‘Emma, there’s something I have to tell you before we go any further.’

I found Monday mornings in January hard to cope with. The centre's heating had been off all weekend and the building always took time to heat up. With my jeans and hair still damp from my short walk to work, my cardigan lost its valiant battle to keep me warm. I needed a couple of easy, straightforward sessions to ease me through until lunchtime. 

Joe had looked tired and drawn as I’d ushered him in. An impressive man, mid-fifties and over six feet tall, he had immediately filled my small office with his presence. His ruddy complexion and well-tailored tweed suit suggested farm or estate manager, an active but executive job in the great outdoors. It had been a well-used but well looked-after Barbour coat I’d hung to dry, alongside my anorak.            

   ‘Coffee?’ I gestured towards the filter machine, hoping that a warm drink might help me.

   ‘I’m a sadist.’ 

With his words, baldly stated, coffee didn’t seem so important, after all. I stared at him for a moment before remembering to appear professional, adjusting my expression to one of, I hoped, neutral interest. 

‘I like to hurt women, to see them in pain,’ he continued, his eyes focussed on my face, looking, no doubt, for reaction.

My training as a therapist told me to always remain impersonal and detached. As if to physically mark that divide, a coffee table sat between us. I studied one of the joints of the coffee table for a moment as I absorbed this statement, or tried to. I had made the table myself, taught the skills of woodworking as a young girl by my craftsman father. A tyrant, but a skilled one who’d taught me with love. That was his good side. The joint in question was slightly less than perfect, a gap showing where no gap should be, which is why I’d put it facing me rather than the client. I wondered now if maybe that was silly. There were only two people in the world, myself and my father, who were even going to notice that poor joint, let alone be annoyed by it. As neither us would ever be sitting in the client’s chair, why not simply put the table the other way around, so it wouldn’t annoy me through my working days? I thought I might when Joe had gone.

‘Your website does say you are kink-friendly.’ He’s having to prompt me, I realised, ashamed of my poor response. Unprofessional.

We’d touched on sadomasochism during training, of course we had. Mutual needs met through consensual union, those who liked to hurt meeting those who fed on pain. Which had nothing to do with the way my father had beaten me, but the way he’d beaten me had everything to do with why I’d turned away from class that day. Why, when the other students had giggled, I’d had to dash to the loo, and to explain later that it must have been something I’d eaten.

‘So, what happened?’ Time to lead a little, I decided, to do my job.

‘My wife was bipolar and suffered from long and terrible depressions, but she never had the highs. It left her with very little confidence in herself. I was her strength, I suppose. She relied on me.’

I heard the physiotherapist next door greeting someone, muffled voices through the thin walls of the centre. For a moment, I envied him. Tension and knots in muscles which he could get his hands on must be easier than grappling with feelings and fears.

‘I loved her so much, and she loved me.’ He took his gaze from my face and hung his head in his hands, staring at the coffee table. ‘She would have died for me, and I for her.’

I’d loved my father with all my soul, despite the beatings, for he was my world.

That was then, and now I am a therapist, a professional, and it’s high time I started to behave like one.

‘So, was it sadism in the bedroom, a bit of kinky sex, or did it go further?’ I spoke crisply, and used the past tense because he did.

‘I was her master, she was my submissive.’ He looked at me carefully. Maybe he didn’t trust me yet, didn’t know whether I was sympathetic to his condition or thought him to be an evil pervert. I wasn’t sure myself.

‘She needed your authority as much as she needed the sensation of pain for sexual excitement?’ I wished I hadn’t missed that class, now, having to make this up as I went along, using my experience of my father’s absolute authority to colour in Joe’s narrative.

‘Yes.’ He sat back slightly in his chair, perhaps satisfied that I’d caught up at last.

‘What happened?’

‘After a long period of happiness, she began to fall into depression and I couldn’t face it, not again. So much suffering for her. For me, as well, but for her it must have been truly terrible.’ He stopped, and began studying the top of my table again.

I poured a glass of water from the jug on the table top and pushed it towards him, creating a little pause for us both, before pushing on.

‘What did you do?’ It had to be an act of commission as well as of compassion.

He raised his face to look at me, and I saw that was struggling to contain his emotion. Tears were not far away, his bottom lip quivering. Sadist he might declare himself to be, but a caring man sat before me, wracked by grief. I put my unease aside and committed to helping him.

‘I caned her. I caned her thinking it might help, that the endorphins might chase the misery away.’ He dropped his head into his hands again.

‘Well, the adrenaline from pain creates serotonin and, as you say, an endorphin cascade. That can lead to a happy and relaxed feeling.’ There had been a research paper about it which had caused a furore at the time. Spanking on the NHS, I think, had been one of the more popular newspaper headlines.

Another pause followed, which I couldn't help but fill. ‘What happened, Joe?’

He looked up, haggard, saying nothing for a moment. I heard the faint swish of cars passing in the rain outside, a mundane, everyday sound standing in stark contrast to the profound intensity filling my workspace. At last, Joe spoke, so softly I had to strain to hear.

‘I must have thought I was beating the depression, not her.’ He paused again. ‘As though I could beat the illness away.’

‘Go on.’ I spoke softly, too, anxious not to break the fragile thread of this admission.

 ‘A red mist came over me. A rage, over the unfairness of her depression, over the suffering it would cause.’

‘You beat her too hard?’

He nodded, lifting his head and searching again for something in my face. Holding his gaze, the tension was palpable.

Is he looking for forgiveness? Absolution? Sympathy? Compassion? Or simply understanding?

‘When did this happen?’

He recited the exact date. To my surprise it had been almost ten years ago. There had to be more. A decade is a long time to have something like that hanging around. How badly had he beaten her? A shocking thought came into my mind.

Did she die? How on earth do I handle it if he killed her? 

I took a deep breath. ‘And?’

‘Two days later she -– she committed suicide.’

The words hung in the air, shocking enough themselves for all that it was more palatable than manslaughter. Although the possibility still existed that the beating had caused her to take her own life, of course, making him culpable, at least morally.

‘Do you believe your beating caused her to do that?’

‘She'd attempted suicide before, but never just after, well, you know. All the same -–’ He still stared into my face, but I don’t think he saw me.

‘Do you think it was your fault?’

‘Emma, I don't know!’ He’d raised his voice, but in frustration rather than anger, I was sure. ‘Did I support her well enough? Could I have done more? How could I have beaten her so hard?’ He reached for his water with a shaking hand. ‘And — did she kill herself to save me the misery of her depression?’ 

He took a hasty gulp from the glass before finding my eyes again. ‘Did she, in fact, die for me?’ His voice broke as he asked the question. 

‘Have you had any relationships since then?’ A brutal question, I knew, but I had to move on from that impossible ground, and quickly.

‘I've had no relationships at all!’ He spoke angrily this time, and the anger felt healthier than staring-at-the-table sorrow.

‘Why not?’

‘Why not? Why the hell do you think not?’ 

He stared at me, anger flashing in his eyes, challenging me, and he began to move, an upwelling of emotion, I guessed, uncontainable. Standing quickly, he made a menacing gesture with the glass still in his hand. For a moment, I believed he was going to attack me. Before I had time to do more than flinch, he had looked beyond me to the window before walking over to stare intently at people and cars and buses passing by in the miserable rain. It seemed my office couldn’t contain him.

This wasn’t in the manual of being a therapist. I was supposed to manage all the emotions between us as we sat facing each other, giving him space to express himself fully but safely. Now I had a powerful and angry man on the loose, a man who was a sadist and had severely beaten his partner. Just how kink-friendly was I?

Take control. Go to him, bring him in. But watch the glass in his hand.

Standing, a little fearfully, I walked over to him. Still with his back to me, he seemed intent on the view outside as I put my hand on his shoulder. Making contact and being in a position to exert some physical control is the first move of self-defence. I’d taken a course to try to build up my confidence after too many years of being bullied, by my father, by my peers at school. But touching Joe’s shoulder felt more like an act of compassion than of control.

Maybe it did to him, too, because he immediately lost some of his rigidity, turning away from the window. I saw with a start that he had tears in his eyes. I led him gently back towards his chair, and I returned to mine. Looking at him, I invited him with my silence to open up. He gulped some more water and rubbed his face before he spoke again.

‘When she’d tried before, she said killing herself would save me from misery, save me from having to look after her. I told her it wouldn’t, I wanted her, for better or worse. I did mean it, at the wedding ceremony. When she was in her right mind, she understood this, although she didn’t think herself worthy of that love. But, when she was depressed, she couldn’t think positively or rationally.’

He took several deep breaths before reaching over to refill his glass from the jug, sloshing a bit of water on the table top as his hand shook. When I’d put the table there, I knew that I could hardly stop in the middle of a session to wipe up spilled water, so I’d varnished it. No harm would be done. Joe drank quickly and deeply, as if trying to dampen the fire that burned inside.

‘She couldn’t work because she was too ill, too often. I had to work long hours and couldn’t always be there for her. I should have been there, and I torture myself every day that I wasn’t. But I have to move on, don’t I? I can't continue any longer like this. It's letting her down, isn't it?’ 

Not answering, I held his gaze, inviting more.

‘Especially if she killed herself to save me from more misery.’

Let the silence run. Don't lead.

‘And if I have another relationship, it will be as master and submissive again, I can’t change who and how I am. Any new partner would have to be a woman who needs me, who trusts me with her life, who requires my authority — and who lets me beat her.’

He looked at me searchingly, as if to ask if I understood. Really understood.

Do I? What is his driving force? What’s it like to ‘be’ a sadist? Or, for that matter, a masochist? I have no idea, no idea at all.

Sadism, from this new perspective I'd gained in the last few minutes, didn’t sound like a mere lifestyle choice, a casual decision of a man to dominate a woman. Instead, it emerged as something far more profound, an intrinsic part of his being he couldn’t walk away from, even when it went wrong. As I pondered this deeper insight, I almost missed that he'd begun speaking again.

‘— even if I found someone, how can she trust me if I don’t trust myself?’

His question sat there in my office, my precious working space, the result of years of study and effort. And I, of all people, understood all too well how it felt when a strong man turned on his fragile ward.

From being loving, and teaching me his skills with care and affection, my father would turn at the slightest challenge to abusive violence. His love, it seemed, came with the most stringent of conditions. But, breaking free from his mercurial tyranny as soon as I came of age, I’d immediately missed his being there between me and the world, a world I was ill-prepared to face as his rampant authority had so thoroughly dominated me. Within its cage, I hadn’t grown up. The dependence of someone like Joe’s partner, battered by their experiences, on a strong, authoritative man who offered protection I could well understand.

Unlike my father, Joe knew about the dependence such protective authority created and the disaster which followed if that trust was breached. Had he learned his lesson, that’s what he needed to know, or would he again fail the faith placed in him?

Not for the first time, I felt hugely frustrated by my job. If, after ten years, Joe didn’t trust himself, how could I, sitting safely on my side of my coffee table, prove to him that he was trustworthy? And with virtually no understanding of the driving forces which lay behind his sadism, how could I hope to begin to help him deal with it?

This is not in the bloody manual. This cosy little office of mine is just a torture chamber for the troubled soul.

Because he was paying for an hour, I went through the motions, but when Joe left, he looked just as beaten and despairing as he had when he’d arrived. People with their lives in tatters looked to me to be some miracle worker to help them out of the mess. Increasingly, I felt I didn’t measure up. I’d take their money but I didn’t deliver happiness. Joe, I thought, was likely to be just another one I couldn’t help.