Pain Healer

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...

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...

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...