Pain Healer

To recap on some recent posts I've made, I'm talking about our planet, which I'm calling Gaia, as an intelligent, living being that provides us with everything we need to exist. If you can accept this, then it seems obvious to me that submissiveness is the only appropriate attitude to adopt towards her. Certainly the arrogance with which mankind has treated her can no longer be sustained; it will lead to our extinction. Therefore I conclude that submissiveness is an excellent grounding for the way we should behave towards our planet. Once we start to make this shift, it seems that the Gaia responds, and we start to gain access to our higher consciousness. However, turning a desire for submission into it's practical reality is not a simple task - for most of us our conditioning pulls us in the opposite direction. It therefore takes training to reorient the personality away from ego-based selfishness towards humility and service. It's hard to keep up the will to ...

This is a phrase that I hear more often than I would expect, given that the people I mix with don't tend to spend a lot of time discussing the gospels. It tends to make me prick my ears up, as if I'm being alerted to something important. I'll let others debate whether the phrase has the same meaning as "blessed are the submissives", but that's how I'm choosing to interpret it. People with submissive qualities often get a raw deal in our society. In a culture that values independence and being extrovert, submissiveness is often mistaken for weakness and subservience. I see it differently - submission requires strength, self-discipline and determination. Submissive individuals are excellent followers and provide loyal support to leaders they believe in. They value good relationships, honesty and plain speaking. They work hard and take pride in producing good work. They do not look for power, celebrity status or applause - they are happy in supporting role...

In corresponding with some of the submissives who send me e-mails, I have noticed a disturbing pattern - the number of women who are getting emotionally wounded by prematurely attempting to become “slaves”. Now it’s important to get the terminology right, and I don’t know what other Doms and subs mean precisely when they talk about Master / slave relationships. For me becoming a “slave” represents an extremely intense and challenging form of D/s relationship, one in which the slave surrenders a significant proportion of her freedom, independence, rights and control to the Master. To me, this is something which should only be attempted by someone who has been thoroughly trained as a submissive by a Dom who knows what he is doing, and who has spent a considerable period of time exploring her submissiveness. Some of those who I hear from haven’t even reached the point where I would regard them as submissive, let alone ready to become slaves. Some are surprised to learn that train...

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...

If you have been reading my earlier posts you will have probably realised by now that I am working towards a scientific understanding of dominance and submission. I now feel ready to put forward the outline of a theory, although many of the details have still to be worked out. Firstly, I want to acknowledge that I would not have reached this point without the encouragement of readers of this blog who have posted comments and sent me emails. I am also aware that despite the fact that it has taken me a lot of hard work to get to this stage, the amount of work needed to take the theory on to the next level will be infinitely greater. For both these reasons I would like to open out this work to others in the online community who want to get involved. At the moment I can think of several areas where I could use some help, and I am sure others will emerge: 1. A theory needs to be able to answer questions and to make predictions which can be tested. Please let me know wh...

The more I carry on with my research into D/s the more I realise how much evolution has played a part. It appears that most animals that live in flocks, herds or groups of one sort or another are organised into hierarchies based on submission and dominance. It has been this way for millions of years. If you were a solitary, territorial creature like a robin you wouldn't have to worry about these things, you would just chase off any potential competitors and sing nice songs to attract potential mates. You would need aggression for the former, sexual behaviour for the latter, and your hormones would tell you which to use. If you were a wolf living in a pack, or a chicken in a flock then life gets more complex. You would still have your aggressive and sexual instincts, but if they were left unchecked the social group would quickly disintegrate in an orgy of lust and bloodshed. To avoid chaos these basic survival instincts have to be partially inhibited, and overri...

I seem to be driven to try to explain this curious human behaviour of dominance and submission. Initially I was doing it to make sense of something that seemed incompatible with the rest of my personality, but as I've dug deeper it has become more and more fascinating as a subject of study in its own right. I'm curious as to what might turn up next, and I get the feeling that there are important insights to be discovered here. It can be a frustrating search, and sometimes I feel I'd be better off just enjoying the fun rather than trying to analyse it. Then flashes of insight come where disconnected parts of the jigsaw suddenly slot together, setting me off in some new direction with fresh enthusiasm. I find I can easily get lost in the minutiae of the scientific literature, as I try to uncover the research that will back up the ideas with solid fact. As a consequence I have several promising threads which have been partially written up for this blog but are too incomplete t...

One of the most harrowing radio programmes I have listened to in a long time was broadcast on the BBC recently . Its includes an interview of a Congolese woman who was captured and abused by a group called the Interhamwe. I won't go into all the details of the atrocities that occurred, because you can listen to the broadcast yourself if you go here . However if you do listen to it, be prepared to be profoundly unsettled. The broadcast left me with a feeling of profound despair at the depths of cruelty the human species is capable of sinking to. I was left questioning whether the appearance of civilisation we normally display is merely a paper-thin veneer, covering up the hidden savagery beneath. It is not as if this is an isolated incident, you don't have to listen to the news for too long to hear of many more examples. After the initial feeling of horror abated I started thinking about this blog, and where I am going with it. Is it merely an intellectual exercise i...

It feels as though the dominant part of my personality is just coming out of a period of hibernation which has lasted for over ten years. Actually, when I think about it some more I would say that a better description would be a process of metamorphosis. It's like emerging from a chrysalis to discover that I've changed, and so has the environment I'm emerging into. Over a decade ago I decided to withdraw from my involvement in BDSM, the catalyst for this being the birth of my son. At that time Operation Spanner was in full swing arresting and later imprisoning gay men for sadomasochistic activities. There was a witch-hunt in progress hunting for paedophiles, but since no-once seemed too sure how to identify a paedophile anyone with a penis was a suspect. Social workers were smashing up families in the name of child protection and seeing abuse round every corner. (I've since had several social workers as clients, and they are lovely people, but in those day...

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 ...

I detect a pattern in psychotherapy that sees abuse as the be-all and end-all of diagnosis. Find a good bit of abuse in your client's past and you've "solved the case" and found the cause of all their problems. Help them work through the memories using your favourite technique and all will be well - healing is assured. Except when it isn't. I'm not denying that for many people, healing the wounds of past traumas can be beneficial. I have helped many a troubled client in this way. But it doesn't always work. Sometimes, even after draining the barrel of traumatic memories to the dregs, the longed for resolution doesn't occur, and the unwanted problems remain. And I have a theory about that. For abuse to take place in the family, there often has to be neglect too. Someone isn't noticing the child's distress, anger or behavioural changes. And neglect is so much harder to pin down. There are no clear cut memories of trauma. It is more like ...

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...

The purpose of this blog is to share my thoughts about sadomasochism (S/M) and dominance and submission (D/s), in particular how they relate to psychotherapy. While I have practised psychotherapy for many years, I have also been drawn to these other fields, particularly domination. While I can be very open about being a therapist, it seems almost impossible to be open at the same time about being dominant. The reasons for keeping quiet seem good ones, and rational - disapproval from colleagues, frightening off potential clients, expulsion from professional bodies, exposure in the media - all seem realistic thoughts. I've searched the web to see how many other therapists are openly advertising their interest in S/M or D/s, and there seem to be very few. Several therapists are "kink aware" (See Kink Aware Professionals) , but being "aware" is not the same as "practising". So for now I'm keeping my identity hidden. But in doing that I don't feel e...