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A thing about both non-monogamy and BDSM is that while neither of them is inherently abusive, they can be easily wielded as tools of abuse, in a large part due to their social stigma and corresponding lack of representation of healthy models/convos about them.
To be clear I am not faulting poly/BDSM educators* — I think a lot of them are doing good work to demystify these subcultures and make them less easy for abusers to manipulate. I’m faulting society as a whole for stigmatizing these lifestyles.
* Well, maybe some of them I am
* Well, maybe some of them I am
It’s easy enough to fall prey to an abuser when you’re in a monogamous, vanilla relationship. When you go off that path, you’re even more vulnerable to being told that something that doesn’t feel right to you is just “the way things are supposed to be.”
I’m sure I’m not the only person whose abuser told them things like, “If you really loved me, you wouldn’t restrict my behavior,” or who passed off boundary violations as just typical behavior.
When you don’t have many models for your relationship, it’s easy to believe that.
When you don’t have many models for your relationship, it’s easy to believe that.
Anyway. No relationship, whatever its structure or predilections, should ever leave members feeling pressured into doing things they don’t want to do, or like asserting a boundary means risking the relationship. That is abuse, full stop.
It’s not quite as simple as “A relationship should always feel good!!!”, but a relationship should always make you feel valued and safe, not like you’re in the middle of a hostage negotiation.
Ugh I get so sad for teen/early twentysomethings me, knowing in her heart that she was being treated badly but feeling unable to defend herself, and too terrified to actually end the relationship.
I think a lot of abuse victims are, on some level, aware of how bad it is, but also incapable of allowing themselves to really acknowledge how bad it is, and always pretending that it’s a temporary and fixable bad not a rot that’s deep in the root
