Pain Healer

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...

Some exchanges I've had on another site have made me think more carefully about behaviour modification - what it is, how it works, and it's place in my two main themes - therapy and D/s. Behaviour modification uses the scientific theory of operant conditioning which was developed by E.L. Thorndike and B.F. Skinner. It describes how a desired behavioural response can be reinforced either by giving a pleasant, rewarding stimulus or by removing an unpleasant, aversive stimulus. An unwanted behaviour can be reduced by punishment (an aversive stimulus) or by withdrawal of a pleasant stimulus (frustration). Thus there are four ways of changing behaviour through operant conditioning. Behaviour modification has a wide range of applications - for a fuller description there is an online book at http://uwf.edu/wmikulas/Webpage/behavior/intro.htm . There is nothing particularly esoteric about behaviour modification- we all do it and experience it all the time, as we try ...

Guilt as an emotion seems to be able to cause a lot of trouble. I tend to divide it into two kinds - "neurotic" and "real". Neurotic guilt doesn't come from doing anything seriously wrong, it is more like having a bad conscience over something, or perhaps not doing something (such as going to church) which you might feel you "ought" to do but don't really want to. The bigger problem is "real" guilt, which springs from actually having done real harm (usually to a living being). This is the guilt that eats away at you, drives away sleep, makes you turn to drink. One simple test I use to distinguish the two is to ask "would you willingly be punished for this?". If the guilt is genuine, the answer is unequivocally "yes" - in other words, punishment is seen as an antidote to genuine guilt. I'm not saying that going to a Dominant and getting a thrashing will magically dissolve all guilt - it's just not that eas...

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...