Pain Healer

When I look around at my local community, talk to neighbours and attend public meetings, I notice a rage simmering under the surface. I live in a rural area that's up to now escaped the worst of the inner-city difficulties of crime, violent gangs, drugs and similar depressing problems. Lately I've been feeling that these troubles have caught up with us out in the country, and ordinary people who normally remain silent are getting increasingly angry about it. The government in it's wisdom has allowed longer drinking hours in pubs and bars, which means we now have groups of troublemakers wandering our streets all through the night, disturbing the peace and smashing things. After recent incidents where members of the public have been battered to death for intervening, we are advised to stay in our houses at night and leave the streets to the thugs. The police and local council seem powerless or unwilling to do anything about it. Meanwhile every criminal seems to h...

Is D/s just something that only happens in the West? A comment to one of my recent posts reminded me of a programme that the BBC broadcast called Tribe, in which the explorer Bruce Parry went and stayed with a number of tribes for an extended period, finding out about their lives and filming them. In one particular episode he participates in an initiation ceremony for a young man of the Hamar tribe, part of which involves the whipping of his young female relatives. In one scene the young women dance round in a circle, blowing horns and shouting "we want to be whipped"! I won't go into any more detail, but you can find the clips here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/tribe/tribes/hamar/index.shtml

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...

It seems that I have not been receiving all my emails, due to some unknown technical problem with my yahoo mail account ( painhlr [at] yahoo [dot] co [dot] uk) . To get round this I have now opened up a second email address which is: painhlr [at] googlemail [dot] com I have answered everything I received at the old address, so if you have sent me a message and not had a reply it probably never arrived. Please do send your message again and I'll do my best to get back to you as quickly as possible. PainHealer

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...

I've spent the last several weeks steadily sliding into, and then recovering from a state of depression. Not the severest of depressions - I checked myself out using one of the common psychological measures, and I come out as having "borderline clinical depression", whatever that means. Nevertheless it has been debilitating enough to prevent me from doing quite a few of the things that I normally do, including writing to this blog. Before going much further I have to say that I'm very wary of the term "depression". I use it as a convenience, but it's too easy to fall into the trap of thinking that when I use the word I know what it means, which I don't. Giving something a medical name makes it sound clear-cut and tangible, but in reality depression isn't a simple entity like a broken leg or chicken pox. I've worked with hundreds of people suffering from it, but no two cases were the same - the causes of the depressions and the t...