Pausing Our Dynamic and It Sucks

First time Daddy here. We’ve been together 9 months and in dynamic for 7 months. Recently, life has gotten really challenging for me and I was turning to our dynamic to help me cope…a little too much. I became really fixated on showing up for my little and sacrificing my self care, responsibilities with work and my graduate program, and I stopped practicing Shibari and spending time with my friends.

All of that caused me to become insecure and to overfunction and make myself really exhausted in my relationship, trying to “earn” feeling secure by being the best Daddy.

You can see where this is headed. My insecurity and jealousy was making my little feel unsafe and like she had to do a lot of emotional labor both in and out of dynamic to help me feel regulated. I called for us to pause our dynamic while I recalibrated to take care of myself and nurture my friendships and other connections so that I wasn’t relying on my little to take care of me.

Some things to know: one of our primary protocols was orgasm control, and it went along with her becoming my little at the start of our dynamic.

While we were negotiating the terms of our pause and the timeline, I was so sad and exhausted and ashamed of myself (and mad at myself), I had a hard time advocating for the protocols I wanted to keep in place during the pause vs the ones I wanted to put on hold.

In the vacuum of my ability to do this, my little set the terms of the pause. She took orgasm control off the table and won’t call me Daddy outside of the bedroom anymore.

She has said that my insecurity has made it hard for her to be little because she feels like she has to parent me.

Now I feel pretty powerless because I couldn’t advocate for keeping these things and I wanted my little girl to feel like she had some agency in the pause. And boy, she has it now!

I am doing the things I said I would in terms of self-care. We are 3 weeks into the pause and it has been hell. I’m more insecure than ever and I’m afraid I made a mistake in advocating for the pause. I think we really needed it and the call was a good and responsible one, but I’m doubting myself more than ever and I’m so scared.

The ask is words of support, stories of success where you had to pause or shift your dynamic in order to make things more healthy/sustainable, and any advice you have for me in supporting myself and my little through this hard time.