned that he thought of himself as submissive.

It gave me pause, because what I had experienced with him felt very different.

He was late 40s and has been exploring intimacy with men for about ten years. After our session, we sat and talked. He shared a memory of an early encounter, in a car, where another man guided the experience with precision: inviting him to remove a sock, to touch here, lick there, kiss this, directing the rhythm with clarity. He described this as submission.

But listening to him, something didn’t fit.

I have worked with men who are genuinely submissive. Lifestyle submissives. Men who consciously seek to relinquish control for the duration of a session. There is a recognizable quality to that energy. It is demure. Deferential. They soften toward my presence. They look for guidance. They wait to be oriented. Their nervous system organizes around being led. It is not confusion, it is coherence. And it is easy to recognize.

That was not what I was seeing with him.

During our own session, when the work shifted from massage into intimacy, he naturally oriented the space. He positioned me. He held me, not with force, but with grounded certainty. There was nothing collapsed or tentative about him. He knew what he wanted. He knew how he wanted to meet me. I felt his clarity and responded to it.

There was a quiet irony, when he was above me, present, embodied, steady, and still describing himself as submissive.

So I reflected back what I was actually witnessing.

What he experienced in that car years ago was not submission. It was recognition.

Someone had paid close attention to him. Someone had articulated their desire with specificity. Someone had been attuned enough to guide the experience in a way that made him feel seen rather than overpowered. That kind of clarity doesn’t remove agency, it often restores it. When desire is structured, present, and emotionally regulated, the nervous system relaxes. Trust emerges.

We don’t yet have a single, widely accepted word for this experience.

Our culture has language for domination and submission, for performance, fantasy, and power exchange. It has far less language for healthy erotic relationality, for desire that is calm, coherent, and grounded in attunement rather than urgency or control. As a result, many people mislabel the relief of being deeply seen as submission, simply because they have no other framework for understanding it.

If I were to name it, I would call it erotic recognition.

Erotic recognition is the experience of being desired as a whole person, not as a role, not as a prop, not as a projection. It is the felt sense of being tracked, wanted with specificity, and met with clarity. It does not collapse the self. It strengthens it.

Psychologically, there is an important difference between collapsing into another person’s power and relaxing into someone else’s attunement. One diminishes the self. The other restores agency.

He listened carefully. Something in him settled.

Earlier, when he arrived, he had said quietly that he already knew the session would be good. Not because of anything I had done yet, but because he could feel my depth. My calm. And most importantly, he said he felt safe.

Later that evening he sent me a message:

“Such a delightful evening. Thank you for your openness and goodness. Catch you next time you visit.”

When I read it, I felt warmth in my belly and a gentle opening in my chest.

It confirmed something I’ve been realizing more and more: the quality of presence I bring, the steadiness of my nervous system, the way I track another person, the absence of urgency or demand, may matter as much as muscles or any technique. Perhaps more than aesthetics ever could.

And I find that deeply grounding.