I had a panic attack during a scene last week and my Dom stopped immediately and took care of me. Now he wants to talk about whether we should continue doing BDSM. How do I feel about this?

Your Dom's instinct to stop and talk about it is a sign he is approaching this responsibly rather than defensively. The conversation he is asking for is the right one to have.

A panic attack is a physiological event: a nervous system response that feels extreme but is not in itself dangerous. The fact that one happened during a scene does not mean BDSM caused it in a simple sense; it means that something in the combination of circumstances at that moment pushed your body into that response. Identifying what that something was is the productive question.

Some panic attacks in scenes are triggered by a specific element: a particular word, a restraint that activated claustrophobia, an unexpected sensation, a loss of orientation. Others are connected to anxiety that pre-existed the scene and found an outlet in the vulnerability of the play space. Others have nothing directly to do with the kink content and would have happened in any sufficiently intense situation.

If you have experienced panic attacks in non-kink contexts, talking with a professional about anxiety management separately from the kink question may be useful. If this was your first panic attack and it happened specifically in the scene, it is worth thinking carefully about whether there was a specific trigger that could be avoided or handled differently.

The conversation with your Dom is not a verdict. It is an investigation. The goal is to understand what happened well enough to make an informed decision about how you want to proceed, and that decision can go in many directions.