I have found if I have not played in a while my tolerance will drop, but will return very quickly. I think with me it doesn’t necessarily have to do with my emotional state either. Seems like sometime I just need to be warmed up more then other times.

WOW that is a good point about healing from abuse, being in one's body and being able to take pain!

speaking as the marauding psychoanalyst, what you are doing is a pavlovian reprogramming trick where pain is pavlov
reporgrammed as sexual turn on. That programming decays over time pretty quickly, and is best built by working slowly through things.

Obviously each new start point in any form of intimacy moves slowly from gentle to rougher. So in order to get back your tolerance, work slowly up to it, perhaps over a few sessions.

The other key is to maintain a strong psychological link between the pain and sexual turn on. One good way of doing this the other way around
might be for instance to wait till the moment of orgasm, and then do something hot and extreme like a branding...
Depending on how you want to approach it...
doing something like that will dramatically increase your tolerance since its a shock of very intense pain at the right moment.


There are a few main points to consider from the pavlovian perspective there.
I think understanding pavlov is really a pretty good idea for anybody into this sort of thing... its for me the intellectual underpinning
of it all.

"...BUT**** the whole point is not "how hard can he hit the bitch" but "How can he do things that make her squeal and happy and owie that make him happy and warm and evil?"... "

Most of the time, I agree with you; mutuality is a consideration, even in some way between My Captain and I. However, under certain circumstances, my pain tolerance has been irrelevant; occasionally I find myself under My Captain's lash for punishment or for some other sort of teaching, certainly not for my own pleasure.

Regarding pain tolerance itself, I think the time I most quickly reached my upper limits was when I was approaching a sinus infection I didn't know was coming on, and He had me upside-down while whipping me (for punishment, not pleasure). No endorphins whatsoever. I'm not sure if my body had just been diverting all its resources toward my immune system, but...owie! Anyone else have this sort of experience when coming down with a cold?

I hear from an old self proclaimed Dinosaur in the scene who many of us know well, that all it takes is enough floggings with a cat o' nine made of rope and eventually the tissue damage is such on the nerves of the back that pain can really not be felt for the most part anymore. This is from historical information, not for-fun scene stuff. That is one way to reach pain tolerance, though it would violate any of those no blood limits and such.