Pain Healer

I have had a conviction which has been growing for a long time that dominance and submission are fundamental human traits, which everyone has to some degree or other. I used to believe that sadism and masochism were the primary traits, but I now suspect that these are more like tools or strategies - sadism being a tool for achieving dominance and masochism a strategy for handling submission. How pleasing then to discover a psychological model of personality that has dominance and submission at it's core. I'm talking about the Interpersonal Circumplex model, originally proposed by the infamous Timothy Leary of psychedelic drugs fame. Leary's model defines personality in terms of two axes - love/hate on the horizontal, and dominance/submission on the vertical. All other personality types are represented as points on a circle centred on these axes (i.e. as mixtures of these fundamental traits). I haven't yet studied this model enough to fully understand it, but one ob...

One of the areas where psychotherapy strays very close to the arena of domination is in the subject of behaviour modification. This derives from behaviourist theories of operant conditioning, in which behaviour is modified by rewarding desired behaviours and punishing undesirable behaviours. A mainstream book on Cognitive behaviour Therapy by Jaqueline Persons (1989) has some interesting quotations. First a basic introduction: "Rewards and punishments have powerful effects on behavior, and can be used in many ways in therapy. The use of rewards and punishments to accomplish behavior change has its origins in operant learning theory. Thorndike's (1935) Law of Effect states that behaviors that are followed by satisfaction are likely to be repeated, whereas those followed by discomfort are not likely to be repeated." (p82). She goes on to give some examples of punishments, applied to patients who break the therapist's rules by activitie...

The purpose of this blog is to share my thoughts about sadomasochism (S/M) and dominance and submission (D/s), in particular how they relate to psychotherapy. While I have practised psychotherapy for many years, I have also been drawn to these other fields, particularly domination. While I can be very open about being a therapist, it seems almost impossible to be open at the same time about being dominant. The reasons for keeping quiet seem good ones, and rational - disapproval from colleagues, frightening off potential clients, expulsion from professional bodies, exposure in the media - all seem realistic thoughts. I've searched the web to see how many other therapists are openly advertising their interest in S/M or D/s, and there seem to be very few. Several therapists are "kink aware" (See Kink Aware Professionals) , but being "aware" is not the same as "practising". So for now I'm keeping my identity hidden. But in doing that I don't feel e...