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AKinkCounselor -> RE: Knowing yourself (9/13/2014 2:17:44 PM)
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All life on earth stems from the same basic genetic material, you share 90-something percent of your DNA with a Banana, and 98-99% of it with a monkey. The genetic difference from one human to another is thousandths of a percent.*
The point being, we're not all the unique beautiful snowflake we believe we are. Or at least, we're only unique to a few decimal places. If you disassemble one human being, and disassemble another, you'll find that by and large, everything is very very much the same.
The same is true of what goes on in our heads, we might all come across differently, we have different desires and needs when you cast your eye over the surface of what people think of themselves. But when you start to poke around underneath those things, it starts getting a lot of the same connections.
If you put time into understanding those connections, if you get a feel for what sort of effects guilt can have, what loneliness can do, you can start to form a map of those connections, you can start to get a feel for what connects to what.
Of course we all have those feelings, we all have the ability to understand the connections of the people in our lives, the close friends that we have spent time getting to know. The trick is being able to understand the mechanisms at play in a general enough way to apply them to everyone.
It is easy to imagine applying that knowledge in quite a coarse way, the new submissive who comes to this place with nothing but a curiosity, they start talking to a dom(me) and the conversation uncovers the facets of the submissive, the conversation being guided by the submissive's reactions to the conversation.
My personal approach has always been very largely based on linguistics and semantics, I think the words we use give away a huge amount of information that we don't intend to give. When we are talking about things that we understand and know about ourselves we can speak confidently and openly. When the conversation turns to more difficult topics, our words change, the way we deliver them alters very very slightly. (Either verbally or written) If you can apply the topics that the words and delivery (and other things) change around, then you can start to understand what it is about them that their mind is throwing mental roadblocks at. Once you have a vague idea of where the roadblock is, you can direct the conversation to the places around it to confirm what you suspect. At that point you've very likely learnt something about that person that they had absolutely no knowledge of before that moment.
Once you have uncovered one snippet about someone, you will generally start finding others that are connected to it. It's like they're buried under soft sand, and tied together with rope, once you've found the end, it just takes effort to find more.
So to answer the OP's question, yes there are huge swathes of our personalities that we aren't aware of, that we hide from ourselves, or just fail to realise. I got into the job I have because I was good at digging up those things (I don't think anything I studied helped that part at all)
Put it this way, I've never met anyone that I've not been able to spend time digging around with that I've not been able to tell them more about themselves than they didn't already know.
*I did know these numbers once, I've since forgotten, and mostly made it up! But they're vaguely close, and its for illustration purposes only. i.e. You get what I mean.
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