Nazorg

What is nazorg?

Nazorg is the Dutch word for aftercare: the phase after a BDSM session in which the body comes back and the experience finds a place. Warmth, a drink, checking the skin, and agreeing what happens in the days after. Nazorg is part of the session and gets arranged beforehand. The word comes from healthcare, where it means roughly the same thing: the care that follows the treatment.

How nazorg goes after a session

Nazorg starts earlier than people expect: at the last act of the session, not after it.

A common run of things. The rope or the cuffs come off, more slowly than putting them on did, and during that untying the first check is already running: color, feeling in hands and feet, spots where something sat too tight. Then a blanket, something to drink, and time in which no one has to do anything. Somewhere in that half hour speech comes back. Only then the conversation, because earlier it makes no sense: someone just out of an intense scene doesn’t yet know what she made of it.

And then the part that gets skipped most. Before you part, you agree who makes contact, when, and where someone can turn if something stands out. A bruise that grows, a wrist that stays numb, a day that is about nothing yet feels heavy all over. Without that agreement, someone is left with it on her own.

Where the word nazorg comes from

From care, and the second part of the word is older than you would think. According to the Etymologisch Woordenboek van het Nederlands, zorg goes back to Old Dutch sorga, “care, worry,” recorded in a tenth-century psalm translation. The same word sits in Old English sorg, and the English sorrow grew out of that. Caring for someone and grieving come from one Germanic stem.

What nazorg names exactly is set out most sharply in healthcare. In its report Nacontrole in de oncologie the Gezondheidsraad describes nazorg as what meets the need for information about, detection of, guidance with and treatment of the effects of the illness and the therapy applied: physical, mental and social. That same committee notes that the term wrongly suggests there is a clear moment where treatment stops and nazorg begins.

That description is written about cancer care, not about BDSM. As a skeleton it works: tell what may come, watch for it, guide, and act if needed. In that order.

Why nazorg is worth it

Nazorg makes the difference between an experience that is finished and one that keeps hanging around.

• For whoever had the receiving role, the gain is practical and immediate: you do not cool down in a car, you notice in time if something is wrong with your hand, and you do not have to work out on your own in the days after whether what you feel is normal.
• For whoever was in charge, nazorg gives the moment to set the role down. An hour of watching breathing, color and voice is work, and that work does not stop by itself the moment the scene stops.
• For a couple, nazorg is where the agreements made beforehand get checked off.

Nazorg is not a repair. A session where something went wrong, where a limit was crossed or where someone did not feel heard, is not set right by it. Nazorg is the close of something that was sound. Something that was not sound calls for a different conversation, and usually not the same evening.

How people do nazorg

Most people do it by feel, and that goes fine until it goes wrong once.

Roughly there are three forms. The first is silent: lying together, drinking, staying warm, saying nothing. The second is talking, with a debrief where both say what landed and what did not work. The third runs on into the days after, through a message or a call, and that one is forgotten most often while it is exactly then that the blow can come.

What separates careful from sloppy is not the length and not the blanket. It is whether something was agreed before it was needed.

Misunderstandings about nazorg

“Nazorg is cuddling.” Touch is one form, and for some people exactly the wrong one. Nazorg without touch exists: a blanket, a glass of water, someone who stays in the same room and wants nothing more.

“Nazorg starts when the session is over.” That is the image the word calls up, and the Gezondheidsraad notes in its own field that it rarely works that way. With BDSM it does not either: the untying, the checking and the catching flow into one another, and the agreements about it are made beforehand.

What I see of it myself

I’m Victor, a gigolo, active in BDSM for over twenty-five years and originally trained as a psychotherapist. Nazorg is almost never asked for, and that is the first thing I notice about it. What people do ask is whether they can stay a little longer.

The second is a practical thing almost no one brings up. Women ask me more often what to say to their doctor than what to say to their partner. That is no strange worry: Sprott and colleagues found among 1,398 kink-active people that 58.3 percent tell their GP or specialist nothing about their kinky life, and that 19.0 percent postponed or avoided care out of fear of the judgment. So someone who goes home without a plan and three days later still has a numb thumb does not go on her own. That is why my nazorg includes a line about when you do go, and what you say then.

What you can do yourself

• Agree who makes contact and when, and set it down before you part, not once you are already in the car.
• Check the skin and the feeling before you dress. Color, temperature and strength in hands and feet; what you do not see then, you will not see at home either.
• See a doctor for numbness or loss of strength that stays, and be honest about how it happened. A doctor can only judge what he is told.
• Eat something. A session that lasted hours costs more than people think, and half of what looks like wobbliness afterward is hunger.

More on nazorg

On this site the research into what happens after a session is on the page about aftercare, with the cortisol measurements and the distinction between the dip right after and the dip days later. The practical side, the way it looks with me, is in the article on why aftercare is crucial after BDSM. What gets agreed beforehand is on the page about consent.

Beyond this site, the Gezondheidsraad’s report is free to read; the chapter on the aftercare plan shows how to write such agreements down instead of leaving them to memory.

Where this fits on my site

Want to experience once what it is like when the part afterward is arranged as well as the session itself? The page about the BDSM date sets out how an evening with me is built and how much time is left at the end.

Sources

• Nacontrole in de oncologie. Doelen onderscheiden, inhoud onderbouwen. Gezondheidsraad, publication 2007/10, The Hague, 2007. Supplies the description of nazorg as what primarily meets the need for information about, detection of, guidance with and treatment of the often far-reaching effects of the illness and the therapy applied, which can be physical, mental and social and can appear at once but also only after many years; the note that the term nazorg can wrongly suggest there is always a clear moment where treatment ends and nazorg begins; and the case for gathering written information for every patient after treatment into an aftercare plan that lists at least the possible effects, the signals that are reason to consult a doctor, and the agreements about who does what.
• Rates of Injury and Healthcare Utilization for Kink-Identified Patients. Richard A. Sprott, Anna Randall, Kevin Smith & Lauren Woo, The Journal of Sexual Medicine 18(10), 1721–1734, 2021. Survey of 1,398 kink-involved people. Supplies that 58.3 percent did not discuss their kinky life with their physical care provider and 49.6 percent not with their mental health provider, that 13.5 percent had ever been injured during kinky activities, and that 19.0 percent postponed or avoided care because of expected or experienced stigmatization.
• zorg. Etymologiebank, with the entry from M. Philippa, F. Debrabandere, A. Quak, T. Schoonheim & N. van der Sijs, Etymologisch Woordenboek van het Nederlands, Amsterdam 2003–2009. Supplies the Old Dutch form sorga “care, worry” from a tenth-century psalm translation, and the related forms in Old Saxon, Old High German, Old Frisian and Old English (sorg, sorh, from which the English sorrow).

Related terms

Nazorg is the Dutch word for aftercare, the page with the research on the phase after a session.

• Drop. The collective name for the backlash afterward, including the variant that hits the leading party.
• Check-in. The same asking, only halfway through instead of afterward.
• Consent. The agreement that nazorg is the close of.
• Bruising. One of the things you check during nazorg, and what you can and cannot read from it.
• Nawa-ato. The marks left by rope, and the difference between an imprint and a nerve.
• Subdrop. The dip that nazorg is meant for, and why it usually comes only on day two.
• Skin hunger. Why that blanket and that arm around you do more than a gesture, with the research alongside it.