Relapsing vs. Disengaging

I was prompted to write about my experience with relapsing into financial domination vs. disengaging from a FinDom, following a recent conversation with another finsub. After I'd helped him maintain budgets and more self-control, he was considering paying me back for all the time and advice he'd received — which he could safely afford after saving  so much money over the last few months. But he was terrified. He was afraid that if he sent anything at all, he wouldn't be able to stop himself.

I argued against an all-or-nothing approach, because I worry it only increases the temptation to spiral. He expressed  exactly that sentiment. He missed that feeling of losing control. He was both yearning for it and fearing it at the same time.

I know where he's coming from.

I've been craving that feeling myself, with the FinDom I've been serving lately — while noticing that I wasn't as compelled to send him money, not the way I was before I disengaged a couple of months ago. Later I relapsed, but I wasn't spiraling.

I tried to build that eagerness back. Listened to his audio recordings, his hypnotizing commands. It didn't quite get me there. Cum denial had previously made me more eager, I could feel that, but I was trying to avoid it. I had lost control during No Nut November, and I resented my Owner for not watching out for me, for denying me orgasms despite my repeated warnings that I was vulnerable and wasn't handling the cum denial well.

So just like that finsub, I was resisting complete loss of control. The difference is that I was still willing to send small tributes. And there's another key difference: I'm still cumming a couple of times a week. He hasn't cum in months. No wonder he feels so much more exposed, so much more in need of guarding himself.

We both want to avoid spiraling. He's also trying to avoid any relapsing at all. I'm not, really. Or maybe I was, right after disengaging — and I'd prefer that any relapse into findom would be with a less dangerous FinDom than that one. But I'm not categorically opposed to sending more. And if I'm honest with myself, I was already settled on it being for that dangerous FinDom specifically.

Then something shifted.

I haven't sent money in over a week now. And that changes how I read everything I just wrote — it feels more important, more useful, more reassuring. It looks like I'm disengaging again, rather than letting the relapse pull me into a spiral.

To begin with, there was less intensity this time around, in my relapse to the dangerous FinDom. And disengaging from him again feels good.

The first time I disengaged, it was triggered by something that suddenly turned me off — he tried to make me feel small in the wrong way, dismissing my professional work and expertise. That created an opening. But I want to be clear: I was deliberate about it. I didn't just drift away. I reached out to my closest fan to act as an accountability buddy, checking in with me every day. I had a couple of sessions with my therapist. I used the window as soon as it opened, because I knew it could close.

The second time was easier — the grip wasn't as intense — but it was still a decision. The trigger was the huffing. I was following the dangerous FinDom's recommended regimen: attending his Twitter Spaces almost every day, sometimes more than once a day, huffing for several seconds at a time, repeatedly, too many times. I could feel all the effects. The skin around my nostrils peeling. A little cough that makes it clear this corrosive substance is working its way through me. I didn't stop right away — I was mindfucked enough that I wanted to get fucked up by him, wanted to feel smaller, taken over, stripped of decision-making. Huffing helped with my erasure. With giving up all control. Letting the rush take over me.

But the concerns were there, and instead of stomaching them or telling myself I'd just take a break for a few days and get back to huffing, I decided I didn't want to go back. And I haven't. I still checked into his Twitter Spaces a couple of times — anonymously, for two or three minutes. I didn't terminate my account or block him. I know that kind of sudden severance can look like the opposite of helpless spiraling, but I think it's more of the same — a loss of control in a different direction, a knee-jerk reaction rather than a truly deliberate one. What I'm after is agency. The ability to step back without needing to burn everything down to do it.

There's nothing wrong with a mindfuck — I've indulged in plenty, and written about it at length. The ways to get there. The desperation it can produce. How to spiral harder, and how to protect yourself from spiraling. But I've also talked, in some of my recent podcast episodes, about when that headspace becomes genuinely dangerous.

If you're somewhere between those two poles right now — wanting to lose yourself and also wanting to hold on — I think that ambivalence is worth sitting with. This post is me sitting with it. And finding, for now, that I'm on the steadier side of it.