Whose responsibility is it to initiate, for check-ins and debriefs?
Newbie here, so I may not know all the right terms/conventions. I understand that the dom and the sub share responsibility for consent, and if the sub says yes and doesn't tap out when they need to, they can't expect the dom to read their mind.
However... does a dom have a responsibility to proactively create space for the sub to express consent/nonconsent, either during a scene or after a scene? Or is it reasonable for them to just trust that the sub will speak up/tap out if they ever need to?
I'm very interested in hearing people's thoughts on this question in a general sense — please feel free to stop reading now and weigh in. But I also have a specific example I could use a sanity check on.
My incident happened a few years ago (I recently broke up with my first/only dom and have been reevaluating a lot of things), so I'm fuzzy on some details. The short version is: I had an unexpectedly bad experience during an under-negotiated but low-intensity scene involving light sensory deprivation and bondage, and I feel like a larger portion of the blame — and responsibility for aftercare — was put on me than I deserved, under the circumstances.
I know I'm not blameless for what happened, I fucked up by not tapping out, and I should have done more independent research instead of blindly trusting my dom to set conventions. But, if I ever decide to look for a dom again, I want to understand what's supposed to count as normal/desirable behavior on their end so that I have realistic expectations.
Some context before I get into the longer version, because "under-negotiated" means we were over-relying on this background understanding about each other:
- D had some level of experience as both a dom and a sub, but he hadn't played with any subs in years. I was open about having zero experience with anything, and wanting to defer to D's understanding of kink while we figured out what I liked. It was a LDR, so we ended up spending several horny months discussing our boundaries, risk profiles, and theoretical + actual interests in detail. By the time I visited, we felt confident we'd identified enough common ground to start dipping our toes in.
- D said he'd been told he did "hardcore 24/7" but he felt like that was kind of an exaggeration. I knew I wasn't up for anything like TPE, but what he described sounded more like "I have some baggage around the classic stereotype of Scenes, I'd rather just think of it as either 'doing things' or 'pressing pause on doing things.' I'm more interested in low-intensity things integrated into daily life anyway, I just want to do normal relationship stuff but with bondage whenever you're up for it." I asked to start with more tightly-scoped/scene-type stuff, and I said I probably couldn't do literal 24/7, but I was open to expanding scope over time, maybe up to a few days at a time.
- D and I both have AuDHD, his being more overt/severe than mine on both levels. I told him I might struggle with identifying whether something was okay in the moment, and he'd need to be open to talking about things afterward and giving me a chance to say "actually no, I didn't love that and here's what we need to modify." (basically, I was worried he'd check in, I'd say yes, and later realize it should have been a no, and I wanted him to know I would never blame him for taking me at my word.) He was nervous about getting delayed/revisionist feedback because he has severe rejection sensitivity, but he eventually told me that it was reassuring to know that I didn't expect him to stay hypervigilant at all times for my nonverbal cues, and to know I'd eventually come back to him with any issues.
- Having zero experience meant I'd never had a bad experience; I had absolute trust in D to take care of me, because he'd been my closest confidante for years; and D had referenced traumatic history with subs who successfully pressured him into things he didn't want, or expected him to prioritize their enjoyment at the expense of his own. Also, I had essentially been playing the Rescuer role in his Karpman drama triangle for years at this point. So... yes this was stupid naive of me, but my only priorities at the time were to push my comfort zone a little in the name of self-exploration, and to make sure that D felt safe, supported, and respected at all times.
The bad "scene" happened less than a week into our first in-person visit together since deciding to get kinky. As far as I can remember, it started as me offering company while D took a nap, and turned into D cuddling me while I was in a bit gag + hood + blindfold + cuffs (all self-removable, though the hood was new for me). This was probably around 4pm, based on when I would've finished with work for the day and gone to seek out D. So my implicit understanding was that I'd probably also nap for about an hour, and if it took D way longer than that to wake up, he'd be fine with me wandering off, but otherwise he'd probably offer to release me shortly after he woke up, since my starting offer had been "company while you nap." Meanwhile D apparently assumed that, since I could technically get up and leave at any time, if I didn't do that, it was because I wanted to keep doing the thing.
(As far as I can remember, we'd never explicitly talked verbal or nonverbal safewords, because D (this may be an unfair characterization) kind of considered them the same kind of cringe overkill as Doing A Scene, for anything less than CNC. After all, if we weren't doing anything intense and either of us could pause things by leaving at any time, why not just... communicate in normal ways, like normal people.)
So... I woke up from my nap, still hooded and gagged, and decided I wanted to challenge myself to stay put until D was ready, so I could find out if anything interesting happened with the sensory deprivation and also feel like I'd succeeded at Experimentation. And eventually D woke up... but didn't check in with me, and just stayed in bed cuddling me and browsing on his phone. At some point D mentioned that he should get some dinner soon... and I tried to say something through the gag about releasing me when he got up for dinner... which he apparently misunderstood as an offer to help with dinner... which I didn't realize, until he eventually got up without saying anything else and left me there. And came back with trail mix for himself, and didn't check in, and went back to happily cuddling me, and didn't check in.
I didn't experience subspace or anything. I think I just got really caught up in an anxiety-attack spiral about wanting to be a good girl who succeeded at reaching a preset end condition? But having no idea what the end condition was, or how far away it was, or whether it had already happened, and no way to clarify without automatically failing my task of "wait for dom to decide the activity feels complete," and not being able to decide on a specific End Of Scene moment fully on my own, and having too many tasks between me and End Of Scene to choreograph in my head (removing cuffs then blindfold then unfamiliar hood then gag). I remember the frozen anxious anticipation comboed really poorly with heightened sound sensitivity, because when he came back with food for himself, every piece of trail mix felt unbearably loud as I was waiting for him to talk to me.
I don't remember exactly how long this kept going before I worked myself up to enough of a flight response to pull everything off and get out. Based on message timestamps... I think it was at least six hours. At some point D emerged to check on me and I was basically frozen and nonverbal and couldn't engage with him or be touched. I had to message him an initial explanation over text before I calmed down enough to return to the bedroom and actually talk about it.
I'm pretty muddy on order of events for what happened after that. I know his initial response to my upset text included the phrase "I... would strongly prefer you have stopped me to check in?", and we had a grueling multi-hour conversation where D was crying a lot and said something along the lines of "Not only did you fuck up while trying to be good for me, if you're going to be this bad for me then how can I trust you enough to dom you?" and "...That came out more final than I intended." I think at various points in there he was also comforting me, but the overall slant was that I'd fucked this up by not responsibly removing myself before I became too impaired, he felt really violated by that betrayal of his trust, and he didn't understand how he was supposed to take a lesson from this other than "you're a bad and stupid person for thinking you're allowed to simply relax and have a nice time with your girlfriend, instead of maintaining hypervigilance mode so you don't forget to check in at regular intervals."
We ended up having a series of conversations about this, where I got increasingly angry on my own behalf about whether I was the only one meaningfully at fault in a scene that had first triggered me — until D finally hit a Breakthrough that the real problem was just he forgot I was a total newbie and he couldn't just assume that Everyone Knows what tapping out means. So, as long as he remembered to confirm the tap-out signal with me ahead of time, next time, he would be fine. No check-ins needed.
(We ended up deescalating things regardless after that, especially because I lost my ability to tolerate a gag for a while. So this is the only time anything really intense or upsetting happened, and it was years ago. But I assume the fact that it happened so early must have shaped our overall relationship and how safe either of us felt about pushing limits.)