Peninsula Unpack: The Unwritten Contract: Power, Consent

You never negotiated most of the relationships you’re in.

The terms got set by habit, by default, or by whoever needed the least. And then you lived inside them for years.

Here’s where tonight’s frameworks come from, and we’ll say it plainly so nobody’s surprised: the kink community had no inherited script for its relationships, so it had to build one from scratch. What came out of that was a working vocabulary for holding power over another person without wrecking them, negotiation, limits, capacity, aftercare, protocol, power fatigue, vetting, repair.

The rest of us never got handed any of it.

This is not a discussion about sex. Nothing about the afternoon is explicit. We’re stealing the vocabulary and pointing it somewhere else entirely like your job, family, friendships, group chat, etc.

What we’ll actually get into:

• Consent as a condition, not a signature. It’s supposed to be freely given, reversible, informed, and specific. Hold that up to your employer. Your family. The volunteer role that quietly tripled in size.
• Capacity vs. intention. You keep agreeing to things based on whether you want to instead of whether you can. What does it cost you to say “I’m at partial capacity today”?
• Power fatigue. Somebody in your life has authority over you and is exhausted by it. Can a person ask for rest from a role without being read as failing at it?
• Authority without accountability. Which roles in your communities come with built-in power, and what actually checks them? “We’re all adults here” is not a check.
• The rules nobody wrote down. Who apologizes first. Who’s allowed to be late. Who’s allowed to be angry. Name one then ask, who benefits from it staying unspoken?
• The conversation you’ve been avoiding. Dodging it gives you relief, and the relief makes it scarier next time. That’s why the thing you’ve been not-saying for six years is now enormous and has nothing to do with its actual size.

You’ll leave with: the actual first sentence of a conversation you’ve been putting off. We end by having everyone say it out loud. Not the topic, the sentence.

Who this is for: anyone who has ever been the responsible one, the one who absorbs, the one who agreed once and got held to it forever.

Before you come: RSVP, then take the two-minute anonymous survey in the link below. It shapes how the event is built. Nobody will see the results other than myself.

[LUT-HR.org Pre Event Survey](lut-hr.org/survey)