Pain Healer

In corresponding with some of the submissives who send me e-mails, I have noticed a disturbing pattern - the number of women who are getting emotionally wounded by prematurely attempting to become “slaves”. Now it’s important to get the terminology right, and I don’t know what other Doms and subs mean precisely when they talk about Master / slave relationships. For me becoming a “slave” represents an extremely intense and challenging form of D/s relationship, one in which the slave surrenders a significant proportion of her freedom, independence, rights and control to the Master. To me, this is something which should only be attempted by someone who has been thoroughly trained as a submissive by a Dom who knows what he is doing, and who has spent a considerable period of time exploring her submissiveness. Some of those who I hear from haven’t even reached the point where I would regard them as submissive, let alone ready to become slaves. Some are surprised to learn that train

This post is on a subject that I have been trying to write about for many months, but until now I’ve not been able to get it clear enough in my mind to set down. It is about what happens when the relationship between a daughter and her father gets distorted in childhood, and I have seen the effects in my therapy work in a large number of my female clients. I suspect that it afflicts many submissive women, and it may indeed be the primary driving force behind many D/s relationships between a male Dom and female sub. What makes the father-daughter wound so hard to describe is that the consequences in the life of the daughter can be as varied as they are far reaching. Relationships, career, social life, home life, all can be affected. There may be uncontrolled rage or helpless timidity, fears and panics or iron-clad defences, frigidity or sexual addiction. There may be a relentless searching for the right relationship, or a life of lonely isolation. Almost any psychological pola

When I read the blogs and websites of D/s practitioners I see a huge amount of experimentation going on into diverse forms of relationship. I regard the people who try out these relationships as true pioneers, boldly going where the less adventurous don’t dare. In my opinion these pioneers are doing mankind a service, if current divorce rates are anything to go by. I’m not indiscriminately glorifying D/s relationships, because I’m sure that they have their share of problems. In any situation where there is experimentation there has to be failure. But if we are to do anything about reducing the human misery that unhappy and failed marriages cause, it must be worth reviewing what these pioneers are doing to see what might be helpful to others. The following is an incomplete list of some of the dysfunctional relationships I see on a daily basis: Relationships that are unduly restrictive, forcing one partner or both to suppress a significant part of their p

Georgie Porgie pudding and pie, Kissed the girls and made them cry, When the boys came out to play, Georgie Porgie ran away This bit of doggerel came into my head while doing a job around the house, one of those nursery rhymes from my childhood. I’d rather it hadn’t come into my head, but it wouldn’t go away so I started to analyse it, and realised with a shock just how much it had affected me. It should have been just a piece of nonsense verse, but in my childhood world, full of toxic attitudes to sexuality, it became a little fragmentation grenade of poisonous messages: Girls don’t like being kissed, it makes them cry. It’s bad to make girls cry, and Georgie was really awful for doing it. Georgie wasn’t like the other good boys who wouldn’t dream of making girls cry. If he was “normal” he would be running round with the other boys playing football, not messing with girls. If the other boys caught him he’d be “for it”. Georgie was too muc

My previous post on personalities relates to any aspect of the personality, but now I would like to connect it specifically with dominance and submission. As I have previously theorised, dominance and submissiveness are built into the human genetic makeup, and these traits are amplified or attenuated by our environment and experiences. They can be present in varying degrees in all the personality layers. Let me take two hypothetical examples - "Jack" and "Jill" Jack Jack’s father started drinking when Jack was 8 years old, and he would often be woken in the night by sounds of fighting and his mother being beaten up. As Jack grew older he wanted to challenge his father and protect his mother, but she begged him not to intervene as it would only make things worse. Jack promised himself never to treat women in this way. When he was 17 there was a major confrontation with his father in which Jack's rage erupted and he knocked his father to the ground

As I reflect on my therapy work I've realized that it can be divided broadly into two - behaviour change and personality change. I have alluded to the behaviour change aspect several times already in this blog - in the therapy world it is the domain of CBT, and in the D/s world it figures prominently in the training that goes on in the relationship between a Dom and a sub. Behaviour change is very effective for dealing with many of the common psychological problems that afflict us, such as fears & phobias, OCD, social phobia, impulse control problems. It is about changing what we do, and very often it is enough to change the things we do to bring about big change in our lives and how successful we are. Some proponents of behavioural therapy proclaim that it is all that is needed, but this is not true. Personality change is about changing who we are as opposed to what we do . Personality is partly from our genetics and partly from life experiences, and of cours

Sometimes I find myself working with clients who have been promoted into management positions without much prior training in leadership. It can be extremely challenging taking charge of a group of people, often highly qualified and skilled, and getting them to do the job that needs to be done. I have seen several highly competent people reduced to breakdown by the stresses involved. Part of the problem is finding a leadership style that works. At one extreme would be an autocratic style, the "way of the dictator", but when the people being led are professionals who are used to giving orders (e.g. teachers) or working independently (e.g. scientists) then this approach tends to be unsustainable. Often the new manager adopts a pleasing, placatory approach to their subordinates, a weak management style which can result in the manager doing most of the work and suffering the resulting burnout. We could call this the "way of the doormat". And then there is

When I look around at my local community, talk to neighbours and attend public meetings, I notice a rage simmering under the surface. I live in a rural area that's up to now escaped the worst of the inner-city difficulties of crime, violent gangs, drugs and similar depressing problems. Lately I've been feeling that these troubles have caught up with us out in the country, and ordinary people who normally remain silent are getting increasingly angry about it. The government in it's wisdom has allowed longer drinking hours in pubs and bars, which means we now have groups of troublemakers wandering our streets all through the night, disturbing the peace and smashing things. After recent incidents where members of the public have been battered to death for intervening, we are advised to stay in our houses at night and leave the streets to the thugs. The police and local council seem powerless or unwilling to do anything about it. Meanwhile every criminal seems to h

Is D/s just something that only happens in the West? A comment to one of my recent posts reminded me of a programme that the BBC broadcast called Tribe, in which the explorer Bruce Parry went and stayed with a number of tribes for an extended period, finding out about their lives and filming them. In one particular episode he participates in an initiation ceremony for a young man of the Hamar tribe, part of which involves the whipping of his young female relatives. In one scene the young women dance round in a circle, blowing horns and shouting "we want to be whipped"! I won't go into any more detail, but you can find the clips here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/tribe/tribes/hamar/index.shtml

If you have been reading my earlier posts you will have probably realised by now that I am working towards a scientific understanding of dominance and submission. I now feel ready to put forward the outline of a theory, although many of the details have still to be worked out. Firstly, I want to acknowledge that I would not have reached this point without the encouragement of readers of this blog who have posted comments and sent me emails. I am also aware that despite the fact that it has taken me a lot of hard work to get to this stage, the amount of work needed to take the theory on to the next level will be infinitely greater. For both these reasons I would like to open out this work to others in the online community who want to get involved. At the moment I can think of several areas where I could use some help, and I am sure others will emerge: 1. A theory needs to be able to answer questions and to make predictions which can be tested. Please let me know wh

It seems that I have not been receiving all my emails, due to some unknown technical problem with my yahoo mail account ( painhlr [at] yahoo [dot] co [dot] uk) . To get round this I have now opened up a second email address which is: painhlr [at] googlemail [dot] com I have answered everything I received at the old address, so if you have sent me a message and not had a reply it probably never arrived. Please do send your message again and I'll do my best to get back to you as quickly as possible. PainHealer

The more I carry on with my research into D/s the more I realise how much evolution has played a part. It appears that most animals that live in flocks, herds or groups of one sort or another are organised into hierarchies based on submission and dominance. It has been this way for millions of years. If you were a solitary, territorial creature like a robin you wouldn't have to worry about these things, you would just chase off any potential competitors and sing nice songs to attract potential mates. You would need aggression for the former, sexual behaviour for the latter, and your hormones would tell you which to use. If you were a wolf living in a pack, or a chicken in a flock then life gets more complex. You would still have your aggressive and sexual instincts, but if they were left unchecked the social group would quickly disintegrate in an orgy of lust and bloodshed. To avoid chaos these basic survival instincts have to be partially inhibited, and overri

I seem to be driven to try to explain this curious human behaviour of dominance and submission. Initially I was doing it to make sense of something that seemed incompatible with the rest of my personality, but as I've dug deeper it has become more and more fascinating as a subject of study in its own right. I'm curious as to what might turn up next, and I get the feeling that there are important insights to be discovered here. It can be a frustrating search, and sometimes I feel I'd be better off just enjoying the fun rather than trying to analyse it. Then flashes of insight come where disconnected parts of the jigsaw suddenly slot together, setting me off in some new direction with fresh enthusiasm. I find I can easily get lost in the minutiae of the scientific literature, as I try to uncover the research that will back up the ideas with solid fact. As a consequence I have several promising threads which have been partially written up for this blog but are too incomplete t

I've spent the last several weeks steadily sliding into, and then recovering from a state of depression. Not the severest of depressions - I checked myself out using one of the common psychological measures, and I come out as having "borderline clinical depression", whatever that means. Nevertheless it has been debilitating enough to prevent me from doing quite a few of the things that I normally do, including writing to this blog. Before going much further I have to say that I'm very wary of the term "depression". I use it as a convenience, but it's too easy to fall into the trap of thinking that when I use the word I know what it means, which I don't. Giving something a medical name makes it sound clear-cut and tangible, but in reality depression isn't a simple entity like a broken leg or chicken pox. I've worked with hundreds of people suffering from it, but no two cases were the same - the causes of the depressions and the t

Most of the time my writing for this blog is fairly serious, but occasionally my peculiar sense of humour just demands expression. Right now we're in the midst of a mini heat-wave, and it's too hot for writing seriously… Here in the UK, Chancellor Gordon Brown is about to take over the Prime Minister's job from Tony Blair without a single vote being cast. Gordon's main claim to fame are his "stealth taxes" - in case you don't know about stealth tax the principle is the same as the stealth bomber: it hits you before you have a chance to see it coming. With £3BN a year disappearing from government revenues in "carousel fraud" Gordon will have a lot of ground to make up, so stealth tax watchers are expecting him to start taxing hitherto unthinkable areas of private life. It is rumoured that officers at HM Revenue and Customs are considering whether spanking could be treated as a "taxable supply" for the purposes of Value A