Pain Healer

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...