Pain Healer

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...

Daily journal … detailed record of food and calorie intake … diary of negative thoughts and feelings … evening review … sleep record Are these tools of domination or the tools of psychological research? Part of the discipline imposed on a submissive by her master, or the "homework" agreed between therapist and client? Well, both actually. Now isn't that interesting? As I extend the range of so-called "disorders" I treat, I accumulate an ever increasing portfolio of monitoring forms and questionnaires. There's the Beck Depression Inventory, the Work and Social Adjustment Scale, the Fear of Negative Evaluations Scale, the Worry Diary and the Automatic Thoughts Diary, to name only a few. They are all designed to be filled in by the client, so that I can more precisely target my interventions as a therapist. That's the theory, anyway… And as I read the writings of doms and subs on their web pages and blogs, I find exactly the same techniques being used...

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...