All for Love Coaching

I think a lot about boundaries. In work, naturally, but also in my personal life. What are my boundaries? How can I ensure that I respect the boundaries of others? "No" is a beautiful  word when it comes to boundaries. Especially when I hear it from another party. It's very hard to say. I am preparing two whole classes on "no," one on how to say it effectively and one on how to hear it appropriately. These are both independent skills to be taught, and very rarely do we get explicit instruction on them.  I'm not perfect at saying it yet. But I'm trying really hard. And one of those ways is examining how I feel when I am given a "no." And often? That's grateful. I'm being handed an opportunity to practice respecting boundaries! And better yet, I didn't need to guess and tiptoe and figure it out on my own, the other person told  me. "May I give you a hug?" "No, not today." "Cool! Waving it is then." It...

  It’s a story I hear over and over.  “I went to a therapist and got told I have a mental illness because I’m a masochist!” “My therapist reported me for abuse because I have a consensual D/s relationship!” It’s 2024, people. Have we learned nothing about sex and sexuality and, first and foremost, consent? No, apparently not. In an ideal world, when a professional hears something that’s outside their scope of experience, they will go educate themselves on the topic. According to ethical guidelines, if it’s too far out of their experience, they will refer the client to a more appropriate care provider. In real life? Not so easy. Sometimes a therapist will try to educate themselves with the wrong resources and end up worse-informed than they started out. Sometimes they’ll prematurely terminate the therapeutic relationship. Sometimes they’ll just let their own instincts guide the conversation. Therapists are humans too. Humans raised in our weirdly puritanical sex-negative societ...

Yup. I have new and exciting thoughts.  Remember the concern I posted some time last year, about my mother finding my website and me getting outed involuntarily? Yeah. I forgot she follows me on Instagram. On a random Tuesday a few weeks ago, I was fighting my way through a migraine, and I woke up dazed and confused to the message, "Welllllllll I guess you just came out to your parent as kinky???" Yes, verbatim. Of course I knew exactly what had happened from her phrasing. She came across the previous post. I'm not actually proud of my knee-jerk response. I played dumb for the first message, just replying with "... What?" And then the real gem of the conversation: "Was it the purple dildo?" Reader, very long ago, in my tweenage years, I had helped my mother rearrange her bedroom. When I picked up the mattress, I uncovered a sex toy. I had forgotten the details besides fleeing the room in a typical embarrassed fluster, but clearly she had not. If I hadn...

I have an assignment for you, reader.  Go watch this video: RIGHT NOW It's a TED talk about the metaphors we use to discuss sexuality, namely baseball, and proposing a new paradigm of pizza. Instead of the competitive win-lose nature of baseball, thinking about sex in terms of pizza provides a more collaborative, satisfying, and ultimately healthy view of relating to sexual partners. Seriously, go watch it. It's wonderful. I saw it last night during a presentation by Pittsburgh Action Against Rape (PAAR) as part of an educational series hosted by the local community. We even did an exercise wherein we all collaborated to build a pizza and then discussed the experience. It made me realize something important. I kind of hate the word "compromise." "But Anneke!" you might say, "You're a relationship coach! Aren't relationships built on compromise?" Some, maybe. But I would argue not the good ones. Compromising holds a connotation of settling. ...

 This is probably the question that all newbies to the kink scene wonder about. What should go in there?  The answer is probably both more and less complicated than you think.  "Of course, a good toy bag needs two floggers, a cane, a paddle, a set of clamps...." Nope! I'm not here to tell you what your kinks should be. If you could happily go about your life without a single impact scene, why should you have impact toys in there? A good toy bag (or trunk, or backpack, or whatever you use) should be, in my mind, not just a snapshot of your kinks, but an overall picture of your good kink practices. I personally abide by the standards of Risk Aware Consensual Kink (RACK), but this applies to you whether you practice SSC, PRICK, or any of the other acronyms they've come out with since the writing of this post.  It's important to note - both tops and bottoms should carry something with their basic necessities in it. Bottoms are allowed to have a favorite paddle, and to...

Ah, the age old question. How do I get total strangers invested in me as a person through a dick pic and some nominal information about my fetishes? Well... you don't. It's totally possible to meet people through Fetlife. I've had friendships and even business partnerships happen solely through the messages function. It's just unlikely. And the kind of people who bulk-message random accounts are probably not the kind of people you want to form a lasting relationship with. If you are that kind of person? Please stop.  The point I'm trying to make here is that in order to seduce people with your profile alone, you need a few basic pieces of information about yourself. You need a profile picture. In essence, you need to give the impression that there's actually a real person behind the screen. If you want to go a step further and become a Fet-lebrity... well, we'll get to that. What are the basic parts of a profile? Profile picture! This is probably the first b...

Woof. What a title. Despite what I do for a living, my mother has no idea about my kink life. Okay so, I say that, but there have been.... hints. She stared me down after seeing the bruise on my upper chest, but after the fourth or fifth time just told me in an aggrieved voice "Tell your boys to go lower!" "My boys" thought this was a hilarious command, and proceeded to thoroughly ignore it. But getting involved in the kink world professionally, I have the deep and abiding concern that she will find out through a method other than me telling her. Such as, for example, Googling my name and stumbling across my website. With a tab saying "kink." I've known people to come out to their parents to wonderful results. One dear friend had her mother express disappointment, not that she was in kink, but that she wasn't a dominatrix.  On the flip side, I've had friends get disowned after coming out as queer to their parents. It is 2023, people. I thought ...

(cross-posted on BoundBDSM)  The title is vaguely misleading, honestly.  Ego can be defined as self esteem or self-importance, and I definitely don't want you to discard those for whoever you're playing with! When I get questions about "ego," it's usually in phrases like "the male ego." In these contexts, I think ego is something different. I think ego is a Saboteur. In coaching, those negative voices in our head are called Saboteurs, or gremlins, or whatever you want to call them. The ego I'm talking about is the voice that says "should" or "shouldn't." Ego might sound like... You shouldn't want this - you're a stronger person than that! You shouldn't let them do that - how embarrassing would that be! You should be above all this and not guided by your desires. You should want to be kind, not cruel, to someone you like. You shouldn't, should, shouldn't... Good golly gosh, what an exhausting way to live. Be...

 I've made a few. My last blog post was even about one! You can read that here.   But Anneke! You've been doing this for years! How come you're still messing up? Well, dear reader, I don't actually count my mistakes as mess-ups. I count them as opportunities to learn about myself. What I learned from my first business account troll was- I'm a little naïve still. Which isn't a bad thing! I love being myself, and I love assuming the best of people. I'm willing to accept a few message threads that drag on if I can keep being me. Feeding the troll without blocking him was the real Mistake #1. However, I've been putting myself out there more and getting more messages. And due to Mistake #2, I'm seeing a theme. Mistake #2 was joining a newbies group. I thought it might be a good place to advertise, or at least drum up interest, so I posted on the introductions thread. R. I. P. My. Inbox. There's a certain class of people who trawl introduction threads ...