How do you handle being dominated

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The above advice is for dealing with emotional domination/emotional bullying. if you are physically harassed, you have to fight back. I couldn't fight back physically when I was very young but as I became older, I got more courage to resist physical bullying also.

You are in fact being put in a submissive position when you receive help, even though it may be one of the "best" kinds of dominance.

Dominanting others is a matter of threatening others, directly or indirectly. There are two basic emotions in all animals that are communicated between all species: anger and fear. Threats (and thereby domination) is an expression of anger towards others.

The 'threat' contained in being helped is: "You better stay friends with me and please me, or you will have no one to help you with this another time."

It is important to distinguish between "receiving help" and "someone servicing you". If you receive help because you are unable to do it yourself, you are being dominated, but if someone helps you with something you are able to do (i.e. services you), you are dominanting them.

When it comes to dominance and submission one should always think in slave/owner scenarios. Who is the owner (i.e. the dominant part) and who is the slave (i.e. submissive part)? Or, who's genes are we serving now (i.e. the dominant part)?

The 'idea' behind this social interaction is that the dominant part is angry with the submissive part, and the submissive part fear the dominant part. Aspies are fundamentally fearless (i.e. have no empathy), so they are unable to be submissive, i.e. fear, anyone. Hence all the social trouble we experience.

In a restaurant the waiter might appear to be submissive to you, but he would only be that if he did not receive some of your money for servicing you. You receive his waiter service in return for some of your money, so in the end things are balanced out and noone receives more or less than they give out themselves.

The direct threat in being made fun of is: "Do as I tell you to, or I will make fun of you again!"

The indirect threat in being ignored is: "Do as I tell you to, or I will leave you, never talk to you again!"


So everytime someone expresses anger towards you, you are being dominated.

Everytime you express fear of someone else, you submit to them.

If you do not respond to a threat against you, be threatening back in some way, you submit to them.

But in some scenarios you are either unable to or cannot threat back for others reasons, so sometimes you end up submitting involuntarily. And I wonder how you can deal with the bad emotion of being dominated when the damage has been done. Time does a lot, but there might be other things one could do.

I don't think this is universally true, though it is true in some situations. There are other kinds of giving and receiving that build ties between equals.

Hi Adamantium.

What kinds of giving and receiving are you thinking of, for instance?

Example 1: I am building a redwood swingset for my kids and my brother in law offers to help. I can do it alone with some difficulty, but it's much easier with his assistance. I accept his offer and together we put up the structure.

This was a friendly gesture on his part. By accepting this friendly gesture, I think I was being open to friendship, not submitting to anything. Nothing that he did (holding one end of a beam while I fitted and bolted the other end, for example, was any kind of show of superiority of dominance, but it was definitely helpful.

Example 2: I was working on the engine of an old VW Superbeetle and a neighbor who is a car enthusiast came out and expressed appreciation for the car. I told him about the difficulty I was having with carburetor and timing and he got out a manual that had some tips on this, then he shared some of the knowledge of VW engines he has built up over many years. I gladly accepted his help and got the problem with the timing squared away. Later I gave him a beer and listened while he talked about his experiences with Bugs and Things (aka kubelwagen). This was basically a gesture of goodwill exchanged between neighbors. I benefited from his experience and he had fun recalling some of his experiences with cars, which he loved. No one was dominating and no one submitting, but help was offered and received.

Life is full of exchanges that are used to establish mutual support and cement alliances without dominance.

There are many situations where asking for and receiving help if beneficial to both or more parties.

That is true, good examples. I, too, think it is very great to help each other. It all depends a lot on the context in which it is done.

I believe the reason these situations do not indicate "dominance" is that the dominance either is so soft one cannot really talk of dominance, or the dominance is balanced out, like between the restaurant guest and the waiter.

I think in human interactions there will always be a display of dominance and submission, whether one thinks of it as such or not, but often the dominance is soft enough to not be considered dominance or the dominance is balanced out.

There are rarely free lunches between people - at least not in the long run. Power is balanced out in nature.

I agree with this. And when I am able to do that, it works very well. The problem though is sometimes no matter how much I want to do that, it is hard to actually put things out of my mind and direct my energy elsewhere.

I've had so many situations going on in my life, for years, where I felt dominated, manipulated, bullied and abused. Some I didn't even recognize as such at the time...but now??! Yeah, now I see it for what it was, and it was such a waste!

Now things are different, and most of those people are not even in my life anymore. But I can't relax because I constantly fear people turning against me or mistreating me in some way. I feel so much grief over the time gone out of my life. Time I wasted being around people who didn't appreciate me. The love I gave that was just trashed and thrown back in my face. The way I worked hard at jobs for too little pay, even to the point of injury. Time I spent waiting and waiting for things that would never happen.

It's like all of this built up so much momentum, it's been a very slow process to turn it around. For awhile I would try to do stuff to take my mind off of things, and I'd just fall apart. Everything just came to a halt really. Only now am I moving again, very gradually, being able to put some energy into things that I want to do.

When qawer wrote,



that touched a chord in me because I do too. And I thought what he is asking about, is the feelings that come after it happens. Maybe not so much how to deal with it while it's happening.

In this case, the act of asking for help itself puts you in a submissive position, even before you get to the point of receiving help.

qawer, you seem to have an extremely negative and distorted view of humanity. Not everything is about dominance, threat, survival, etc. Not everyone is out to get everyone else. Some people just want to be nice.

+1 Fnord. You sound like my type of person!

What were some of these scenarios which made you unable to threaten back?

I have been picked on since I was young, however it didn't bother me. I ignored it. However when people attack me because they are angry. I fight back. That is how I got something from people commonly called respect. People say I protect my honor, but I don't know. I just do my own thing.

Well, you know what they say... If you can't beat 'em, arrange to have 'em beaten!

This is a tangent, and I mostly wanted to say how much I enjoyed Fnord's posts about how to spell history and what to do when you can't beat them, but...

In my sense of English, serving is what is done by staff in a restaurant or office, servicing is what the mechanic does to your car or what a stallion does to a mare on a stud farm.

Every time I look into this thread I find it really hard to get past that word.

For instance if you boss makes fun of you. He can fire you any time he wants to, thereby damaging your career.

Or if someone happens to make a funny comment about you just before quickly disappearing (for instance by closing a door). Those situations where they get the last word because of circumstances you cannot control.

How to get past the hurt feelings.