Pain Healer

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...

Back in April I posted a piece about Monitoring . I was intrigued by the similarities between the process of monitoring which is common in D/s relationships, and that used as part of therapy, particularly the more directive therapies such as CBT. Of course there are major differences as well as similarities, the main one being that therapists don't use overt punishment as part of the process, whereas Doms do. Since making that post I've been experimenting some more with monitoring - mainly in therapy at the moment, although I've also been discussing the D/s form with a number of people. I'm greatly encouraged by the results I and my clients have been getting, and I've learned a lot in the process. It therefore feels a good time to write down my own way of doing it so that it is available for discussion. I'm not saying that my way is the only way, and I imagine that there must be many in both the therapy and D/s worlds with greater expertise than I ha...

In psychotherapy there is the concept of an "edge". It's not the same as the edges talked about in business such as "cutting edge", "leading edge" or "competitive edge". The psychotherapy edge could be thought of as a "growing edge" - it represents the boundary between what I think of as "me" and what I don't. I haven't been able to find out who first introduced the idea so I can't give them credit, but I know that it forms a core concept in Process Oriented Psychology - as documented in Wikipedia: Experience is found to be of two kinds: that with which the client identifies, and that which is experienced as “other” or alien to the client. Experiences with which the client identifies are called “primary process”, to emphasize their place in the foreground of awareness. Experiences which the client marginalizes as “other” are called “secondary process”, to emphasize their place in the background of aw...