Structure Isn't the Same as Connection: The Loneliness of Being the Dominant
Dom drop, power exchange, and why the person who holds the structure needs care too.
I have run companies for the better part of three decades, which has mostly meant being the person in the room who needs to stay calm when the situation at hand has gone sideways. As a leader, your job is to quickly get on top of whatever is going on, have already processed it before your team, and already be running recovery scenarios. And whatever the outcome, you will be the ultimate owner. There’s no celebration, no feting of your leadership, other than maybe the occasional ‘hey nice work’ from a staff member. There’s no great post-mortem or check-in on you. You just drive home, feed the cat and make dinner.
I think about that pattern whenever I read about what the kink community calls ‘dom drop’, the low a dominant can feel once a scene ends. Most writing on drop is aimed at submissives - sub drop - and for good reason. The person who handed over control, or simply stopped having to make decisions for an hour, is the one whose comedown is easiest to see. Aftercare, the practice of tending to a partner once a scene is finished, has largely been built around that need: blankets, water, reassurance, quiet. All necessary. None of it designed for the other person in the room.
A 2009 study out of Northern Illinois University measured cortisol and testosterone in 58 practitioners before and after sadomasochistic activity, and found the physiological signature of the experience belonged almost entirely to the person receiving structure, not the one providing it.
Cortisol rose significantly for participants who were bound, receiving stimulation, and following orders, but not for participants who were providing stimulation, orders, or structure.
You can measure the sub drop chemically, but for the person delivering the experience, there is not the same reset; they stay switched on even though their partner gets to fall and be caught. There’s a loneliness bound up in that for the dominant person; they have to process what has transpired, whilst simultaneously taking care of their subservient. The structure of a BDSM scene, the control they exercise, does not protect the dominant from a feeling of disconnection and loneliness. As a leader, as a dominant, everyone assumes you are fine, because you are the one in charge. The truth is very different. Dominance and leadership are so often underpinned by isolation. Aftercare is focused on the sub, not the dominant.
There is a crossover to business leadership, where that dom/sub relationship operates in very similar terms. Indra Nooyi, former CEO of PepsiCo, described the position plainly once she had some distance from it.
You can’t really talk to your spouse all the time. You can’t talk to your friends because it’s confidential stuff about the company. You can’t talk to your board because they are your bosses. You can’t talk to people who work for you because they work for you.
The boardroom might as well be a BDSM dungeon, and you, the CEO, are the Mistress standing over your sub, cane in hand. Whilst as a business leader flagellating your employees is probably not a fab idea (!), both scenarios carry responsibility for the safety and welfare of others. The more of this responsibility you carry, the fewer places there are for you to seek your own aftercare and support.
A kink dominant chooses the position, and there’s an argument that this should include understanding the isolation it may bring. But so does any leadership role; there is a power exchange. In BDSM, it is a form of intimacy; in a business setting, it’s an employer/employee relationship.
Feeling capable and feeling connected are not the same thing. A dominant can walk away certain they did their job well and still feel entirely alone in having done it. I have written before about the cost of always taking charge in a relationship, and this is that cost in a different guise.
The obvious solution is that aftercare must run both ways, negotiated before a scene rather than assumed afterwards: a submissive checking in on the person who held the space, not only the other way round. Outside kink, I would call that the same conversation any leader needs with the people around them; it should be part of the deal, someone whose job it is to ask how you are doing and mean it.