UNBOUND: A Women’s Guide to Power is such an interesting read! Kasia spent 17 years studying to be a Taoist nun. To foot her bill, she became a dominatrix in NYC. What she learned in these settings is remarkable and below I have written the parts that I found most interesting. 

Breaking the ingrained conditioning that keeps women silent and accommodating when we should be expressing ourselves and having influence. 

Power is the ability to access your deepest desires, express them fully, and use them to influence other people and the world at large. 

You stop being a servant of the life you’re living and become a creator of the world you want. 

FREEZING– moments when they know they should say something, moments when they need to say something, but when they open their mouths, nothing comes out. It is about agreeing to do something they really didn’t want to do. 

The invisibility of these mechanics has resulted in a giant, culture-wide gaslighting for half the population. 

Influence is the opposite of control. 

You’re really going to feel like you’re strong and powerful when you rely on yourself to speak, no matter how inappropriate the question or how badly it triggers you. When you can navigate another person’s opposition to your ideas with generosity. When you can ask anyone for anything and greet even the hardest no with a sense of humor, persistence, and curiosity. 

A technique of “turning the spotlight”. We do have a millenia’s worth of conditioning to contend with. 

ASK A QUESTION. Simply ask the other person a question about themselves.  Ask another question. And another one. And another. Don’t stop until you’ve got the person where you want them. Asking a question reverses the flow of attention.  Control over the flow of attention is power. 

What many really want is to be fully held in somebody else’s attention.

The truth is that someone is leading and someone else is following. 

Your role as a submissive is to turn your attention inward, and to feel what you want so completely that every cell in your being is saturated with it. 

Requests made using submissive language- “I” language. 

One of the very first instructions we receive is that it’s okay-indeed, expected- to lie about our feelings. “You may rejoin the group when you say you’re sorry”. You don’t want to be on the outside-nobody does. So you fake contrition and rejoin the herd. This disconnection from our feelings and desires continues to be rewarded, especially for women. 

Over a lifetime of ignoring our own basic inner cues, we lose touch with what we’re actually thinking and feeling. We go numb. We lose discernment, the understanding that subtle differences make a difference that isn’t subtle at all. We lose our connection to the inner signal- to the life force itself. We need to know what we are feeling.  This space is where the treasure lies. 

It may appear as nothing more than a vague impulse, a feeling you can’t quite settle into, a shapeless longing that takes the form of dissatisfaction and the vague suspicion that there has to be something more. 

Desires born from true connection carry the vital spark of something essential, something unique, some thing only you can bring into the world. 

If we don’t know what we want, then what is the point of having influence. 

We are here to use the life force, to ride its momentum to the sun. Accessing the submissive space is how you will tap into its riches. To open that treasure chest, you must turn your attention inward. 

She speaks about an ex who controlled through manipulation, leaving her feeling diminished and wrong-footed, no matter what she said or did. 

A truly dominant state simply has to do with the flow of attention- attention out. 

Your attention goes out, onto, and into someone else’s body. 

To dominate another person, you have to turn- and keep-your attention out. 

Begin sentences with the pronoun “you”. Give extremely specific instructions, telling the other person exactly what to do, how to do it, and when to do it. Leave “I” language out of it entirely; your attention is on them. 

Many of us default to apology and softened language when we ask for something. 

An inability to make or maintain eye contact is often an indication of shame. 

Many times, in a high-stakes conflict situation, people don’t know how they themselves feel. 

The ledge most women live on, is the almost invisible amount of real estate between “too much” and “not enough”. 

From the very start, then, boys are rewarded for agency- for what they do– while girls are rewarded for how they are. 

You need to stop being a servant of the life you’re living and become a creator of the world you want. 

There is an exercise called, Things Unsaid, where you make a list of everything you’ve left unspoken.  I never told ____ about _____.

Invisible labor is a tremendous source of rage for women- rage that, most of the time, doesn’t even get to surface.

For some of us, this invisible labor makes up 80% of our work. No wonder we’re exhausted all the time; no wonder we have no energy for our own passion projects, or even to think about what those might be. 

Beware if your Good Girl auto-responder is jumping in before you’ve been asked to do anything at all.

How much of what you did and thought and worried about was for you, and how much of it was for someone else?

Simply recognizing how much invisible labor you do can be incredibly liberating, in and of itself. You begin seeing the work you do as work- as opposed to the tax you pay just for being female on the planet. 

Avoidance is a  form of protection. 

You’ll see that rage was really a desire trying to make itself known- what you’re fighting for. 

There was nothing that anyone on earth could have said that would have convinced her to let some random stranger take that little boy out of her sight. Now imagine that what she was protecting was her dream of being a sculptor. THAT is how rock-solid I want you to feel about your desires. 

It is crucial for all of us to register evidence of when we got it right. Yet, over and over, I see women achieve a 97% victory- and then focus all of their attention on the 3% that didn’t land. 

I think female self-celebration is the cure for the patriarchy. 

When you build your library of wins- you strengthen your attunement to your inner signal and reinforce what that win felt like for you, in your body- which changes how you choose in the future. 

This is a Good Girl problem- the Good Girl is lovely to others- polite, solicitous, forgiving, and generous to a fault. But she is fucking vicious with herself. 

It’s time for a booster shot- We need to inoculate you against NO. 

Women aren’t trained to deal with conflict; this lack of skill leaves us avoiding it. Good Girl conditioning teaches us to smooth and accommodate, not to advocate for ourselves, especially in the face of someone else’s resistance. 

Friction, let’s not forget, is how babies are made. This is why I get so excited when I meet opposition. Nothing less than a doorway to shared intimacy. 

“He should just know!”…. What the person is really saying is “figure out how to make me feel loved, esteemed, and admired”. That simply isn’t fair. How can our partners, classmates, and friends know what symbolic weight we’ve attached to our desires, when we’re so wildly and wonderfully varied in what we want? 

A specific Ask is an essential first step.

Questions you can ask: 

• Why do you want to know?
• Did you just ask me what I think you asked me? 
• Do you realize a question like that could make a woman feel very uncomfortable?
• People who want to abuse their power often deliberately exploit that confusion; they keep it cloudy so that they can maintain plausible deniability- “Hey, now! I was just asking an innocent question”. 
• Are you trying to be hurtful? Are you familiar with the concept of the backhanded compliment? 
• How long have you been thinking about asking that? What inspired you to ask that tonight?
• Seriously, what the fuck made you think you could ask me that? 

Even 99% right is 100% wrong. 

You’ve got all the skills you need to go big; it’s time to try something different. Go out and get something fucking outrageous for yourself, using the tools in the book, and then tell me how you feel. 

I teach so that women can break the bonds that constrain them, and so they can have a powerful influence in shaping our individual worlds. 

You don’t have to examine the past to heal it; with these tools, we create a present that proves to you that the future can be anything you want it to be. 

Be direct. Be outrageous. Be skilled. Be playful. We’ve got a lot of ground to make up. What happens next will be wildly unexpected- and absolutely perfect. 

 

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