The fol­low­ing skills are listed as a gen­eral guide and you may from time to time find one useful.

Many Adler­ian Coun­sel­ing skills can be adapted to slave train­ing.  These skills include active lis­ten­ing, goal align­ment, (“Is this the per­son you want to be?”),  reflec­tion of feel­ings and empathic under­stand­ing, con­fronta­tion, inter­pre­ta­tion and encouragement.

Adler­ian Coun­sel­ing used in BDSM lifestyle slave training

Some of the meth­ods used are as follows:

Para­dox­i­cal Intention

There is a tech­nique that was called “pre­scrib­ing the symp­tom” by Adler.   It is a tech­nique in which slaves are encour­aged to empha­size their symp­toms or develop them even more.  For exam­ple, a slave that is afraid to do a par­tic­u­lar act  may be asked to try harder to avoid the act.  Bring­ing humor into the sit­u­a­tion helps.  This can serve the pur­pose to “take the wind out of the sails” of the fear.

Act­ing “As If”

When a slave says, “If only I could…,” the coun­selor sug­gests that the slave pre­tended or act “as if” it were pos­si­ble to be that way. In a greater sense, act­ing “as if” she is a trained slave aids in the training.

Catch­ing One’s Self

As a slave becomes aware of her train­ing goals that require behav­ioral mod­i­fi­ca­tion, she is encour­aged to “catch her­self” doing the old behav­ior, writ­ing it down and report­ing it to her Mas­ter.  Par­tic­u­lar keys and or times can be estab­lished for her to stop her actions and observe her behavior.

Cre­at­ing Movement

Intro­duc­ing the ele­ment of sur­prise by doing the unex­pected can help encour­age the slave to con­sider a change in behav­ior or atti­tude.  The Mas­ter momen­tar­ily assumes the slave’s faulty logic.

Goal Set­ting and Commitment

What­ever the the­o­ret­i­cal approach, an essen­tial task of slave train­ing relates to behav­ior and atti­tude change.  Goals should be clearly defined by the Mas­ter for the slave.  Train­ing tech­niques should then be devel­oped to instill cor­rect behav­ior and exam­ine beliefs.   Desired behav­iors should be dis­cussed and prac­ticed.   Goals should be achiev­able and, if pos­si­ble set in short term;  breaking down large goals into smaller goals is advisable.

One tech­nique for suc­cess is that before a train­ing ses­sion ends, the Mas­ter should make home­work assign­ments con­cerned with observ­able behav­iors.  McKay ( 1976) sug­gested that a “change card” be writ­ten on an index card with instruc­tions on one side.

The reverse side of the card is used by the slave to chart daily progress.  The slave is advised by the Mas­ter to focus this eval­u­a­tion on what is accom­plished and not to dwell on mis­takes. If things did not go as well as she would like, ana­lyze pos­si­ble rea­sons: Did she expect too much of her­self? Did she sab­o­tage her com­mit­ment? How? Make a new com­mit­ment based on the discovery.

Jour­nal entries can be used for the above purpose.

 Inter­pre­ta­tion       Back to the­ory section

The inter­pre­ta­tion phase is sim­i­lar to coun­sel­ing.  When the Mas­ter and the slave are in the inter­pre­ta­tion phase of train­ing they share their basic atti­tudes about life, self and oth­ers.  The slave is pre­sented with her Master’s atti­tudes and goals and then goals are set to enable her to align her atti­tudes and goals to match his needs.  The con­sis­tent empha­sis in their dia­log is on goals and pur­poses, rather than on causes or why peo­ple act the way they do.

Dur­ing inter­pre­ta­tion the Mas­ter is con­cerned with increas­ing the slave’s aware­ness of her:

I. Lifestyle; read sec­tion on lifestyle and pri­vate logic

2. Cur­rent psy­cho­log­i­cal and behav­ioral move­ment and it’s direction

3. Goals, pur­poses and intentions

4. Private logic and how it works

The dis­cus­sion of the slave’s pri­vate logic includes its impli­ca­tions for her present and future activ­i­ties.  They also con­front the dis­crep­an­cies between the words that are expressed and the actions that are taken and between the ideal goals that are stated and the real goals that are sought.  The slave begins to expe­ri­ence insight into her true intentions-what is really desired-by exam­in­ing the spe­cific means she employs and the ends or goals they pro­duce.  This exam­i­na­tion of the slave’s lifestyle allows her Mas­ter to specif­i­cally refer to self-defeating ideas that block her re-education and re-socialization.

Any sys­tem­atic review of the train­ing process should include iden­ti­fi­ca­tion of the following:

I.  The slave’s defi­cien­cies in train­ing and her prob­lems and feel­ings about it.

2. The direc­tions to be taken to over­come the defi­cien­cies (goals).

3. The rela­tion­ship between such direc­tion and coop­er­a­tive social interest.

4. Spe­cific areas of dif­fi­culty the slave expe­ri­ences with life tasks.

5. How the slave is avoid­ing the res­o­lu­tion of problems.

6. How the slave man­ages to feel supe­rior while avoid­ing con­fronta­tion of problems.

7. Con­tribut­ing influ­ences from the slave’s past history.

8. What her actual behav­ior is and what behav­ior is expected.

Such an inter­pre­tive review of train­ing should also be used as sup­port and encour­age­ment to iden­tify the slave’s strengths and assets.  Adler dis­ap­proved of the “red-pencil men­tal­ity” that con­stantly ana­lyzes deficits and lia­bil­i­ties.  “We build on strengths, not on weak­nesses,” was the reminder that Adler con­tin­u­ally gave.  The same is true of slave train­ing.   Back to the­ory section