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...

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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...

From time to time I find it helpful to illustrate a point with a vignette or case study from one of my clients. At the same time I owe my clients total confidentiality, and to tell their stories would be breaking that trust. I get round this by inventing "typical" clients, who are as close to real life as I can make them. I do this by combining little bits from many clients, rather like a collage. Therefore I never write about an actual individual, but I hope the composite figures I create are accurate enough to be realistic. If you think you might be a client of mine, and you think you recognise yourself, then this is pure coincidence - as authors say, all my characters are fictitious.

I am curious about what the experience of therapy/counselling is like for clients who have a BDSM orientation, or wish to talk about problems related to sadism, masochism, domination or submissiveness. Is it a positive experience, with their orientation and problems accepted and understood, or are they pathologized? Is BDSM treated as a symptom to be cured, or a lifestyle to be welcomed? As a therapist myself I would hope that the experience is a positive one, but my own experiences and other pieces of evidence make me less than optimistic. My first serious experience of therapy did not inspire confidence. It was a "training analysis" - therapy I was doing as part of training to be a therapist. I felt it was important to be as honest as possible, so talked about my interest in sadomasochism to my middle-aged female therapist. She was clearly uncomfortable about it, and never referred to it again. When I left my therapy with her 18 months later she seemed rath...

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 ...

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...