1. Intro

I'm a very large and physically powerful man who’s never managed to have a successful relationship, and never had anything even remotely like a relationship – but I’m writing this because, thanks to some information I gleaned from this website, certain pieces of the puzzle that is my troubled psyche have recently clicked into place, and I'm having trouble sleeping because the need to share this with people of a like mind is overwhelming. To understand what I’m talking about, you’ll need to know some very, very personal things about me, and the darkness inside me that I’ve been battling with. To begin with this story is going to seem very off topic (about abuse rather than a healthy relationship) but please, bear with me while I bear my soul.

2. Dark Side

My father was Hitler, Stalin and Atila the Hun all wrapped up in one sadistic 5’ 10” frame. Probably still is, but I’ve not had contact with him in a long while. My mother was, and is, Mother Teresa times 1000. My father used to abuse my mother and my eldest sister regularly – on more than one occasion he tried to drown my eldest sister. It’s only thanks to my mother that my sis is still alive. Mum used to get between my father and my sister whenever she could, so that he would hit mum instead. I guess the love of an overwhelmingly good mother pushes her to do extraordinary things, because I remember a time when I was very young, sitting in a hospital next to what I thought was a corpse. I was about 4 years old, and naturally wanted my mum, so I went looking for her, obviously in something of a distressed state – calling out for my mum. A nurse picked me up, told me not to be so stupid, and plonked me down next to the ‘corpse’, which I hadn’t noticed was still breathing, and told me that was my mum. My father had beaten her so badly, I couldn’t recognise my own mother.

3. Little Old Lady with the Television Camera Rules!

This is something he did to her regularly for about 18 years. He would beat her several times a week, with varying levels of severity – and the police would do nothing about it because it was just a domestic disturbance, and back then it wasn’t something the police here in the UK got involved with unless someone died. Thankfully, while we were all still very young, she managed to escape with all of us, and although he did his best to make life difficult for Mum for the next decade or so, he never got to lay a finger on her again. If you’re thinking that experiences like that could mess a person up for life, well you’d be right in the case of my eldest sister. In my case, I think I’m over the worst of it – or at least, I’m hoping so, with the new insights I have recently gained. Anyhow, back to the story… When I was a young teen (not sure exactly how old, about 13 I think), a fairly attractive girl was at our house one day. She was slightly younger than me, and frankly, not that interesting to me. Being bored, and looking for something to do, we played various games, one of which was to see if we could do a Houdini and escape from being tied up (with an old necktie, of all things). I quickly realised that being tied up was something I really hated, and was soon free – probably from the sheer adrenaline of the mild state of panic being so helpless put me in. But then it was her turn. As soon as I tied her up, I found myself incredibly turned on by the exchange of power. I didn’t understand why I felt that way, or why it scared me so, and so I forgot about the whole thing. For a few years.

4. Forming ideas about relationships

Then as I got older and more interested in the ladies, I found myself forming ideas about relationships that were, in hindsight, not my own. I thought that any woman in my life should be treated with the utmost veneration (a belief I still hold to, by the way) and that they should be my absolute equal in every way. As I got older, I found myself having darker and darker thoughts in private. I abandoned the idea of women being equal in bed, but clung to the idea that a woman should be my equal outside of the bedroom – in fact, slowly coming to feel that maybe she should take the lead just a little when not in the bedroom. If Hollywood and the media teaches us anything, it’s that women are our equals, maybe even our betters – men are dogs, after all. As easy to turn on as a lightbulb. So now I was feeling more and more that my perfect woman would be some sort of sex slave in the bedroom, but some kind of superwoman at all other times. Unsurprisingly I couldn’t find this woman no matter how hard I looked. All the time, my private fantasies about women got steadily darker. Now, I knew from experience that any time I hurt someone, even when they deserved it, I would get so chewed up with guilt, remorse and anxiety that I would feel physically sick, yet I couldn’t help but fantasise about bondage situations. These fantasies eventually started to include fantasies about rape. Before long I was dreaming about kidnapping and torturing innocent women.

5. Turning into a monster

And then one day, on a bus going to work in the city, I glanced at a fairly good looking woman, and images filled my head of her in a situation that, in all likelihood, she would rather have taken her own life than been in. And just for a split second, I liked them. I started to think that unless I found someone with whom I could fulfil some of these fantasies, someone who would enjoy being treated that way, I was going to turn into a monster, just like my father. I started to think that this darkness inside of me was my nature, and that unless I could find a way of satiating it, something terrible was going to happen. Now, I would think about it logically and I knew that I could never hurt anyone. Any time I even scare someone, something inside me is wounded, and I’m emotionally hurt. I’m the kind of person who is forever trying to make those around him comfortable, trying to fix everyone’s problems, be the agony uncle – the nice guy, the funny guy, the gentleman. It’s not in me to hurt anyone, and I knew this – so why were my dreams so dark? Being an Internet savvy kind of guy, I decided to go online and find someone to talk to who had tried dominating another person sexually, and maybe get some insight into that part of myself.

6. Finally I understand who I am too

But I never did. I looked at various resources, saw pictures of people doing things to other people that would be considered abuse if it weren’t for the fact that both people wanted it to happen, and were both enjoying the experience. Then I stumbled across a Loveawake dating website for those into the kind of dark things that were going through my head. The site was for dominant women and men, submissive women and men, and those who liked to try both. Somewhere in there it stated that there aren’t that many dominant men in the “scene”, and in fact that kind of person was somewhat in demand because submissive women abounded. I couldn’t help but be puzzled by that. It just didn’t sound right at all. Surely there was an ample supply of men around the world who are more than willing to be strong and rough with a submissive woman? Surely the caveman in us can’t be that far gone? Then I stumble across a website for women who like to be submissive to strong but caring men – women who want to be taken in hand. At first I thought it was just another site for sexually submissive women, but as I read an article about how men can be separated into 3 groups, alpha, beta and gamma – strong, “normal” and weak men – I began to see something. Society has told these men that they have to be nice, caring “new man” men – betas. It slowly dawns on me as I read other articles on the site that I’m an alpha, but society has told me so often that I should be a beta, I believed them. So I did my best to be a beta.

7. The Gentle Giant

“The Gentle Giant” is how most people seem to think of me. People at job interviews think I’m arrogant. Nice, but arrogant. Now, arrogance is misplaced confidence – I have no misplaced confidence. I’m very very good at what I do for a living, and the point of a job interview is to get that across. I’m not arrogant; I’m just that good. And very confident – a sure sign of an alpha. And that sounds arrogant, which kinda makes this whole point like some sort of self-fulfilling prophecy… So I realised, after all this time, thanks to this website, that it’s ok to accept my need to be dominant. In fact, the more I think about it, the more natural it seems. It makes me think of gorillas. The alpha male takes the lead in the family, protects them, guides them, cares for them, guards them like a huge bodyguard. He won’t eat unless the entire family is safe – he puts their welfare before his own, their needs before his own. He may be their leader, but in a very real way, he is their servant. He would die for his family in a heartbeat. He’s the silverback. With this it all becomes clear. The media, society, Hollywood and the very real need to be the opposite of my father led me to believe that I needed to treat a woman as my equal in every way, rather than as a beautiful and fragile being that isn’t my equal – in many ways a woman is inferior to a man, but in just as many ways she’s superior to him. It’s ok to celebrate and exploit those differences, those advantages, to offset each other’s deficiencies. I accept it. I’m an alpha male. I’m the silverback. It’s my place to lead, protect and provide for, and in so doing, to serve in my own special way.

8. Final Words

The same night I made that discovery, I found and read some fiction about the kidnapping of innocent women, and how they’re forced into servitude as slaves known as Kajirae on a fictional anti-earth called Gor. Just the sort of thing that used to excite my dark side – only now it was a massive turn off. In fact, it angered me. I started feeling the need to fight these evil people and release these slavegirls. I had to remind myself that this was nothing more than fiction, and that just like I would never really hurt anyone, neither would the people who read or write this stuff. I had to wonder, though, why it didn’t excite me anymore – and this is the point of this somewhat long-winded posting: I think the “alpha” me, the REAL me, was buried in the back of my psyche by the need to conform to a "beta" norm, to be the “nice guy” that the media and society as a whole told me I should be, and the need to be the opposite of my Father compelled me to be. I think the disturbing fantasies were some sort of reaction to that, and grew more and more intense over time as the “alpha” me struggled for a conscious release. Now that I’ve accepted that part of myself, I feel more at ease than I have done for years, and my “dark side” seems to have dissapeared. I think it's work is done. I’ve always been irresistibly drawn to vulnerable women. I never knew why – I always fought the urge to take a vulnerable woman, choosing very deliberately the more confident women instead – the alpha women. Now I know why I was (am) drawn to that kind of woman, and I can stop fighting it and accept that it’s my place to find a vulnerable woman and make her invulnerable by being her Silverback. Only took me 28 years and accidentally stumbling on this website to work all that out. Anyhow, I know that’s one hell of a way of introducing myself, but I’m fairly certain no one I know will understand any of that, and I needed to share it. I would really love to hear what you think, especially of my theory regarding the sudden disappearance of my “dark side”…