<Disclaimer>: This isn’t aimed at anyone, though one of my daily reads did spark it.

Every once in a while I run across something that says, in one way or another, that any failings in a submissive are the fault of her owner. If he had been more consistent, if he had punished her more, if he had trained her right, if he…

Thing is, the failing is the slave’s. And, in some cases, the master twisted himself in every direction to find the best way to train her, trained her, punished her when she fucked up, and she still fucks up. It’s called human nature and it’s no one’s fault. But it is the slave’s responsibility to strive to avoid it. And it’s her responsibility to take her lumps when she can’t avoid it. Not point her finger and say, “Well, if you would have done [this] then I wouldn’t have messed up.”

It’s a beautiful dream. A world in which the submissive has absolutely no responsibility at all. The master does everything for her. He even puts her on the pot and squeezes her stomach so she can shit and piss. And in some cases it’s the main reason girls choose slavery over freedom. But it’s completely ass backwards.

I’ve been known to blame Master a time or two. He’s not always consistent and His training approaches have been known to change with the wind. The other day when He beat me for my mouth and then beat me again because I popped off again directly following the first punishment, He admitted that He knew I’d noticed. He asked if I thought He wasn’t going to follow through with His decision to use this time of semi-privacy to get me back to where I was a few years ago. And He wasn’t surprised when I told Him I didn’t believe He would. I probably still won’t fully believe it until I fuck up again and get punished again.

I’ve long since learned that blaming Him for my behavior gets me exactly nowhere. Cause the fact of the matter is *I* don’t make it work. *I* am the one who refuses to approach things the correct way. *I* am the one who crosses lines clearly drawn. It doesn’t matter if the lines are drawn in sand or set in stone. The fact is they’re there and I’m boldly stepping over them as if I have the right.

Maybe His approaches are off. Maybe He wasn’t consistent enough or firm enough or attentive enough. But it’s not my place to make those judgments. Being beneath Him, I’m not qualified to make those judgments. And it was my actions that caused the problem to begin with.

Maybe that means He needs to tweak His punishment strategy. Maybe it means He needs to change how He deals with things. Maybe it means He needs to take a look at where the training wasn’t strong enough and reinforce it. But none of that changes the fact that it was me who messed up in the first place. And the first step is me accepting responsibility for my own actions.

This idea that a slave has no responsibility is so convoluted. Slavery is full of responsibility. And one of the biggest ones is being able to stand up and gracefully say, “Yeah, I did it. I shouldn’t have and I’m sorry.” instead of saying, “Yeah, I did it. And it’s your problem, not mine.”