@Xinergy said on Fetlife:
The Dominant failing to come through with what they say they are going to do is devastating to the submissive. The submissive is in this lifestyle because they need that comfort and safety. They need to believe that if the Dominant says something, it will happen. Without that certainty and trust, how can he or she sink into subspace while chained to something being beaten?
It is indeed completely devastating, particularly when the promises broken are as fundamental as repeatedly violating limits, not respecting her health and safety above his own needs and desires, etc.
It doesn’t matter what else the dominant does in the rest of life, how good he is about his word in other matters both in the relationship and elsewhere, no matter how many other wonderful qualities he has. If he does not scrupulously respect his sub’s limits and boundaries, and remember and honor both the letter and the spirit of relationship-level agreements, he will lose both the trust and the respect of his submissive.
While I don’t think that “need [for] that comfort and safety” is necessarily the reason we are in this (certainly not for everyone), we do in fact absolutely need it to be present, or there’s no possibility of being able to submit to the dominant at any level, whether in play or every day life.
If the dominant then blames the submissive for “making” him not feel domly when she insists on having her limits respected (as any healthy submissive both will and should), then he has indeed completely lost the game, because all that does is hand his own power over completely to her. How can you possibly submit in any way at all to someone who has just put all of his own power and even control of his own sense of himself into your own hands? Alas, it is absolutely impossible, because there’s nothing there to submit to at that point.
If you don’t feel like your submissive trusts you or isn’t being as submissive as you would like (or less so than she was originally), take a good hard look first at your own behavior and how you yourself have likely set that up, because I promise you, that’s where it starts. We are not the ones to start that ball in motion, because that’s not at all where we want to be.
We go into this wanting to trust, expecting to be able to trust and have that trust we place in you held sacred, indeed already trusting up front that you will take care of us in these most fundamental of ways. If you behave in ways that reinforce that trust, it will grow and the relationship will deepen. If, however, your behavior undermines it instead, you will lose it, especially if it turns out to be a pattern.
Oh, and subs, if you see a pattern like this developing, don’t waste your own time hoping it will change. It won’t. It will only get worse over time. Believe your own eyes and feelings; don’t try to make excuses for him and justify it. Bite the bullet and pull the plug on the relationship yourself before it gets out of hand, no matter how many other good qualities the guy has, no matter how good it seems otherwise.
Because a man who will not respect your most fundamental limits and your needs for safety in the way that you need it to be shown, is not the good person he would like to be seen as, and it simply will not change, at least not in time to make a difference in your relationship with him.
I know. I spent two years making excuses for my ex, both to myself and to others, working my ass off to accommodate him and to find excuses for his bad behavior, while he violated my limits repeatedly, throughout the whole relationship. If it wasn’t one thing, it was another, or a variation on yet a different theme. He injured me fairly badly several times, and not only would not take any responsibility for the injuries, or show even the slightest sympathy, nor take care of me by doing things like getting me an ice pack, but he also never even soi much as apologized, even the one time I am absolutely certain it was an accident and completely unpredictable. He would even get angry when I’d have an asthma attack while we were playing, and accuse me of faking it to get out of playing. Eventually, he got to where he’d at least get me my inhaler and leave me alone after an attack, but it was clear that he almost never believed I was actually in trouble. He also never got it that when they were caused by the clothing he insisted I wear (even after I told him straight out that it would cause me difficulty breathing and to go int an asthma attack.
It would look like it would get better for a while, but then we’d be back into the same old cycle, and it just kept getting worse. At first, I thought I was the luckiest girl in the world, and had found the world’s best guy. We could have had it all – if he had just been willing to respect my limits, and not behave like a petulant child when he didn’t get what he wanted because I got sick, had an asthma attack, couldn’t physically or emotionally handle something he dished out, etc., and then worse still, blame it all on me. For a long time, I thought he was a good guy in spite of all of this kind of crap, in spite of my growing unhappiness.
But the reality is that a really good guy won’t take care of you in some areas of life and then completely destroy you repeatedly in another, particularly in one in which you are the most vulnerable, and the most in need of being able to be certain that he holds your safety as sacred.
@Master_Defiant said:
…a dom who is not “capable or willing” to admit to their mistakes. Those guys are not doms, they are wannabe domasses, and there are a lot of them around.
All too many of them, I’m afraid. They give the whole lot a bad name, hurt a lot of people, and turn a lot off to BDSM altogether…
The really sad part is that nothing will actually build trust faster than a dom who both can and will admit to his mistakes – and learn from them, making sure to not repeat them again.
And nothing will destroy it faster than refusing to do so…
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