This post has been de-listed
It is no longer included in search results and normal feeds (front page, hot posts, subreddit posts, etc). It remains visible only via the author's post history.
Introduction
As a professional submissive and professional masochist it's a big part of my work not only to be able to handle a lot of pain for a long time, but also to be able to understand my body, all its sensations, and keep myself safe while doing so. All of this happening while enduring some truly extreme tortures (as I'm sure my KKD pics have demonstrated 😏😉😈).
As a result I spend a lot of time studying neurology, neuropharmacology, mental fortitude techniques, and self awareness. My objective here is to share those skills and practices with you in the hopes that it not only allows you to explore a wider variety of sensations and experiences, but also that these skills help you in your daily life to better understand your body, how you are feeling, and even detect & explain medical issues better to practitioners.
The Techniques
Hydration
This is Sooooo important for impact play (there's a reason "drink your water is a meme in the community).
When you're properly hydrated (peeing about once every 60 to 90 minutes with a pale yellow dry fall straw color) your blood flows better, your tissues are more saturated, and your electrolytes are maintained in your cells better. This does a few things:
Provides more padding and "give" in both the tissues and nerve endings to reduce hypersensitivity.
Increases blood flow making warmups more effective at building endurance
Allows arousal to be more easily stimulated due to better parasympathetic nervous response (yes, you can't get as horny when you're dehydrated).
Allows sodium and calcium to be transported to nerve endings more easily to "reset" them faster making the pain sensation less "spikey" and more "curvy" (look up a square wave for spikey and "log normal distribution" for "curvy" - specifically mu=0 sigma = 1) It's also critical to have good sodium and calcium levels in your bloodstream, which also requires high vitamin D. So using WHO rehydration salts with the water (not the best tasting but VERY effective), and taking 20,000 IU vitamin D and 1.5g (1500mg) of calcium citrate) for 1-3 days before and on the day will help a LOT as well.
Mental Focus
One of the mistakes people make with trying to process pain is trying to dissociate or ignore it to move through it. This works to a point but for intense experiences it's counterproductive and requires a lot more effort. Instead the trick to tolerating it is to meditate on the pain and analyze it in your mind, focusing on how it feels, seeing if you can pick out different features of it, and really exploring it at a high level.
This is how a lot of the monks and pain performers handle the incredible things that they do. The stoic image of Thích Quàng Dùc performing self immolation is a tragic but very illustrative example (Obvious trigger warning for googling it... it's a graphic picture of a public suicide). You can never ignore pain of that severity, but by fully accepting it and integrating it as a part of your existence will allow you to shift it from a sensation that induces panic to one that simply exists.
This is something that is a perpetual practice and is never truly mastered, but you can improve and it doesn't take a lot of equipment or another person to practice. In fact isolation and peaceful meditative music (psychedelic rock, new age, new wave, trance music, ambient, brian-eno, chanting, Lo-Fi, &c) or quiet are ideal for practicing.
What you want to do is find a sensation that's mildly uncomfortable but related to the one you want to build tolerance for and slowly expose yourself to it. For spanking I'd chose a warm sensation, a sharp sensation, and a deep sensation. I'd say:
Warm Sensation
A sports balm (in small amouts on thick-skinned muscle tissues ONLY: it's poisonous on mucus membranes and vascular tissues like the genitals), Capsaicin HP, ginger root, horseradish, szechuan peppecorns, black peppercorns, or a hot fire a couple feet away so it's hot but not burning.
Cold Sensation
Ice cubes, moving them closer to your body, or using an ice pack through fewer and fewer layers of cloth. Menthol also works. Be careful not to use it against your bare skin though.
Sharp Sensation
- pressing a wooden skewer or chopstick into your skin
- sitting or standing on a sharp rock
- digging a finger nail into your skin
- placing upholstery tacs into a thin foam pad to hold them up and sitting it under your thigh or into a bra.
- using a row of D4a under your thigh and pressing into it gently
crushing sensation
Wrap a rope around your thigh 3-4 times, using a bight and knot on each end then twisting the bar to pull the wrap tighter. Do regular nerve checks and take breaks every 5 minutes or so between rounds for safety.
pulling sensation
Similar to the crushing only wrapping the rope around a limb on one end and a post on the other so it pulls the limb away from your body. Use appropriate brakes and nerve checks for safety.
Clamping Sensation
Use clamps and clothespins of inceeasing intensity. Try not to go longer than 5 minutes until you're up to max intensity, then start again at 10 minutes, then again at 15, 20, 25, and 30. After 30 the rebound pain will be close to peak so you won't really see much benefit going further.
The process
Take some time, get a room dark, remove any extra distractions, put the music on low, get super comfortable otherwise, center yourself with some box breathing and whatever relaxation stuff works for you (cuddling stuffies, aromatherapy, stimming, &c), and then apply the sensation. Start mild (diluted, or lightly) and focus on it; sit with it and try to find something in it that you can identify as distinct from the rest of it.
Just keep doing your relaxation exercises and every fee cycles of that try to explore the sensation for a new element, a tingle, a buzz, a thing you like about it, maybe a coolness in the heat. Anything new and special.
Once you run out of things to explore, up the intensity and keep going. Don't do more than an hour in any one session. Keep it to 2-3 sessions a week. Eventually you'll start to see yourself reacting to all pain that way.
This is also really helpful for self-awareness; you'll be able to better understand your body, how you're feeling, what hurts and howz how much, and where everything is. You might even get to the point where you can focus and feel your own heartbeat, muscle movements, bone movements, and digestion. That can be really helpful for identifying illness or issues before they get severe too so it's a very good skill to have!
Arousal & Mindset
This is the last piece of the puzzle. You really double, tripple, even quadruple, your endurance for pain just by being aroused and relaxed. A huge part of it is playing into that and getting yourself feeling sexy. This is super different for everyone but just do what gets you INSANE with horniness before your scenes. Read hot porn, watch sexy stories, tease yourself for days, just be desperate and dripping as much as is practical before the scene.
Conclusion
So there it is, a professional submissive & professional masochist's guide to pain management, pain tolerance, and a 050 type summary of sensory neurology. I hope it helps your scenes and your life in some cool and fun ways!
First: let me apologize for the tone of my last post; I was frustrated and I've had a short fuse lately thanks to recent global events.
That said, my point stands; you described (at a cursory level) how nerves work. Something I addressed in a bit more detail in my post, actually. The fact that nerves use a biochemical process doesn't mean that what those nerves are picking up isn't very real, or that the perception of them isn't real.
Every sensory nerve you have uses the same ultimate process. It simulates an ion level change in the cellar plasma which travels down the cell until the ionic charge builds enough to jump to the spinal cord and again into the brain. This is caused by sodium ions and calcium ions around the nerve cells help to restore the natural ionic balance across the cell length. That's how Cocaine and its derivatives work as local anesthetics, they block the buildup of possibly charged sodium ions in the nerve cells which delays their capacity to respond. This affects both tactile nerves that use physical pressure to simulate potential difference across the cell membrane attracting sodium, or in free nerve endings where a photonic shift, chemical agent, or change in energy levels directly stimulates a change in potential that draws in the sodium ions.
Now that I've been through all of that so it can be clear that we both have the same knowledge of the biological process that's happening (and other readers can gain something useful from this exchange) hopefully I can finally explain this in a way you can accept:
Just because someone results in the brain processes it doesn't mean it's purely emotional or doesn't exist. Everything in our reality goes through the brain's filter through this process, and our brain responds to everything with a variety of still not well understood reactions and processes. Pain is just as real as the smell of a rose, the beauty of a song, the warm touch of a hand, or the golden glow of a sunset. All of these things can also create an emotional reaction, but the way our brain interprets them is very much not solely emotional. We can have dramatically varied emotional reactions to the exact same simulation at the exact same intensity based solely on context.
This is important to me because I live this experience every second of every day, and trying to argue that it's "just emotion," or "something my brain has made up," is extremely frustrating to hear. It's a perspective that has caused incalculable harm to myself and others in many communities I am a part of. I understand that accepting you're not the expert in a situation even when you've been told for decades that you are - and that the people who disagree with the are just hysterical, difficult, or don't want to be helped.
Unfortunately sometimes the very basic understanding of medical science is deeply flawed due to its racist, sexist, and eugenicist roots. This was amplified in the understanding of pain because of attitudes of a "stiff upper lip," and "stoic resolve" that are so louded by English speaking cultures; especially among men. The desire to pretend pain isn't real and that is just an emotional response to a chemical process played really well into this narrative: "If you just learn to be less emotional/hysterical/stronger/toughen up it won't hurt as much." Unfortunately that ignored the very reality that pretty much anyone when exposed to pain of certain levels will have the same intensity of sensation & pain response (sympathetic nervous system activation, reflexes, trauma recording, adrenaline dumps, &c); the only thing that helps temper the emotions you experience and how your respond is experience, deliberate training, and (often) the right medications.
The issue I've been taking is your statement that pain isn't real because pain drives every decision I make ever single moment of every day of my life; sometimes even how much I'm able to breathe. Saying that the pain I go through isn't real reads as a personal insult and a statement that my experiences are false, or just imaginary... something I'd been told by PTs, Doctors, Nurses, and many others for my whole life.
You. Don't. Understand. My. Situation. Just. Because. You. Saw. People. With. Something. Similar. It's also well known that doctors & medical professionals trying to manage patient pain are notoriously inept at the task, and have no clue how to actually manage things for their patients most of the time. It's how we wound up in the Opioid Crisis... and the Benzos Crisis... And the Vicodin Opioid Crisis... and The Oxycodone Opioid Crisis ... & now the Tramadol and Fentanyl Opioid Crisis...
All while women and black people are told they don't experience pain the same way or that they aren't actually in pain because their pain doesn't exist since you can't see the cause or measure it. Which is something that's a known and catastrophic reason why women don't seek help for their medical issues and *why Women are more likely to die from heart attacks, ruptured apendixies, ruptured cysts, and infections than men.** Doctors ignore our pain and say it doesn't exist and thst we should just manage our emotions better instead of actually trusting and treating us. This has been the case for the entirety of western medicine.
Observation is not experience, and your ideas are decades out of date, mysogenystic, and outright in conflict with everything medical science and experiential philosophy has grown to understand over the last 20 years. (Well in the Central European, White, Ethno-supremacist West anyway... most other cultures figured this stuff out millennia ago...)
Saying "pain is just an emotional response to nerve stimulus" is syllogistically identical to "sight doesn't exist because it's just a response to the stimulus of your eyes" or "touch doesn't exist it's just an emotional response to your skin having pressure applied to it." It's an absurd idea facially to anyone not trying to be macho or up-their-own-ass freshmen-philosophy-student-thinking-they-understand-hedonism self importance and self-indulgence.
Ya sound like the douche in the bar in "Good Will Hunting," trying to impress all the women by talking down to the misfit kid only to be shown up badly when it turns out they're smarter, more experienced, and better educated than you even though they don't have the fancy degree, wealth, and aesthetics you do.
With that in mind: Do you like apples?
Sure! I thought this had posted yesterday but the app dropped it due to length so I had to split it up XD.
There's a reason I said only 2-3 days before, and yes, checking and keeping up with your routine health is always important, and checking with your doctor about things should be a standard before doing anything major for a long period of time.
Still, thank you for pointing this out as It's not meant as a daily regimen. Unfortunately Reddit crashes when I try to post longer replies so I have to edit down before posting quite a lot and sometimes things get lost.
Subreddit
Post Details
- Posted
- 1 year ago
- Reddit URL
- View post on reddit.com
- External URL
- reddit.com/r/BDSMnot4new...
So as someone with a chronic pain disorder the statement "There's no such thing as pain," comes off really badly. I know you didn't have bad intentions but it's really not an okay thing to say. If you had a single day in my body it would break you. My shoulder dislocating is about a 4/10 on my pain scale, rib dislocations are a 6/10. The pain I deal with every day is very real and not an emotional response.
If anything I have the opposite: most of my pain doesn't even evoke an emotional response anymore because it's that ordinary to me. I actually need to be in the right mindset to have an emotional response to any pain below a 7 or 8 on my scale. I'm writing this on a plane and my right 10th rib is out of place. I won't be able to put it back for another 2 hours. I'm actually having a good time enjoying my music and the scenery because if I was to get emotional about it I wouldn't be able to function at all.
Please, please, please recognize that an able bodied person without a severe pain disorder has a lot of privilege when it comes to talking about this kind of thing; what you're talking about kida works, sometimes, but it's only going to take you to a 6/10 or 7/10 level before your sympathetic nervous system just overrides it and you won't be able to do anything with it anymore.
For reference my pain scale: 0: No excess pain, just mild muscle aches: what most people have after weight lifting for 30 minutes or so.
1: Shutting a light door on your hand, slapping your hand into a wooden wall with moderate force, snapping a rubber band on your skin, putting your hand in 0C water for a few seconds. A 20ga needle IM injections.
2: Dropping a 25lb object on your toe, a cut through the epidermis, a 1st degree burn. Stretching too far.
3: Putting your hand into freezing brine, touching a 400 degree stove rack, shutting your hand in a storm door. Sprained ankle.
4: Dislocating a finger. Dropping a 50lb object on your foot. 4hrs into a tattoo.
5: Dislocating a shoulder. 2nd degree burn. Eyelid tattoo. Hernia surgery post-op without medication. 6 hrs into a tattoo. Stapling mouth shut with surgical staples.
6: Dislocating a lower rib. Migraines.
Testicular torsion.
20 minutes into being beaten with a 1/4" steel cane, no warmup, full force. Labial reconstruction/GRS pain with medication immediately post-op.
Post-operative pain from GRS without medication. The pain in my body from being in a hospital bed for 18 hours.
The pain in my body after being in a hospital bed for 72 hours.