Aftercare Is Not An Antibiotic.

For the longest time aftercare was not a concept I understood, nor one I was remotely interested in. I didn’t really wanted hugs, reassurance or blankets after someone beat me up and to be perfectly honest, I wasn’t in the type of relationship where aftercare was the norm. Neither one was us was really interested in it because to him it was hot to leave me feeling terrible, and to me it was hot to continue to feel terrible until it gradually wore itself off. It was only when I started dating my current partner that the concept of aftercare ever came up in a relationship. In the beginning I told him it was not my thing, and he told me it was totally his thing. It makes sense, he’s the daddy-ey type and I could just picture him trying to make a fuss over me after the utter destruction. For a while though, we did not engage. We did not engage because it made me uncomfortable, the shift from violence to tenderness was too radical for me to process, and it made me want to crawl inside my skin.

Then one night after a particularly intense evening of beating and debasement, I was exhausted and lying in bed when he took me in his arms and started to talk about what had just happened. The more he talked, the more I felt like crying and holding him, and ultimately I was wrapped up in a ball in his arms as he kissed me. He held my hand, very tenderly, and in between kisses, he twisted my wrist. Not hard, not a lot, not even enough to hurt. It was extremely hot, and two-seconds later he was on top of me, fucking me, not rough and mean as usual, but almost gentle and kind. I realised there was something I could like about aftercare when I focused on the fact that I wouldn’t need care, if I hadn’t been broken. The idea was extremely erotic. From there we developed a system of aftercare, not an exact system, but one that works for us. Depending on the intensity of the experience, it follows 45-minutes to a day after we’re done (because I can’t do it immediately, I just can’t, the more intense the experience the longer I need to be left alone to process it), and it’s usually in the form of almost-tender, very controlling kind sex.

It’s not a regular feature of our relationship though because here’s the thing, when you live with a person and you have an ongoing relationship within a dynamic it’s actually very hard to tell when the scene is over. Sometimes it’s over, sometimes what may seem like the event was only the foreplay, sometimes it plays out in parts, and I am pretty sure there are some “scenes” that have been ongoing for years and we just add to them each time. And I am confused by the concept still, because I find myself wondering —

What is the point of aftercare?

I’m not being facetious or disingenuous, I am actually confused by this. Depending on what you’re doing during play, you may have a varied array of feelings: you may feel overwhelmed, you may feel hurt, you may feel exhausted, you may feel cold, you may feel high-strung on adrenaline, you may feel disassociated, you may feel sad, you may feel happy, you may feel horny, you made feel traumatized, you may feel absolutely nothing, you may feel scared. In light of that, I can see aftercare as the thing you do to deal with the aftermath, and some of it is very easy to apply. If someone is bleeding you give them antiseptic and a bandage. If someone is cold, you give them a blanket. If you’re thirsty, you give them water. If they’re exhausted, you could put them to bed. It’s not that difficult to wrap my head around this. It’s not even that difficult to wrap my head around aftercare for certain emotions if the person experiencing them wants it. If someone is scared, you can change demeanor and reassure them. If someone is sad, you can hold them. If someone is happy, you can share their joy. That concept of aftercare, even though I don’t necessarily use it, I get it.

I don’t get how you can provide aftercare for a role.

For instance, there are many things my partner says and does to me as his slave that are extremely degrading and rob me of the agency. Do those things hurt me? Absolutely, that’s what they are meant to do. They aren’t just meant to hurt me in the moment in which they are said, they are meant to continue to hurt. When he says them, he isn’t just saying them to hurt, he means those things. Within that particular role there is a continued form of reduction and it doesn’t just have an impact on me on that evening, it is a part of identity and personality. If he told me that he didn’t mean them, he would be lying and they wouldn’t serve the purpose of forming the bedrock that makes up this role. Sometimes if I am crying and feeling terrible about myself after we fuck, that was the intention and telling me it’s okay, and I am okay, defeats the intention. I would accept the argument that on a long term basis this could affect the self-esteem of a person, but I am not that person, I am extremely capable of separating my role as a human being from my role as his slave. I am extremely capable of distinguishing a feeling I am having as his partner from a feeling I am having as his slave. And in the long-term believing I am an object with little value is the purpose of this game, it’s why we play. The terribleness is part of me. I don’t know how one can provide aftercare to that effect.

I don’t get how aftercare is applied if someone is traumatized.

I know, we’re not supposed to play with trauma, but we all have a different understanding of what constitutes a toy. For me, whips and chains aren’t the toys, I am. The entire gamut of data of my psycho-sexual existence is the toy I like to play with and when you do things that tap into your trauma or are built upon it, you cannot heal it with a hug. He will often give me a hug or cuddle with me but that aftercare not going to keep me from having the responses I would have had even without it. Whether that is a period of disassociation or extreme euphoria or silent introspection, it’s going to happen with or without the hugs, reassurance and blankets. He is supportive during the period, and available to me for whatever I am need, but it is essentially a journey one must take alone. If providing a safe environment in which to be triggered is aftercare then I get it, but if it means he must provide the cure to the disease he caused to flare, I don’t get it.

Aftercare is not an antibiotic.

I will not be perfect after it is given to me, it won’t kill the infection. A part of that, of course, is that it’s not an infection at all. The things we feel and do and experience as a result of our sexual experiences aren’t symptoms of a disease, they’re signs of life. Neither do I need to be cured of life nor do I think it’s simply a matter of kindness and reassurance to cure it. The responses I have as a result of the things we do are the point of the things we do, I wouldn’t do them if they didn’t make me feel. I wouldn’t do them if all I wanted was the thrill of the moment of pain or arousal, for me everything that matters comes after and preempting that with “care” robs me of that. I like to sit in the pool of filth for a while, think about myself as this person, and revel in it.

If we do however see it as an infection, aftercare still isn’t the medicine. It’s a patch at best, and a kind hospice nurse at worst. What happens during a “scene” is that everything is magnified, your feelings, the sensations of your body, the thoughts, and that brings some parts of your psyche into the fore. The infection flares. It doesn’t subside immediately because someone hugged me or gave me chocolate, and when it does subside it is as a result of the internal process of understanding your response to what happened. At least for me that is how it works. I cannot just revert back to normal in a few hours of love, sometimes it takes days and in some ways it never goes back. That does happen. There are some moments that add layers to the roles we take and even if the moments last a few minutes, their impact is permanent, and I am fundamentally changed by them. Whether those changes are good or bed is debatable, but they’re interesting, and to me, sort of the point of having roles. The things we do add to the roles and our identities in them, and some of the roles are fundamentally painful because they’re made of pain. He can’t cure me of pain when the point is to keep me in pain.

Aftercare cannot cure the pain. Sometimes it acts as a painkiller for a short period of time but just like the effects of pain, the effects of care wear off too. A hug tonight won’t help me with the disassociation of tomorrow morning. That’s just how it is because people don’t function like the textbook versions of kink-people as much as that would be preferable. Sucks. Sorry.