When Polarity Asked Me to Abandon Myself ~ Conscious D/S Brought Me Home

For a long time, I endeavoured to practice polarity. I am inherently feminine and prefer that expression most of the time; however, I am able to move fluidly between both expressions. I am highly adept in leadership, discernment, and agency.

I studied Tantra, Polarity and even taught and hosted retreats covering the topic for a decade, but I always felt a part of me was not welcome in the polarity dynamic.

In my heterosexual relationships, I earnestly practiced being “in my feminine.” I softened. I waited. I tried to trust that leadership would come from the masculine, and that my role was to receive. On the surface, it sounded aligned. On the inside, something slowly went quiet.

I began to abandon my own leadership.

There were moments when I could clearly see what was needed, in the relationship, in the emotional field, in the practical unfolding of life, and yet I felt I wasn’t supposed to name it.

Most modern polarity models implicitly ask people to:

• be masculine or feminine

• stay in that role

• organize life around it (decisions, leadership, emotions, timing) If named what I saw, I was “in my masculine.” If I waited, I betrayed and self abandoned my knowing. r.

Over time, this created a subtle but devastating split: I started to question my own truth and to measure myself as less than my partner.

What was framed as polarity began to feel like co-dependency. He needed me to be small so he could be big.

My domain quietly narrowed, care, home, emotional labor, while vision, direction, and authority lived elsewhere. I was never more disconnected from my body than I was during this period.

My intuition dulled. My aliveness flattened. And when I did speak from my feeling body when I shared what my inner oracle could see, it often landed painfully.

The masculine I was partnered with could not receive feedback without taking it personally. His own wounds would surface: shutdown, rejection, defensiveness. The result was a relational stalemate where my truth felt dangerous and my silence felt corrosive.

Polarity, as I was practicing it, felt stuck in an old story.

And then something surprising happened.

When I began exploring conscious Dominance and Submission, clearly negotiated, time-bound, and chosen, my body relaxed in a way it never had under polarity.

There was a beginning. There was an end. There was consent. There was containment.

These terms are important and you will hear me teach them often.

During those periods, my full attention was on my safety, my emotions, and my authentic inner world. I wasn’t performing a role. I wasn’t waiting to be chosen. I was actively choosing to surrender, and those are not the same thing.

What emerged in those contained experiences was profound.

First came the early attachment material, the imprints around my father, inconsistency, and authority.

Then surfaced the “good girl” conditioning, the princess feminine, the learned compliance. If those layers were met with presence and care, something else arrived: the wild woman, the sovereign queen, the animal body.

Shame stored deep in the body around early autonomy, control, and even childhood experiences of being shamed — had a place to move. And beyond that, something transpersonal opened: a softening of the separate self, a sense of merger, an ecstatic state beyond identity or role.

This wasn’t happening despite structure. It was happening because of it.

What I began to understand is this: polarity often asks us to heal conditioning indirectly.

Power remains implicit. Roles remain assumed. Patriarchal patterns stay hidden. And so the work is slow sometimes feels endless. Conscious D/S does something different. It names power directly.

When power is named, it can be negotiated. When it’s negotiated, it can be paused. When it’s paused, it can be examined. When it’s examined, it can be healed.

In months of clear, consensual, time-bound practice, I metabolized layers of patriarchal conditioning that years of polarity only made more disempowered.

And here’s the paradox: conscious D/S didn’t replace polarity for me, it clarified it.

By making power explicit, it restored choice. By restoring choice, it returned agency to submission and accountability to dominance. Only then did polarity begin to feel clean fluid, situational, and alive rather than fixed or gendered.

This is also where the gender binary begins to loosen.

Most polarity teachings still rely on rigid masculine/feminine roles, often assuming cisgender heterosexual dynamics. Switching, the capacity to inhabit both sides of power — is rarely welcomed. Yet switching is precisely what builds empathy. When both people feel leadership and yielding in their bodies, projection softens and compassion grows.

That kind of understanding doesn’t come from theory. It comes from experience.

I don’t believe polarity is wrong. I believe it’s incomplete when power remains unconscious.

For me, conscious Dominance and empowered Submission became a pathway toward true polarity, one rooted in safety, consent, nervous-system intelligence, and embodied truth rather than inherited roles.

If any of this resonates, if you’ve felt confused, silenced, or disconnected while trying to “do polarity right”, know this: you are not broken. Your body is wise. And clarity is kinder than ambiguity.

Chris and I offer conscious D/S playshops designed to make power visible, consent explicit, and surrender a choice rather than an expectation. These are not about performance or intensity, but about safety, presence, and integration.

You can explore our current offerings at goldenguidance.online.

Sometimes, what we’re seeking isn’t a new role —it’s a cleaner way to be with power itself.