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...

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...

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...

Sometimes I find myself working with clients who have been promoted into management positions without much prior training in leadership. It can be extremely challenging taking charge of a group of people, often highly qualified and skilled, and getting them to do the job that needs to be done. I have seen several highly competent people reduced to breakdown by the stresses involved. Part of the problem is finding a leadership style that works. At one extreme would be an autocratic style, the "way of the dictator", but when the people being led are professionals who are used to giving orders (e.g. teachers) or working independently (e.g. scientists) then this approach tends to be unsustainable. Often the new manager adopts a pleasing, placatory approach to their subordinates, a weak management style which can result in the manager doing most of the work and suffering the resulting burnout. We could call this the "way of the doormat". And then there is...

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...