These are some thoughts in ways we can figure out who might be an abusive Dom or difficult sub. We talk a lot about red flags but looking at personality patterns might get at underlying factors. I am trying to write this to apply to both doms and subs but I get the sense that abusive people posing as doms tend to cause more problems in the BDSM community.

A lot if the writings come from the POV that these personality profiles are the result of childhood upbringing which I don’t entirely buy into — they might be genetic!

An article I stumbled across might provide insight.

We often say that empathy is necessary to be a good Dominant.

Lack of empathy is often related to narcissism. There are two types of narcissism: grandiose narcissism — this article finds a correlation between grandiose narcissism and the entitlement/grandiosity schema, and vulnerable narcissism with the emotional deprivation schema. This is a list of the schemas

It might be that “bad” dominants tend to have grandiose narcissism and some submissives have vulnerable narcissism?

These are some thoughts I’m formulating. What do y’all think?