For many people the pain of BDSM has no effect on their relationship with other 'real' pain because they do not experience it in the same way. It has a different meaning for them. BDSM is, for them, literally play, a group of pleasure rituals that are quite separate from their everyday world. They even get a little defensive when you try to extend the things done in the dungeon and bedroom to be a way of gaining insight into life in general. Yet play is an expression of our lives, and can affect what we know and how we relate, not just to our lovers, but to everyone.
Insights into life
There are lots of ways that participating in BDSM can affect your life. It can give you the confidence to go after your other dreams and fantasies about the way you want to live. It can be a form of sexual psychodrama that transforms your whole values system by letting you face and overcome your deepest fears. It can expand your sense of your own capacities, both emotionally and physically, because you attempt and succeed at things you would never have tried if your master or mistress had not pushed you to step beyond your boundaries.
It can be a way to work through the power dynamics that we face in everyday communication and relationships, offering an insight into their significance. It can give you the assertiveness to handle bullying and harassment. It can complicate your understanding of experience, power, desire, pleasure and relationships by showing you how you are responsible when you participate, successfully or not.
This can result in understanding office politics; it can help you unravel misunderstandings in a lot of situations, enhance your participation in your relationships and most especially in your pleasures. It can teach you about charisma and your non-verbal effect on people around you. You can learn the practicalities involved in fantasy fulfilment, in making the ideal real.
And of course it can change your relationship with pain, desire, sensuality and pleasure broadening and deepening them.
Knowledge and learning
There are probably more you could add to that list. But there is one thing we all get from play - knowledge, though what that means will differ from person to person. For some it means just what things get them off and what new things to do to achieve this, for others it goes deeper. Most people coming to BDSM do not start as hardcore players. They arrive with fantasies, curiosity and a few, often failed, sexual experiments. They have to learn how to play.
They have to learn how to take or give the intensity that is play. If it is bondage then there are lots of technical things to learn about shaping the ropes to the bodies you are tying. If you like receiving bondage you may have to learn the patience to hold the almost meditative pleasure state for hours at times. If you are enjoying what you are doing then the learning is part of the enjoyment and you do not even notice it.
In S&M the Sadist has to learn the process of growing the intensity in an organic way, and then there is the use of floggers, whips, canes, needles, seashells or whatever you are using and where to hit for best effect and to maintain safety. For the receiver there is communicating what works and does not in a way that does not disturb the exchange and there is the growing of your capacity to appreciate the Olympic level ecstasies. In Dominance and submission you both need to appreciate the subtleties of the power exchange that underlies whatever activity, role playing or otherwise, that may be on the surface of the game.
Who you are
Regardless of your bent, the biggest lesson is who you are and what is real for you when you start doing things with others. Fantasy is wonderful. It is however lonely when it is something that only happens inside you. But it is also safe because it remains completely under your control; everyone involved is ideal and understands you perfectly because you created them to be that way. You get the sensation you want in the way you want it without having to consider anyone else. The intensity might be a ghost but it is exactly the way you want it, even when you actually cut yourself or prick yourself.
For some people their secret fantasies are part of what gives them a clear sense of their individuality, an inner that is untouched by the outer world. Sharing it can feel like a profound threat to everything they are to themselves. The moment there is someone else in the room, let alone participating, the whole texture of the experience changes.
Just being willing to share your most important and exciting fantasies by talking about them, not to mention playing them out, can be transforming in unexpected ways.
It can be amazingly empowering to learn the mechanics of making your dreams come true by sharing honestly with other people in the face of the greatest pains of all - rejection, disappointment and lost love. (Christopher)