Improving Your Kink Life: Practicing Appreciation

Life comes with inevitable challenges, and so do relationships of all types, kinky and otherwise.

One of the greatest contributors to resilience and creating ongoing enjoyment is quite literally practicing appreciation – and this post tells you how my pet and I are hacking this to improve our kink lives even further.

Where I am, it’s winter. And today as I’m writing this, it’s a particularly cold and savage day. There’s rain, sleet, and snow howling outside. It’s not particularly nice.

And this kind of weather has been happening for awhile, which has had an effect on both my pet and me.

Recently in my relationship there have been a lot of ups and downs. We’ve both experienced some health challenges of late, and that’s also impacted on the overall mood of the relationship. 

There have been some additional major stressors relating to work as well, which hasn’t helped things. 

Overall, the stressors have been sufficient enough to really impact on our kink life. 

In the interests of emotional safety, we’ve been playing according to the level of safety and security we’re both experiencing right now… which of course, has fluctuated quite a bit in response to those stressors. 

Now, none of this is uncommon, for anyone. Relationships are never static. Life is never a perfect, smooth line of ever increasing prosperity and happiness.

It’s often more like a game of snakes and ladders, where sometimes you progress, and oftentimes you find yourself backsliding into a not so great place. 

So now is a perfect time for both of us to be engaging in a bit of a reboot.

Being a total nerd with a big interest in what makes relationships healthy, what makes for good principles, and how I can apply them to kinky relationships, I’ve been doing a hell of a lot of research recently, and that brought me across a really interesting case. 

Harville Hendrix and his wife are both very well known for their work in relationships, and have co-written many books together. They’ve appeared on Oprah many times, and the book “Getting The Love You Want” is widely known as one of the top selling books on relationships in the last 30 years. 

Despite this insane level of renown and expertise, their marriage was failing. 

All of their talks descended into criticism of each other. It was impossible for them to complete a conversation without some kind of sniping remark. They had been married for over ten years, had achieved world wide renown, and both found themselves blaming the other for everything that was wrong in the relationship. 

The negativity was rampant. They couldn’t seem to focus on anything else. 

One of the things my relationship research has led me to is this very prevalent tendency for a lot of people to focus on the negative. When it gets to an unhealthy level, it’s often known as negative filtering – that tendency to only see or focus on the negative things that have been happening.

It’s incredibly easy to do, especially when life is a bit harder than usual, and there’s a lot of stress going on.

 And that focus on the negative can result in focusing on every little thing our partners do which irritate us as well, or every little hiccup or mistake that happens in play.

When this happens, it’s often the case that people start to think “If only I were dating someone else, this wouldn’t happen…” 

When the reality is that every relationship is going to have issues like these. 

The focus on the negative can become so strong that we stop seeing the considerate things our partners do for us every day, because all we can see are the imperfections or what isn’t going the way we would like it to. I think we can all see how that pattern is likely to end… 

Which brings us to appreciation. 

Harville and Helen discovered that when they intentionally stopped being negative, they had nothing to say. The pattern of negative focus had gone on for so long, the habit was so entrenched, that they literally couldn’t think of anything else to say. 

Eventually, they worked out they could replace being negative by engaging in a ritual of identifying three appreciations of each other at the end of every day, (trying not to repeat the same ones).

The result: they began to notice many more things they liked and respected in each other. They fell in love all over again, through an intentional process of appreciation. 

My partner and I have both found that this principle of actively focusing on the positive in the relationship, the things that we appreciate about each other, creates quite a lot more emotional safety and resilience in the face of all the other stressors which have been coming up. 

It’s generally a good principle for life, actually. 

As part of our reboot, we’ve been messaging each other every day with things we’ve appreciated and enjoyed. 

Some examples: 

• The way she brings me coffee in the morning. 
• The recent increase in D/s interactions. 
• The chocolate squares I’ve been using to reinforce her training. 
• The time spent sitting together as she worked on her journal. 
• The amazing lingerie she wore last monday 
• The really hot impromptu sexual objectification scene we had last night. 

We’re both using this same principle to defeat negative filtering in life as well. 

When we journal, we look at the good things that have happened first, and identify a number of those which have happened recently (actively practicing looking for the positive). 

When we discuss worries, we try to move to a solution to each worry before discussing the next one, so that we have an immediate dose of solutions focused thinking before we get to the next one (that was my pet’s idea, and it’s brilliant). 

At the moment I’m working on some communication training which makes use of the same principle; using particular communication techniques to control the amount of negativity in even the most difficult conversations, so as to keep even the most difficult conversation from being too harmful. 

As a Dom, I’m training myself to do it first, so I can role model it for my pet when we move to her next phase of training. 

It’s also a great principle for post play review. Discuss what we really enjoyed and appreciated first, before moving onto anything we might do differently next time, and then finish again on a positive note and what we’re excited to explore further. 

Part of the training method I’m using at the moment with my pet is simply actively practicing positive reinforcement at the same time each day – reviewing what my pet has done that day that’s in line with her training, and giving her pats and a square of chocolate to acknowledge the work she’s putting into her training.

This isn’t quite appreciation, but that intentional highlighting of positive progress is very similar – and serves the same cause of highlighting joy and positive feelings in the relationship, in addition to being an effective training method. 

Now, to be clear, I’m not suggesting that we focus only on the positive, and ignore the negative.

That’s just as unhealthy, in a different way.  It leads to effectively burying one’s head in the sand, and ignoring problems and issues that do need to be solved constructively.

Instead, I’m suggesting that we counterbalance the common tendency to focus on the negative with an intentional focus and highlighting of the things we appreciate about each other. 

Practice appreciation for each other. Keep practicing it, every day. Make a habit of it. 

And then sit back and revel in the improvements to your romantic and kink life. 

Photo, photo