CONTENTS:
START HERE: Unhealthy vs Healthy TPE: Context and Definitions
Part II: What makes for a healthy/unhealthy TPE (according to me and others)
Part III: Questions to ask yourself to tell if *your* dark dynamic or TPE is unhealthy or not
Part IV: You know someone whose dynamic seems unhealthy, or yours is and you want to stay. Now what?
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What can you do if you know someone whose dynamic seems unhealthy?
You can be their friend.
You could send them red flag lists out the wazoo. You could send them this post, even. You could tell them you’re concerned, or flat out what you think — but none of these are likely to get them out. In some cases, depending on the level of control, this may even cause them to be cut off from you by the abuser.
Part of the problem here is the nature of dark dynamics themselves. If they entered interested in that and were not coerced into it, they likely can look at a typical list of red flags and see a list of things that they are into. Hell, I still can. It is my belief that with vigilance, that is totally okay. I support the kind of empowerment that comes from following your true desires. It does not have to be your belief. But you should know that one of the biggest things that keeps people in abusive situations is shame.
No one wants to be told their interests and turn-ons are 1:1 what makes something abusive (and they aren’t.) If it isn’t abusive, being their friend is what will allow you to see how the relationship affects them over time and figure out it isn’t harming them. You may even learn a thing or two.
But people also don’t like to be wrong about their hearts. They don’t want to hear “I told you so.” They don’t want to say “I’ll leave next time” to you and prove themselves wrong. They are afraid you will get frustrated with them. They are afraid you won’t understand. They don’t understand.
But they may need someone to talk to one day. They may need a couch to sleep on. And so your unconditional support and building them up continually, for as long as that takes and even if it doesn’t, means so much.
Whatever you do, though, please be careful about your phrasing. When people finally told me their concerns about AA… Well, it was after, because they only saw the hearts in my eyes. The few who did see it at the beginning said things like “he’s such a dick.” And he was, but I loved him. So people who talked about my love to me like that… How could they be my friend, I wondered. Nobody ever brought up that it could be affecting me too. Nobody ever told me there were red flags about a relationship. They just talked shit. When I needed people, I’d already cut them off.
When someone came directly to me about T, I’d already figured it out, and things were improving — but you know, I had already heard their concerns through the grapevine, and they did not flatter me. I heard of being the next in the harem, new meat, easily manipulated. Everyone was talking. If you are talking like that about someone’s partner, don’t think they don’t know. Do you think I was going to reach out to people talking about me like that?
Be a friend. Talk to that person. Leave breadcrumbs, sure. Bring them to educational events if you can. But most of all, support them. Ask good questions. Don’t push too hard. And build them up. Their self-esteem is taking a heavy hit. They need to hear that they deserve to feel as gorgeous as they are. They need to hear that they should be heard.
I think I might be in an unhealthy TPE. But it’s not abusive, and I don’t want to leave. Is it hopeless?
Here we are at the big question.
I do not live or Love within a fantasy.
This is what I start to get at in my context post.
I say I am in my dream dynamic, and I am. But this was not a perfect path and we are not perfect people, and I have been hurt in more distant and more recent ways and I am always doing the work to be authentic with my hurt and to keep expecting that “healthy” means my partner is always doing the work to listen and respond to that accordingly.
The relationship I entered a decade(ish) ago is not the relationship I speak of when I teach. The same person, yes. But it feels different. I behave differently. I give feedback on (undesirably) painful things without bracing to be shut down. I am not pitted against anyone past or present. I am not fighting for my place anymore. I am living my life for me, and it includes my partner. My life isn’t for my partner. It’s with Him. Yes, I submit. Yes, I enjoy being forced to. Yes, I do service. However, my existence itself and my choosing to stay in a dynamic is *not* an aspect of that submission or service.
Today, things that support my mental health are not merely in existence, but encouraged. I have a support system that knows even the worst of Him and when I am hurting He reminds me I can talk to them. They know the details in the weeds. But what’s most important is that He does not need to remind me. I feel empowered to reach out about bad things, when before, there was an unspoken code of silence in public — it would look too bad to say things weren’t perfect. Way back before, I would have been terrified to post something like all this. Today… I don’t care? I know why I feel I need to post it. And no, this doesn’t make me a bad submissive. Because I also *know* that if I believe something is important, a healthy partner will trust me on that.
This is a dark dynamic, but it is one of mutual respect and understanding. It is one where I am empowered to communicate, and where I believe what I communicate will be considered, even if it is not the outcome I expect. Domination and romance is not on an autopilot. It is responsive to me.
I remember a moment in the Bad Times where I made some sort of vow to the universe: if he keeps me, I will hide any of my depression, I said. Any of my mercurial nature, my passing boredom that has nothing to do with circumstances and everything to do with my miswired brain—I will fake it. T will never know. I will always be additive and positive and lift him up.
God, I remember it so well. It hurt so much to be.
Planning to fake it. I didn’t know then about the fawn response. If I wasn’t fighting or fleeing, it wasn’t a trauma response. That’s what I thought. But it’s not that simple. Back then, this, for me, was a reaction to trauma.
So what changed?
This is a long and complicated answer, and these writings are a novella on their own as is. I originally did plan to tell the whole story here, but to give all the nuance and history, I will need to write something *much* more in-depth. And I plan to.
In the meantime, I have a few answers.
I firmly believe you cannot change another person. You can only change yourself. So what’s different between a toxic and a healthy relationship? Between AA and T, but also in earlier years with T from later on? Within or without it being the same person, the difference is… me. It’s what I feel. It’s how I act.
It’s important to know that I did not feel our connection was unhealthy at the time. I say in the writing before this one that I have come to believe that I have known, somewhere inside myself, every time I’ve been mistreated. And that’s true: I knew I felt bad and there was something going on in the relationship causing it. But it was buried deep, and back then, with a low level of self-confidence, I could always ascribe that to something I’d done. I could always tell myself it might not happen again. And for the majority of the cases I can remember, they didn’t. So I didn’t bring up the ones that did.
Even now, I have never felt abused. I have, in retrospect, seen times that I was coerced or otherwise felt unable to communicate. I couldn’t see those then. I had to learn how. This is one of the many reasons I believe everyone should be in therapy. Engrained patterns of silencing myself and blaming myself were there before the relationship, and the behaviors in the relationship allowed that to thrive, which allowed the behaviors to thrive, which meant that I, as a person, did not.
We had jumped right into dark TPE, and I don’t regret that and I still don’t think that new people shouldn’t, if that’s what they want. And we did have some of the prep-work conversations very early on: what does this collar mean to you? What’s an interest and what’s not? Do you understand that no-safeword play comes with a risk?
But we didn’t discuss things like what we’d do after unintentional consent violations or what could happen for either of us if degradation play stopped a little past when it should. We didn’t talk about the way both our mental health and relationship patterns could react to D/s. We didn’t talk about our romantic or companionship needs from each other. We didn’t know to; I didn’t know enough of my needs because I didn’t talk about my relationship in therapy until after I could see the problems for myself.
Finding a kink-aware professional is incredibly important in dark TPE, if you have the means. Even if things are good. Because yes, I changed, but what allowed *me* to change—not just the relationship and how it affected me—was therapy. And it remains therapy today—importantly, on both sides and as individuals. (Which is not to say that relationship counseling can’t be effective as well, but it has not been right for our particular challenges.)
Once I started working on myself, the second thing that changed was my confidence in bringing things up. I’ve told a few of you that I don’t think any of this would have gotten better had we not switched to monogamy. But I don’t say that to imply monogamy is WHY things became healthy. (Unhealthy and healthy exist in all forms of monogamy and polyamory.) It’s that it was the realization of my need for monogamy that brought me to a boiling point of “I have to state this.” It was the one that I couldn’t not (though I should have valued other items just as much.) He thought about it over a few days. And then we tried. We hit roadbumps for a while, and as a result, had more discussions about operationalizing our definitions of monogamy. From there, we had more and more discussions that we never had at first. The strength I mustered up to understand that if I couldn’t have a need filled, it’d be the best thing for both of us for me to leave; the validation of that feeling heard and actively considered—these then made it possible for me to go on to state other things as a result.
Things became really good. *Really* good. Fairytale good, or so I thought.
Both our therapists (at different times for different reasons) stopped practicing, and we didn’t get new ones. Why would we? Everything was fantastic.
If you can’t see where this is going, things got bad again for us both, at different times for different reasons. Not bad-bad. Not like it was. Still, not good either.
With the help of my (new) therapist, I recently newly noticed some Things I Didn’t Say. As one example, my partner and I had a discussion about going out and hanging out with other people, something we don’t do much. If you’ve invited us somewhere in the last two years, we’ve probably declined. Or rather, I have. Because after a lot of “no” answers from Him, I stopped ever asking.
I had made that decision for Him. I did it to avoid conflict. I did it to avoid disappointment of my own.
This is codependency, old patterns I’d worked myself out of, and their rising again was a symptom of toxicity. We weren’t unhealthy in the way we *used* to be, but it was a sign I wasn’t bringing enough up. It meant discussing the ways that He turns things down, how I respond to those responses and what He doesn’t pick up on and what I hide; it meant we don’t discuss the social aspect of life enough. And look, this is something I didn’t figure out I was doing for a while. This is just one example, but I give it to show how things that are bothering you about a relationship can be considered and addressed… or not. Not addressing them can be a symptom that there’s more that runs deeper.
So that’s what I’d recommend for next steps: therapists and hard work and a lot of awareness and analysis and discussion and thinking and doing it all over again. What’s more, while it’s important at first, when things are good, it’s still important. I will never again be comfortable with either of us not being in therapy. We both need to work. We both need to know beyond a fraction of a doubt that I wouldn’t stay and wait for unhealthy things I noticed to change on their own again. That I’d bring it up once, and then, if discussed solutions didn’t start, I’d leave. I hope He’d do the same.
When it was really unhealthy before, I would never have done that. I would have “known,” no doubt in my mind, that the problem was me. I would have suffered willingly because I would have told myself that if it keeps happening, that’s on me. I would have told myself that since that was on me, I wouldn’t leave for something so small as being mistreated.
That’s the difference.
Being mistreated is never small.
And it’s never your fault.
You may need to do the work to recognize just what the core is and to be ready to communicate what’s going to change going forward, and to leave if it doesn’t.
There’s happiness on the other end. That, I believe most of all.
This was the last of these writings (for now). Thank you so incredibly much for whatever amount of time you’ve put into reading them.
Should you want to join in on the conversation in the comments of my writings, you can find the original Fetlife post of this one here.