Thoughtsrep­re­sent insights, philoso­phies, ideas, opin­ions, self-talk and judg­ments that con­sti­tute one’s fun­da­men­tal val­ues, atti­tudes, and

beliefs. Thoughts are more than the nor­mal think­ing we do all the time in our con­scious mind. Thoughts often spring from learned atti­tudes that are deep within our sub­con­scious mind. Life expe­ri­ences have forged our beliefs and these beliefs must be iden­ti­fied to effect per­ma­nent change. Thoughts in the con­text of this essay mean both con­scious and sub­con­scious ideas and beliefs that effect the slave’s emo­tions and behavior.

“We are what we think. All that we are arises with our thoughts. With our thoughts, we make the world.”

–The Bud­dha

 Life is ruled by Thoughts there­fore key to slave training

Chang­ing core beliefs (think­ing) to mold a slave to serve her Master

The goal of train­ing  is to change core beliefs to com­pletely accept slav­ery. To estab­lish slav­ery as a basic part of her being and there­fore make dis­obe­di­ence an unac­cept­able option for her. After the slave accepts slav­ery, the focus changes to devel­op­ing her into a slave that serves, obeys and pleases her Mas­ter. This may mean chang­ing some of her attitudes.

No pri­vacy of thoughts (transparency)

No pri­vacy of thoughts can be tol­er­ated by a slave in train­ing. A slave should be trained to be open (often called trans­parency) to dis­cussing her beliefs and pri­vate logic and feel­ings. Explain­ing what is expected of her and pos­i­tive rein­force­ment are the best meth­ods of get­ting a slave to become open. It is a Master’s duty to insure that his slave under­stands that in order for her to be prop­erly trained, she is help­less in keep­ing her pri­vate thoughts and feel­ings to her­self. Ques­tions that are asked by her Mas­ter must be answered from her deep­est feel­ings and thoughts. Only by doing so is change possible.

Faulty Cog­ni­tions and why it happens

Com­mu­ni­ca­tion with her Mas­ter is his way of dis­cov­er­ing faulty think­ing about BDSM, slav­ery and an hun­dred other issues dur­ing her devel­op­ment. Hold­ing in feel­ing has no place in slav­ery. As a slave she grants her Mas­ter accesses to her inner thoughts. Prac­tice is often needed to develop this skill.

Faulty think­ing has to be rec­og­nized and chal­lenged by the Mas­ter. Often a slave is unaware of these faulty cog­ni­tions until uncov­ered, dis­cussed and challenged.

Basic Mis­takes 

Uti­liz­ing the “basic mis­takes” of Adler, the “irra­tional beliefs” of Ellis (1973), and the “cog­ni­tive defi­cien­cies” of Beck (1970), Kern et al. (1978) com­piled the fol­low­ing list of faulty cognitions:

 1. Casual Inter­fer­ence. Mak­ing an unjus­ti­fi­able jump in logic by draw­ing a con­clu­sion from evi­dence that is either insuf­fi­cient or actu­ally con­trary to the con­clu­sion reached.

 2. Blowup. Tend­ing to exag­ger­ate or mag­nify the mean­ing of an event out of pro­por­tion to the actual sit­u­a­tion; gen­er­at­ing a gen­eral rule from a sin­gle inci­dent: (“I made a mess of my rela­tion­ship with Ellen. I guess you could con­sider me a real social bust.”)

 3. All-or-Nothing Think­ing. Think­ing in extremes; allow­ing only two pos­si­bil­i­ties — good or bad, right or wrong, always or never. (“Peo­ple never have a good time with me.”)

 4. Respon­si­bil­ity Pro­jec­tion. Fail­ing to assume respon­si­bil­ity for one’s emo­tional state (“This course is caus­ing me to have a ner­vous break­down!”) or for one’s per­sonal worth. (“If my par­ents had only made me study in high school, I’d have been able to qual­ify for college.”)

 5. Per­fec­tion­ist Think­ing. Mak­ing ide­al­is­tic demands on one­self. (“I made a D on that test; I’m so stupid!”)

 6. Value-Tainted Think­ing. Couch­ing a state­ment in such terms as “good,” “bad,” ” worth­less,” “should,” “ought,” or “must.” (“I must get into med­ical school or I won’t be able to look my father in the eyes.”)

 7. Self-Depreciation. Focus­ing on puni­tive self-statements rather than task ori­en­ta­tion. (“I hate myself for not being able to break this habit.”)

 Cor­rect­ing Faulty Think­ing as part of slave training

Once a slave dis­cov­ers the illog­i­cal aspect of her think­ing, she gen­er­ally is moti­vated to make changes in her per­sonal pri­vate logic that will ren­der it more func­tional. Accord­ing to Kern et al. (1978, pp. 21–22), the cor­rec­tion of self-defeating, pri­vate logic includes the fol­low­ing steps:

 1. Ask­ing the slave to describe only the facts of the actual sit­u­a­tion that gave rise to an expres­sion of the faulty think­ing (“I made a 78 on my math test ”) and to omit the self-defeating state­ment (“…and I know I’m just going to flunk out of col­lege”). In this way, the real­ity of the sit­u­a­tion is sep­a­rated from the individual’s per­sonal conclusion.

 2. Ask­ing the slave to gen­er­ate alter­na­tive expla­na­tions for the sit­u­a­tion that trig­gered the illog­i­cal con­clu­sion. The stu­dent mak­ing the 78 on the com­po­si­tion exam could have con­cluded, “I made a high C when I’m used to mak­ing A’s, and this dis­crep­ancy is dis­ap­point­ing. I guess I’ll just have to study much harder if I am to meet my expectations.”

The slave is told to avoid being the direct object or the sub­ject of a pas­sive verb. In the case of respon­si­bil­ity pro­jec­tion, the per­sonal state­ment is to be recon­structed in such a way that the slave becomes the sub­ject of an active verb. For exam­ple, the state­ment “My room­mate makes me so mad when she doesn’t hang up her clothes ” could become: “When my room­mate doesn’t hang up her clothes, I become very angry because I’m telling myself that she should meet my expec­ta­tions and something’s wrong with me since I can’t get her to do bet­ter. Clearly, my room­mate is not doing it to me — “I’m doing it to myself!”

3. Ask­ing the slave to design a pos­i­tive course of action based on the more rea­son­able of her alter­ative expla­na­tions. This tech­nique is used to assist slaves to rec­og­nize the poor fit between many of her fic­tions and real­ity and to prac­tice a more respon­si­ble kind of self-talk.

Incor­rect behav­ior on the part of your slave is always asso­ci­ated with incor­rect thoughts or a lack of atten­tion to cor­rect behav­ior. At times, the best long term cor­rec­tion of unde­sir­able behav­ior is to explore the thought process that took place while the incor­rect action was occurring.

Some of the best ques­tions to ask are:

1) “what are you think­ing, right now?”

2) “Where is the evi­dence that what you think about your­self is true?”

3) “Is your being upset help­ing you?”

Meth­ods of chang­ing incor­rect behav­ior using logic:

a) REBT**

“Ratio­nal Emo­tive Behav­ior Ther­apy (REBT), a Ther­a­pist Guide”, Impact Pub­lish­ers (1998) Dr. Albert Ellis and Catharine MacLaren, is based on the con­cept that emo­tions and behav­iors result from cog­ni­tive processes and that it is pos­si­ble for human beings to mod­ify such processes to achieve dif­fer­ent ways of feel­ing and behav­ing. The most basic premise of REBT is that almost all human emo­tions and behav­iours are the result of what peo­ple think, assume or believe (about them­selves, other peo­ple, and the world in gen­eral).  more infor­ma­tion on REBT

b) Hyp­no­sis

Often beliefs that are long held can be more effec­tively addressed through the use of hyp­no­sis. This is not a mind con­trol tech­nique, but is used to assist her Mas­ter in explor­ing the hid­den causes of beliefs and bring them to the sur­face. The beliefs can then be addressed using hyp­no­sis, REBT and sec­ondary B.E.S.T. tech­niques. Hyp­no­sis can also be used to assist in rein­forc­ing new beliefs, relax­ation and stress release.

c) “Choice Decision”

Choice deci­sion is an adap­ta­tion of real­ity ther­apy and choice ther­apy taken from: Real­ity Ther­apy In Action by W. Glaser, M.D, (2000), Harper­Collins Pub­lish­ers, New York, NY.

A slave at some point in train­ing, makes a deci­sion to allow her Mas­ter to own her choices. In other words, she makes a “choice deci­sion.” He then has the author­ity to make choices in her life that changes her behavior.

 Part of “choice deci­sion” assumes that a slave will choose to change her behav­ior when:

 1) her present behav­ior is not get­ting her what her Mas­ter wants of her because pleas­ing her mas­ter is impor­tant to her and

 2) when she believe that the choice of a dif­fer­ent behav­ior will get her closer to the goals set by her Master.

The major step in reach­ing a “choice deci­sion” is for a slave to come to terms with and learn to accept that she is a slave. Part of this accep­tance of slav­ery is that her choices in life now belong to her Mas­ter. Her only choice becomes obey­ing her Mas­ter. A slave still has influ­ence on the deci­sions made by her Mas­ter and her advice and wis­dom may be sought by him but in the final analy­sis, it is his deci­sion that a slave will follow.

Chang­ing and rein­forc­ing the slaves thinking

Chang­ing and or rein­forc­ing the slaves think­ing about her slav­ery is more impor­tant than teach­ing her to kneel prop­erly. Full accep­tance of slav­ery can only be achieved by accep­tance of it on a cog­ni­tive level. We first think, then we feel, then we act. Accep­tance on a cog­ni­tive level may involve explor­ing sub­con­scious thoughts and emotions.

Exam­ples of meth­ods used to change or strengthen the cog­ni­tive processes:

Read­ing Assign­ments — lifestyle books and pub­li­ca­tions or web sites

Cor­rect­ing Mis­con­cep­tions — bring to ser­vice any mis­taken attitudes

Self-Instruction Train­ing — jour­nal entries or prepar­ing instruc­tions for reach­ing a goal

Mod­el­ing oth­ers in the lifestyle

Thought Block­ing — teach­ing a slave to iden­tify thoughts and method of block­ing unwanted thoughts

Writ­ing Essays and Research of Subjects

Hyp­no­sis

slave Con­tract – indi­rectly as a direc­tion to go

Keep­ing a Jour­nal — pos­i­tive progress and neg­a­tive thoughts and actions

Dis­cus­sion (Q&A’s)

Rewards for Pos­i­tive Ideas and Thoughts

Dis­put­ing Neg­a­tive Thoughts

Teach­ing — uncon­di­tional accep­tance of slavery

Encour­age­ment and Punishment

**Ellis’ A-B-C-D-E Paradigm

Addi­tional infor­ma­tion related to thoughts and emo­tions can be found in the arti­cle enti­tled ATTITUDE.

** REBT was devel­oped by Dr. Albert Ellis and detailed in his many pub­li­ca­tions of which sev­eral are still avail­able. A. Ellis & R. Grieger (Eds) Hand­book of Rational-Emotive Ther­apy, Springer, (1977). Newer books authored in whole or part by Dr. Ellis and oth­ers are also good sources of infor­ma­tion on RET or REBT.

“The prac­tice of Ratio­nal Emo­tive Behav­ior Ther­apy” is a great place to exam­ine ways to change a slaves thoughts

The major con­cepts that have been adapted to slave train­ing on this page are derived from:

•  Ratio­nal Emo­tive Behav­ioral Ther­apy: A Ther­a­pist Guide, A. Ellis, PhD and C. MacLaren, M.S.W. (1998), Impact Pub­lish­ers, Atas­cadero, CA.
•  Real­ity Ther­apy In Action, W. Glaser, M.D, (2000), Harper­Collins Pub­lish­ers, New York, NY.
•  The Prac­tice of Mul­ti­modal Ther­apy: Sys­tem­atic, Com­pre­hen­sive, and Effec­tive Psy­chother­apy, A. A. Lazarus, (1989), The Johns Hop­kins Uni­ver­sity Press, Bal­ti­more MD.