One day,  I was masturbating to 3D werewolf porn.

I wrote: “My fantasy today is that I just want to feel impossibly small and helpless, like that little toy stretched over a cock. Like I’ve been pinned by a werewolf during mating season. A big wolf that only knows the instinct of breeding, that I am helpless against, and my self-protective defenses don’t work with. I want to be violently overwhelmed by a monster too large to be concerned by my fears. Relaxing into it is the only option when I’m so little. The werewolf is so big, it’s fully capable of holding all of my contradictions without faltering or diminishing me.”

It made me think about forms of power in BDSM and the stigma that DDLG has had (or even continues to have.) And I’m a submissive and a little. But I have trouble calling myself one because most people don’t understand what I mean. A lot of D/s is either flavored in Insecure Domination or Hierarchical Domination, so I’m coining a new phrase that matches *my* erotic core, which is “Agency-Preserving Domination.”

Thus, I made another chart so people could see what I mean. I’m pasting this one in image format bc it gets wonky in text w all those dashes lol.

Many men (in my opinion as a sex worker of many years) operate from Insecure Domination (or even Insecure Submission, but I’m not touching that rn)– not because they’re malicious, but because patriarchy trains men to source power from insecurity and status anxiety. In kink spaces, this looks like:

• diminishing women’s agency
• scoffing at female dominants
• asserting control over submissives who aren’t theirs
• feeling threatened by a self-owned woman

Community leaders are sometimes the worst offenders because they accumulate authority, control narratives, and have access to ‘training’ new people.

Since much of D/s is based in the ideal of Hierarchical Domination, it attracts a lot of insecure dominants, as any hierarchical community would. Men are socialized to be chronically unsure of their status in relation to other men, and that insecurity often spills into D/s dynamics. In my experience, when a man’s dominance comes from insecurity, it tends to default to gendered power tropes, rituals that reinforce masculinity rather than connection. These dynamics aren’t about me; they’re about stabilizing him. And in those moments, the submissive ends up managing the dominant’s self-esteem instead of being held by his presence.

With Complex PTSD, this has a very specific impact on me. Insecure Dominance doesn’t make me feel like submitting — it feels like being responsible for topping from the bottom (managing the encounter instead of surrendering to it, while forced to maintain the impression of submitting.)  Instead of feeling aroused, my nervous system goes straight into hypervigilance and I feel like I have to monitor the emotional temperature of the scene for my safety. Anything that requires me to collapse or caretake pulls me back into old trauma wounds. If I’m penetrated in this state, it is literally, physically painful. (Caretaking in this context means taking responsibility for someone else’s feelings, regulation, or stability in a way that requires me to abandon myself.)

My body can only soften into subspace or littlespace with someone whose dominance is grounded enough that I don’t have to shrink to take care of them. That’s Agency-Preserving Domination — the only form that feels safe to me because it doesn’t require my disappearance in order to work.

This is where containment comes in:

Containment is someone’s capacity to hold my emotions without being destabilized. It’s intensity built on steadiness, without collapsing my agency.

It comes from the dominant’s internal stability, not external hierarchy. I’m attracted to power that doesn’t extract from me.

Containment communicates:
“You’re not too much.
I don’t need hierarchy to manage you.
Your complexity won’t destabilize me.”

Containment supports my agency by providing a stable frame. When my nervous system is not scanning for danger, it gains extra capacity. That extra capacity = an expansion of agency to fully express, risk, imagine, and participate. Safety is not the opposite of intensity; it’s the condition that makes intensity usable. Submitting makes me bigger, not smaller.

Thus, calmness feels very erotic to me instead of boring.  It safely leaves room for my intensity instead of competing with it. Some people eroticize danger — some eroticize containment. They’re not opposite kinks, but opposite adaptations.

So while people assume that what I mean by submissive is that I want to be abused, what I actually want protects me from being abused. There might be aggression in the aesthetic, but not in the structure. Being overwhelmed, like by the werewolf, doesn’t have to be traumatizing or hierarchical like some feminists might claim. Overwhelm that preserves agency is categorically different from domination that collapses it.

From a trauma-informed perspective, containment supports safety and participation, whereas shame (“I need you to shrink so I can feel big”) and coercive hierarchy destabilize identity and collapse agency. This isn’t about consensual or aesthetic hierarchy, which can preserve selfhood. It’s about hierarchy that requires self-abandonment in order to keep the relationship stable.

Certain dynamics like DDLG (Daddy Dom/Little Girl) make containment much more explicit than mainstream D/s, which is probably why it was often stigmatized and treated as peripheral within BDSM. Naming the underlying structure makes its function and place within kink much clearer.

But this doesn’t just apply to BDSM, does it? These are feedback loops applicable elsewhere, which I’ll post about next.