Quote Originally Posted by leah06 View Post
I know Midori has a well-respected position on this. I haven't heard the whole thing, I've only heard her summarize it. The idea, though, is that a person's psyche is like an architectural edifice - some columns and pillars are load-bearing and others aren't. If you want to remodel your house, you can take down some walls because they're not load-bearing, but if you take down a structural one, the whole house will crumble. She says the psyche is like this too. People have all kinds of constructs that are important to them - appearance, position in the community, competence, intelligence, whatever. Some of these are actually central to the person's sense of self - load bearing columns, so to speak. You can play around with humiliation by tearing down a lot of the person's internal structure, you ugly stupid cunt, but if you tear down a part of the person that is really central to them, you can destroy them in a not-fun way. So the key is to know what's central TO THAT PERSON and what's merely important but decorative, as it were, and leave the structural stuff alone.

It's worth tracking this down and getting the original though.
Wow, that's a great way to think about it. There are certain things my master won't say to me because it brings back memories from my abusive childhood - he can say things like "You exist for nothing but to be my little fuck hole" or "You dirty little whore" but if he calls me a worthless cunt or useless or anything like that, it would probably bother me and I'd say something to him later.