Top 40 Dossie Easton Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “One remedy for the fear of not being loved is to remember how good it feels to love someone. If you’re feeling unloved and you want to feel better, go love someone, and see what happens.”

— Dossie Easton

2. “Empathy in BDSM presents a wonderful paradox: as tops in role, we are often called upon to present ourselves as cold, cruel and unfeeling, when in fact we are getting our rocks off on an empathy so profound that it can approach the telepathic. So we believe that, contrary to the opinions of the uninformed, consensual sadism, dominance and topping are primarily empathic activities.”

— Dossie Easton

3. “The real test of love is when a person – including you – can know your weaknesses, your stupidities and your smallnesses, and still love you.”

— Dossie Easton

4. “BDSM gives us permission to act in ways that are unacceptable in the outside world.”

— Dossie Easton

5. “Intimacy is based on shared vulnerability Nothing deepens intimacy like the experiences that we share when we feel flayed, with our skins off, scared and vulnerable, and our partner is there with us, willing to share in the scary stuff.”

— Dossie Easton

6. “The problem is that when you blame someone else for how you feel, you disempower yourself from finding solutions. If this is someone else’s fault, only that person can fix it, right? So poor you can’t do anything but sit there and moan. On.”

— Dossie Easton

7. “When you respect your limits, other will learn to respect them too.”

— Dossie Easton

8. “When you find yourself responding to someone else’s behavior, it can be easy to dwell on what that person has done and how terrible it is and what exactly they should should do to fix it. Instead, try looking at your own feelings as a true message about your internal state of being, and decide how you want to deal with whatever’s going on.”

— Dossie Easton

9. “We believe that every relationship is unique unto itself, and thus even an attempt to think in types and forms is not going to express the essential truths of what happens when we love people.”

— Dossie Easton

10. “It felt so wonderful that she concluded that the existence of her clitoris was proof positive that God loved her.”

— Dossie Easton

11. “It is basic to any relationship, and particularly important in open relationships, that no one can own another person.”

— Dossie Easton

12. “Introducing your lovers helps prevent one of the scariest aspects of jealousy, which is the part where you imagine that your lover’s other lover is taller, thinner, smarter, sexier, and in all ways preferable to funky old you. When you meet that other person or when your lovers meet each other, they meet real people, warts and all, and so often wind up feeling safer. Introducing.”

— Dossie Easton

13. “Faithfulness is about honoring your commitments and respecting your friends and lovers, about caring for their well-being as well as your own. If.”

— Dossie Easton

14. “Increasing your repertoire has the advantage that you don’t have to give up enjoying what you already like: it is always easier to add new behaviors than to deny your deepest desires.”

— Dossie Easton

15. “What you are not responsible for is your lover’s emotions. You can choose to be supportive – we’re great believers in the healing power of listening – but it is not your job to fix anything.”

— Dossie Easton

16. “A ring around the finger does not cause a nerve block to the genitals.”

— Dossie Easton

17. “One of the most valuable things we can learn from open sexual lifestyles is that our programming is changeable.”

— Dossie Easton

18. “Remember, as you look at yourself, to look kindly, and also remember that you are not balancing a checkbook: anything you see that you don’t like, or that you want to change, is not a debit that you subtract from your virtues. When you learn to reflect on your strengths, it becomes easier to look at your weaknesses with acceptance and compassion. Keep your virtues at their full value and cherish them.”

— Dossie Easton

19. “The problem is that when you blame someone else for how you feel, you disempower yourself from finding solutions.”

— Dossie Easton

20. “Do remember: your sexiness is about how you feel, not how you look.”

— Dossie Easton

21. “Dossie, giving a lecture on consent to about two hundred people, asked those who had never been sexually assaulted to stand up.”

— Dossie Easton

22. “So what’s wrong with wanting attention? Isn’t there plenty? Remember about starvation economies: Don’t shortchange yourself. You do not have to be content with little dribs and drabs of comfort, attention, support, reassurance, and love. You get to have all the comfort and reassurance you want.”

— Dossie Easton

23. “The binary nature of monogamy-centrist thinking tends, we think, to cause problems: you’re either the love of my life, or you’re out of here.”

— Dossie Easton

24. “When you have built a satisfying relationship with yourself, then you have something of great worth to share with others. Abundance.”

— Dossie Easton

25. “You might also want to do some thinking about how much time you need to get your needs met: do you really have to stay over and have breakfast together the next day, or would an hour or two of cuddling and talk be just as nice?”

— Dossie Easton

26. “If you have a partner who is struggling with reclaiming their sexuality from an ugly history of violence, we hope that you will choose to become an ally in that struggle and find the patience to support the work that needs to be done to claim a joyous sexuality.”

— Dossie Easton

27. “Love is not a real-world limit: the mother of nine children can love each of them as much as the mother of an only child.”

— Dossie Easton

28. “We have been taught that forgiveness is a singular act to be completed in one sitting. That is not so. Forgiveness has many layers. It is also taught that forgiveness means to overlook, to act as though a thing had not occurred. This is not true either.”

— Dossie Easton

29. “People often learn about starvation economies in childhood, when parents who are emotionally depleted or unavailable teach us that we must work hard to get our emotional needs met, so that if we relax our vigilance for even a moment, a mysterious someone or something may take the love we need away from us.”

— Dossie Easton

30. “We know from extensive experience that appearance and wealth are not predictors of good loving. We try to avoid ranking people as better or worse than each other and are unhappy with those who want to relate to our rank more than our selves. Hierarchies produce victims on the top as well as the bottom, because it is almost as alienating to be approached by too many people for the wrong reasons as it is to be approached by nobody at all.”

— Dossie Easton

31. “Don’t give up! Your therapist author Dossie specializes in healing old wounds for trauma survivors and is happy to announce that many people find ways to deal with their history of violation, take care of themselves when painful memories show up, succeed in reclaiming ownership of their bodies, and enjoy a free and happy sexuality.”

— Dossie Easton

32. “A technique for good listening is to listen to what your partner has to say without interrupting and let them know you heard them by telling them what you think they just said.”

— Dossie Easton

33. “When you are single, you have unique opportunities to deepen that relationship with yourself, to find out who you are, and to celebrate your journey in whatever relationships you may move through as you travel through your life.”

— Dossie Easton

34. “When you find yourself worrying about how you are seen by others, remember that there is no point in pretending you are anyone except who you are. It does you no good to attract someone who thinks you are somebody else: all you get is someone who is excited about somebody who isn’t you. When you are honest, you attract the people who are interested in you, just as you most wonderfully are.”

— Dossie Easton

35. “Marriage today is the outcome government imposing its standards on personal relationships, legislating a one-size-fits-all mandate for how people in sexual or domestic relationships ought to run their lives.”

— Dossie Easton

36. “Only when we’re all willing to own our emotions, and let our lovers and friends own theirs, does anyone have the power to change and grow.”

— Dossie Easton

37. “We think that relationship structures should be designed to fit the people in them rather than people chosen to fit some abstract ideal of the perfect relationship. There’s no right or wrong way to do this as long as everyone’s having fun and getting their needs met.”

— Dossie Easton

38. “Once you’ve gotten comfortable with “no,” “yes” is usually easier. Try it, in all its variations: “Yes, please.” “Yes, when?” “Yes, but I have some limits I want to tell you about first.” “Yes, but I need you to talk to my partner first.” “Yes, but not tonight; how does next Tuesday look for you?” “Hell, yes!”

— Dossie Easton

39. “We believe that the fundamental sexual unit is one person; adding more people to that unit may be intimate, fun, and companionable but does not complete anybody.”

— Dossie Easton

40. “We bottom in order to go to places within ourselves and with our partners that we cannot get to without a top. To explore these spaces, we need someone to push us over the edge in the right ways, and to keep us safe while we’re out there flying.”

— Dossie Easton

41. “How many times have you rejected the possibility of love because it didn’t look the way you expected it to? Perhaps some characteristic was missing you were sure you must have, some other trait was present that you never dreamed of accepting. What happens when you throw away your expectations and open your eyes to the fabulous love that is shining right in front of you, holding out its hand? Clean love is love without expectations.”

— Dossie Easton

42. “For us, when our sexual lifestyle is essential to our sense of identity, anybody who doesn’t know about our kink doesn’t really know us.”

— Dossie Easton

43. “Being single offers the opportunity to spend time being purely who you are. Singles enjoy more freedom to explore, fewer obligations, and the ability to lounge around the house in a holey T-shirt, playing video games, with nobody the wiser.”

— Dossie Easton

44. “It’s a very good idea for everyone to learn to live single – to figure out how to get your needs met without being partnered so you don’t find yourself seeking a partner to fill needs that you could equally well fill yourself.”

— Dossie Easton

45. “When we blame, we fail to shoulder our part of the burden; we project the responsibility for whatever is wrong onto another, usually to protect ourselves from feeling terribly guilty or anxious. When we blame, we also disempower ourselves – if it’s all your fault, then I must be impotent.”

— Dossie Easton

46. “It’s not easy being easy.”

— Dossie Easton

47. “Listen to your fears: they have a lot to teach you about yourself.”

— Dossie Easton