The following entry is a modified version of one of my submissive journal entries, which, perhaps unsurprisingly, went down like a lead balloon. I wanted to be true to the openness I'd agreed to regarding our D/s relationship, but discovered, painfully, that too much honesty can be fatal to a D/s relationship. It could be argued that radical honesty acts as a filter, but equally it could also be viewed as a starting point for rich discourse between D and s. Perhaps it depends on where we are on our personal life journey as to how we show up to such challenges.

The Phenomenology of Submission: Between Exchange and Struggle

In the context of Dominance and submission (D/s), the distinction between power exchange and power struggle is not always clear. Rather than existing as opposites, they may be better understood as coextensive – sometimes overlapping, sometimes diverging – depending on the affective and relational context.

Power exchange, ideally, hinges on mutual consent, psychological alignment, and embodied trust. When these conditions are met, the dynamic produces a sense of affective coherence between dominance and submission. The submissive finds security in yielding, not through erasure of self, but through a distillation of agency into offering. The dominant wields power not as coercion, but as an attuned force that holds, disciplines, and arouses.

Yet D/s relationships are not immune to rupture. Moments of emotional reactivity, internal resistance, or perceptual misattunement can blur the line between exchange and struggle. From a phenomenological standpoint, these are not failures of the dynamic but are instead rich sites of inquiry. The submissive may experience a sense of being “bent out of” submission rather than unfolding into it – an important distinction that speaks to authenticity versus performance.

Internal resistance in submission is often framed in terms of brattiness or defiance. But such framing can obscure deeper causes: unmet needs, misread cues, or a destabilised sense of psychological safety. These internal struggles may not always be articulable in the moment. Phenomenologically, this silence is not a void but a saturated field of affect: guilt, anxiety, confusion, and ambivalence may co-arise, generating a kind of embodied dissonance that makes authentic surrender more difficult.

For some neurodivergent submissives, particularly those with traits associated with Pathological Demand Avoidance (PDA), resistance may not be volitional at all, but rather an involuntary affective and cognitive response to perceived control or expectation. In such cases, submission is not negated, but must be carefully nurtured within a container of trust, attunement, and spaciousness. Resistance here is not a rejection of the dynamic, but a cue for deeper relational work.

In ideal moments of power exchange, the dominant’s authority acts like a flame – intense, erotic, but contained. The submissive does not disappear in the fire, but becomes more themselves, more precisely formed. When this mutual rhythm is disrupted – whether through miscommunication, perceived rigidity, or an imbalance of emotional labor – the submissive may begin to feel their role as obligation rather than offering.

A phenomenological approach to submission asks not whether a reaction is justified, but what it reveals. What is the mood, the atmosphere, the sedimented history that gives rise to a moment of internal rupture? What kind of subjectivity emerges in submission – not as fantasy role-play, but as lived and relational being? These are not questions of failure, but of fidelity to the truth of the dynamic as it unfolds.

Submission, when attuned and ethically grounded, is not a negation of self, but a relational state of becoming. It is not always seamless, and it need not be. The interplay between resistance and surrender may in fact be the very site in which power exchange proves itself real – not in how perfectly it aligns, but in how authentically it wrestles with the reality of two human beings trying to meet one another across power, trust, and desire.