Aftercare

What is aftercare?

Aftercare (Dutch: nazorg) is the care that comes after a BDSM session: a blanket, water, touch, talking about what happened, and checking how you are doing. It belongs to the session, not to what comes after it. Aftercare is there for everyone who took part, including the person who was in charge.

What aftercare looks like in practice

Aftercare is usually unspectacular. A blanket, water, lying close together, and half an hour where nobody has to do anything.

The common picture first. The scene is over, the rope comes off, and a stretch follows where the body comes back. Something to drink, warmth, touch that isn’t after anything. Later a conversation about what was good and what wasn’t. The encyclopedic description sums aftercare up as providing emotional, psychological, or physical support afterward, often with physical closeness and a debrief of the session.

There is a second picture, and it is the reason aftercare doesn’t stop the moment you put your coat on. You had a wonderful evening, you go home, and two days later you are low, unsure, or just empty. Without anything having gone wrong. Sprott and Randall open their paper in Journal of Positive Sexuality with exactly that kind of description: someone who, after a beautiful scene, feels “a little lost and disconnected” while her partner had in fact been very attentive.

Subdrop: why the dip often comes only days later

Subdrop is the dip that can come after a session for the person who had the receiving role: low mood, emptiness, doubt, sometimes physical tiredness. For the person who was in charge the same thing is called topdrop. But under that one name sit two very different things, and they are rarely pulled apart.

Sprott and Randall do pull them apart. The first is the dip right after the end, which makes sense as exhaustion after something intense. The second comes days later and looks to them more like grief: the loss of a peak experience you can’t hold on to.

And they note something you will read almost nowhere else. No study has ever tested the physiological explanation for that immediate dip. The story about endorphins draining away sits on hundreds of pages, gets copied from one to the next, and has never been measured. That doesn’t make it false. It makes it unproven, which is a different thing.

Why this distinction is practical: it explains why a blanket and a glass of water on the night itself do nothing against the blow that lands three days later. Only one thing helps against that, and it is contact.

What has actually been measured about aftercare

One thing has genuinely been measured. Sagarin and colleagues took saliva from 58 people who practice BDSM before and after a scene and published the result in Archives of Sexual Behavior. For the people who were tied up, took stimulation, and followed orders, cortisol rose during the scene. For the ones in charge it didn’t. Then the interesting part happened: for the participants who said it had gone well, that stress level dropped again and the felt sense of connection went up.

That is the best evidence there is. So no chemical repair. What it does show is that a session that ends well leaves measurably less stress behind and brings people closer together.

Why aftercare matters

Aftercare does two things at once: letting your body settle, and closing off the experience with someone there. The second one weighs the most.

• If you had the receiving role, the gain is that the stress that builds during the scene comes back down again, and what happened finds a place instead of staying a loose end.
• If you did it together as a couple, the payoff is in the connection Sagarin and colleagues measured in the participants who were satisfied with their scene.

Aftercare doesn’t fix a bad session. In that same study the group that felt it had gone badly showed no clear pattern: some felt further apart afterward, others closer. Think of it as the finishing of something that was right. It is not a bandage for something that wasn’t.

Aftercare for the dominant

The person who was in charge needs aftercare too, and that is the side that gets skipped the most. Hébert and Weaver describe in The Canadian Journal of Human Sexuality how dominants see themselves as empathetic, caring, attentive, and responsible. As the flip side of their role they name “more work and responsibility.” That responsibility doesn’t fall away by itself the moment the rope hits the floor.

Where the receiving role is mostly about settling, this is about setting the role down. Being sharp for an hour on someone’s breathing, color, tension, and voice is work. Whoever loads the dishwasher right afterward only gets the bill the next day.

In practice that means asking the dominant side how they are doing too. It sounds obvious and it almost never happens.

How people do aftercare

The most common form is also the simplest: lying together, drinking, staying warm, and having to do nothing. Then talking. Or deliberately not talking.

What happens beyond that varies a lot. Some people agree on the aftercare in advance, like the rest of the session. How long, what’s in and what’s out, who calls if it hits harder later. Others go on feel. With play among strangers or at a party it gets skipped entirely more often, and that happens to be exactly where the later dip lands hardest.

The forgotten form is the aftercare in the days that follow. A message, a phone call, or simply the agreement that you will be in touch. If that late dip looks more like grief than exhaustion, contact is the fitting answer. Another blanket won’t help then.

The difference between careful and sloppy, by the way, rarely lies in how elaborate it is. Usually it lies in whether it was talked about before it was needed.

Misconceptions about aftercare

“Aftercare is for the submissive.” The encyclopedia says it plainly: aftercare isn’t limited to the submissive role, and whoever was in charge may need as much support or more, depending on the intensity of the scene and their own experience. In practice the dominant side is offered something the least often.

“If you need aftercare, something went wrong.” No. Sagarin and colleagues’ study shows the opposite: stress in the receiving role rises during a good scene too. Letting it come back down is the last step of a process that simply went well. There is nothing to repair.

“A dip after a session means BDSM is unhealthy.” Wismeijer and Van Assen compared 902 people who practice BDSM with 434 others in The Journal of Sexual Medicine and concluded that BDSM is recreational leisure rather than a sign of psychopathology. A dip like that after a peak is something you also know from the Monday after a festival, or the week after you have finally moved house.

What I see myself

I’m Victor. Twenty-five years in BDSM, trained as a psychotherapist before that. Aftercare is the part of my work I have learned the most from, and the part people least expect to exist at all.

Subdrop shows up days later, not on the night itself. Someone goes home happy, and then on Wednesday evening the phone rings with the question of whether it is normal to feel this off. Yes. It is. That is why my aftercare doesn’t stop at the front door but runs on through the week that follows.

The second thing I have learned is harder. People rarely know beforehand what they will need afterward. Someone who says up front “I’m not much of a cuddler” sometimes lies quietly against someone for an hour after an intense session. So I would rather watch what I see happening than what was agreed in the talk beforehand. That part you won’t get from a book.

Are you in a dip like that right now and don’t know who to ask? You can send me a message, no strings or chat for free first. You don’t have to be a client, and there is no price tag on a question.

What you can do yourself

• Agree on the aftercare before the session, like everything else. How much time, what’s in and what’s out, and who gets in touch if it hits harder later.
• Set aside time for it. A session that stops because someone has to catch a train stops without a proper close.
• Ask the other person what they need too if you were in charge. Setting your role down is just as much work for you.
• Line up a message for two days out. More often than people think, the dip comes only the weekend after.
• Read a dip as information. It tells you something meaningful happened. What you do with it is talk about it, with whoever was there or with someone else who gets it.

Is something going on that you can’t talk to anyone about? Send me your question. I answer even if you never book.

More on aftercare

On this site the article why aftercare matters so much after BDSM goes into more detail on what my aftercare looks like, including after a BDSM date. For the dip itself there is a separate page on subdrop, and the page on consent covers what we agree in advance.

Beyond this site, the paper by Sprott and Randall is free to read and the best piece there is on drop, precisely because it is honest about what has not been studied.

Sources

• Hormonal changes and couple bonding in consensual sadomasochistic activity. Sagarin, Cutler, Cutler, Lawler-Sagarin & Matuszewich, Archives of Sexual Behavior 38(2), 186–200, 2009. Saliva measurements in 58 people who practice BDSM; cortisol rose in the receiving role, then dropped for those who felt the scene went well, and the felt sense of connection increased.
• Black and Blues: Sub Drop, Top Drop, Event Drop and Scene Drop. Sprott & Randall, Journal of Positive Sexuality 2, 2016. Distinguishes the dip right after a scene from the dip days later, establishes that the physiological explanation has never been tested, and proposes grief as the explanation for the late variant.
• Perks, problems, and the people who play: A qualitative exploration of dominant and submissive BDSM roles. Hébert & Weaver, The Canadian Journal of Human Sexuality 24(1), 49–62, 2015. Interviews with 9 dominants and 12 submissives; dominants describe themselves as empathetic, caring, and responsible and name “more work and responsibility” as the flip side.
• Psychological characteristics of BDSM practitioners. Wismeijer & Van Assen, The Journal of Sexual Medicine 10(8), 1943–1952, 2013. Comparison of 902 people who practice BDSM with 434 others; BDSM as recreational leisure rather than psychopathology.
• Aftercare (BDSM), Wikipedia. The description as emotional, psychological, or physical support afterward, and the explicit statement that aftercare isn’t limited to the submissive role.

Related terms

• Nazorg: the Dutch word, with its roots in healthcare and the practical arrangements that go with it.
• Consent: the agreement that aftercare closes off, and where the debrief belongs.
• Drop: the umbrella word for the dip afterward, with the four forms that fall under it.
• Subdrop: the dip itself, when it comes and why aftercare doesn’t switch it off.
• Check-in: the gauging during the session that aftercare is the counterpart to afterward.
• Warming up: the mirror at the start of the scene, of which aftercare is the close.
• Adrenaline: the hormone that shows up in nearly every explanation of aftercare. That page covers what has actually been measured of that story.
• Endorphins: the other substance that gets the credit for the high, and the only one where blood was actually drawn during BDSM.
• Subspace: the state someone comes back from, and the reason the first half hour afterward shouldn’t be empty.
• Breath control is the nearest neighbor on the risk side.
• Topdrop. The same backlash in the person who ran the scene.
• Sexual response cycle. The model that contains the resolution phase aftercare connects to.
• Attachment style. Why one person seeks closeness afterward and another wants space.