by Divine Theratrix

Why would you want to learn how to top your partner?

If you are usually submissive or the bottom, I can help you learn how to top your partner.

Why would you want to learn how to top your partner? You might want to try something new. You might want to experience another aspect of yourself. You might want to please your partner.

There is some science to trying out new things. The brain chases pleasure which it gets from dopamine. Novel experiences can stimulate the production of dopamine. So, the brain likes new things. You know how it is; the same thing gets boring after a while, and you crave excitement.

Polarities

A lot of the work I have done with couples involves teaching them how to inhabit polarities that are unfamiliar to them. What are polarities? They are opposite ends of a spectrum of experience, such as dominance and submission being the opposite polarities of the experience of power. For example, a submissive woman might want to learn how to be more sexually dominant. Or a dominant man might want to learn to embrace their submissive side more.

Social conditioning

It is undeniable that social conditioning affects people and that a lot of this conditioning has been patriarchal. So, it is reasonable to generalise by saying that women have historically been socially conditioned to be submissive and men dominant. But this article isn’t about smashing patriarchy. It’s about smashing through anything that stands in the way of having an expansive human experience. Think of experience like force accumulating in an elastic band: to expand the band, force needs to be exerted at opposite ends.

In my opinion, giving yourself permission to explore power dynamics that do not feel natural to you, can help you to expand your field of perception and bring balance to your psyche.

The gift of experimentation

And why not eh? I’m all for experimentation. Experimentation is a gift. Be with your body as a laboratory and find out all the things it can do and feel. Trying an experience does not mean you have to keep doing it or let it define you, but at least you’ll know what it’s like. Experimentation yields data to add to your personal logs in determining your next adventures in this game of life on planet Earth.

Finding my inner top

You might wonder what I know about expanding into unfamiliar polarities. Well, I was assigned female gender at birth and socially conditioned as a woman. So being dominant didn’t come naturally to me.

I developed submissive defence mechanisms to cope with the environments I grew up in. My early sexual experiences were submissive in that I was allowing things to happen rather than being in charge of what happened or actively negotiating what happened.

Sexually, my defence mechanism when I felt vulnerable looked like people-pleasing behaviour (also known as ‘’fawning’). It was my default to go into a people-pleasing performance focussed on the other person’s pleasure. I was able to feel some measure of power by being ‘good’ at what I was doing. I could feel safe by relying on the other person’s ability to receive pleasure. Over time though, I became tired of this performative behaviour and during the years that I lived a polyamorous lifestyle I gave myself permission to explore what it would be like to be more dominant sexually. Those polyamorous explorations laid the groundwork for the work I later did as a professional dominatrix.

So how did I find my inner top? I’ll break this down into two steps that you can follow too as part of your own experiments.

1. Be honest with yourself about what you want to happen in a scene.
2. Take a risk by exposing your true desires.

Temporarily give yourself permission to be selfish

Whereas I had mostly been focussed on giving to my sexual partners or allowing them to take, the two steps above helped me shift into the other polarity of receiving from my partners or taking from them. I had to give myself permission to be selfish. To think only of what I wanted.

There was a risk in this because what if my wants were rejected by my partner? What if they said I wanted too much? What if they weren’t into the scene that I wanted to co-create? Being honest and taking charge required me to expose my true desires. The risk was of my partner saying “no” or being displeased. What if they didn’t want to play with me anymore? Well, you know what, life is too short to hold yourself back from what you want. You can’t please everyone else all the time. So, you might as well please yourself some of the time.

If you are a performing pleaser, I dare you to give yourself permission to be utterly selfish, even temporarily.

Ask yourself this: in your wildest dreams, what would a delicious sexual encounter look like for you? Where would you be? What would be happening? Go into as much detail as you can and allow yourself to imagine receiving all your wants as if there was no risk of them not being given.

The mistake women make when topping for the first time

If you are focussed on what will be fun for your partner, you are on the wrong track.

When you are not used to being the sexual director, it can be easy for people-pleasing behaviours to creep in. What this tends to look like is:

• creating overly detailed scenes.
• trying to fit in lots of different activities.
• designing it all to give your partner the best time.
• trying to be a stereotypical domme.

Those points above are typically driven by performance anxiety.

When you learn to switch your focus from what you think will be hot for your partner, to what is hot for you, you will be in your power.

When you are in your power, you will not be overthinking the scene. You will be directing the scene from a place of your own pleasure. Pleasure doesn’t have to be sexual. Pleasure could be emotional, or it could be mental. Pleasure could even be spiritual. Or it could be a combination of any of those. But it has to be what you want.

Questions to ask yourself

I like to ask myself questions to understand myself better. So, when I am working with clients, I like to give them questions for them to start their own self-inquiry. The exploration starts in the mind. If the “in your wildest dreams” question hasn’t yielded much, you could try out these questions instead:

• if you could receive something from your partner in a play scenario that was just for you, what would that be?
• if your partner would allow you to do something with them just because you wanted to, what would you do to them or have them do?

Those questions are designed to get you more into your receiving and taking mindsets, which sit at the topping or dominant poles of sexual power dynamics.

Forget about what images typically come to mind when you think about what a dominatrix is. There are many ways to be the top or to be the domme and once you find the ways that feel good for you, you will know how to top your partner.

Divine Theratrix is a conscious kink and sex educator who has been attending Torture Garden for many years. She believes that the human body is art, and loves to teach people how to make art, with their art. You can find out more info here: https://divinetheratrix.com/