Cuivis dolori remedium est patientia.

My Latin is rusty, but those words roughly trans­late to “Patience is the cure for all suf­fer­ing.”. My slave knows that she some­times frus­trates me, just as I frus­trate her. Frus­tra­tion can stem from a lot of sources, most of the time it is lack of under­stand­ing why I expect her to act in a cer­tain way. Edu­ca­tion is an essen­tial part of any BDSM rela­tion­ship, you need to be able to share your doubts and fears so that a topic may be resolved. To be able to do so you need to feel comfortable.

Change and Guarantee

Human beings are creatures of com­fort. We like to feel at home in an envir­on­ment we under­stand well and have got­ten used to. It allows us to anti­cip­ate and under­stand well what is expec­ted and thus makes us less prone to fail­ure. Whenever someone tries to intro­duce change into an estab­lished envir­on­ment you also intro­duce uncer­tainty. No one likes uncer­tainty and with the amount of per­sonal emo­tion involved your slave likes uncer­tainty even less. When you intro­duce new rules, when you make changes you need to ensure that your slave feels safe prior to doing so.

Patience…

Know­ing that there is room for mis­takes and espe­cially the know­ledge that these mis­takes will be met with patience are an import­ant tool to cre­ate the safety needed prior to intro­du­cing changes. When the like­li­hood to “fail”, as she tries some­thing new, becomes sud­denly close to zero, she is more will­ing to try. Whatever she is going to see as a res­ult will be accep­ted as a valid attempt and it will rein­force that she can con­tinue try­ing, get­ting bet­ter each time.
We nat­ur­ally make mis­takes, mak­ing mis­takes is a huge part of our learn­ing pro­cess. You do not have to trust me on this, simply got to the
Edu­ca­tion Resources Inform­a­tion Cen­ter and search for the keyword mis­takes.
Avoid­ing mis­takes slows our learn­ing pro­cess down, tol­er­at­ing mis­takes by being patient will allow your slave to pro­gress much more eas­ily into a state of mind where she will want to no longer fail or make mistakes.

The Need To Please…

My basic assump­tion always is that you slave loves noth­ing more than to please you. I know that mine does and I know she does love to please me because there are emo­tions involved, because she feels safe, because she val­ues my patience and above all she is proud. There is noth­ing bet­ter than pride to motiv­ate a slave into suc­cess. Pride can be fostered by first allow­ing her to not be per­fect, to not suc­ceed right away and this can be achieved by being con­sid­er­ate and patient in your responses. A well tempered and meas­ured response will rein­force the secur­ity needed to push lim­its and to learn and embrace new sen­sa­tions or techniques.

Infin­ity…

My patience might appear to be infin­ite at times, but even mine will run out sooner or later. You will need to make a con­scious decision when it is enough. My rule of thumb is very simple. Once I feel that my slave under­stands what I am try­ing to achieve, once we have estab­lished that she is phys­ic­ally cap­able of doing so and once I can be sure that she feels there will be no harm com­ing to her from the intro­duced change my patience starts to thin. I will allow for some mis­takes being made, but I expect those mis­takes to become less fre­quent and less severe over time. Once I feel a change has become a well estab­lished pro­ced­ure my patience stops. My slave knows very well that I will never repeat myself for well estab­lished rules and she under­stands that there are con­sequences when she fails to sat­isfy well estab­lished procedures.

No Fail­ure Policy

In sum­mary of what I men­tioned above I have a no fail­ure policy. My slave can­not fail me as long as she tries her best. I will always give her the bene­fit of the doubt and assume that she does try her best. If she did not, then our rela­tion­ship would be suf­fer­ing already very badly. Since she is always try­ing her best and amount of mis­takes made will decrease, she can always rest assured that she is pleas­ing me and not fail­ing me. This addi­tional know­ledge allows her to feel safe, even when she doubts her­self and makes it easier for me to guide her past her lim­its. Do not let your slave think that she is fail­ing you, it will break her heart and a broken heart does not serve well. If you are inter­ested, you can read about this topic from my slave’s point of view.