6:47am July 20, 2015

SafeWords - NOT about BDSM

lysikan:

A thing we learned from BDSM - safewords. A word or sign that says “I can’t take it any more” and the people involved know you mean it and that everything must stop immediately.
It works really well for life in general when dealing with people like me and Baby. We have limits to what we can handle, we know when we are getting close to those limits, and going past those limits is almost never worth whatever else is happening.
But simple “stop” or “too many people” is not clear enough. “Too many people” covers a range of “too many for me to be comfortable” to “I’m going to bite you and then have a meltdown”. “Stop” can mean anything from “if you keep tickling I’m going to pee” to “I’m going to kick you in a very sensitive place and then have a meltdown”.
So we have in our family a very short list of safewords. They aren’t just words, they are also signs, since, for me, by the time I’ve had enough I can’t speak even a single word. It’s a list because we want to cover a little of the “why” we need the stop.
For each family it would be a different list, of course, and the need for more than one word may not apply - some families can do with just a word for “everything must stop now”. Others might need our system of “everything must stop now for reason X”.
The point of having the safeword/s is to give family members that have difficulty communicating a way of stopping things that are leading to a meltdown/shutdown BEFORE the event, without requiring them to write a treatise on why things should be stopped. A pause and a chance to evaluate what is going on and the reactions.
It even helps with family arguments, although in the cases where it’s most needed it is most ignored since people that yell and scream a lot tend to ignore rules as well.
Anyways, this is just something that we have found works for us to delineate “stop because I’m uncomfy” from “stop because I need you to stop or consequences”. I tried to avoid giving specific cases simply because your needs and my needs are different - figure out when and where it can apply for you.
This has been a random babble provided by the association of randomly babbling faeries.

I am so here for safe words & similar in totally nonsexual, non-kink situations.
My partner and I utilise “yellow” and “red,” as in the stoplight system, to signal when the current topic of conversation is NOPE and the other needs to back off.
It’s super useful to have something like this, too, for those of us autistics & other neurodivergent people because by the time you’re heading toward a meltdown or panic attack or whatever, words in general stop being a thing you can do.

Be sure to talk to the person about the exact meaning of a safeword before you use it.

My ex came up with this idea (based on a thing from Nethack, not on BSDM, long story) and I only tried to use it once. I very specifically used the word to signal that I could not talk about a particular topic right then. (As in, “_______ on that topic”, not just “_________”.) He then refused to talk to me at all, and when I pressed him, told me that I was violating the spirit of the entire thing because unless the word ended the entire conversation, then it was completely and totally useless, so now that I had used it we could not talk about anything. Which just became one more way that he managed to win arguments, which ended up really triggering in the long run, because it was a fucked up relationship to begin with and this did not help.

So if you use words like these, be sure everyone knows what to do, exactly what is expected of them and what is expected of them not to do, because otherwise you could end up in a heated situation having your own safeword being turned against you to win an argument, which is all kinds of fucked up.

Notes: