"This Will Hurt You More Than It Hurts Me"

A serious piece of research, reported in the Telegraph last week, has an interesting slant for us spankos. It seems that scientists have discovered that talking about pain actually makes it worse for the person experiencing it. So saying to someone: "this may hurt a bit", or "you might feel a little pain" can make feelings of discomfort worse. The researchers hypothesise that

"It is possible that those conversations intensify the activity of the pain matrix in the brain and therefore intensify the pain experience"

For the tops among my readers, this could probably go one of two ways. The nicer among you may well read this new piece of work, and think "oh gosh, well, I really should make sure that I don't compound my poor bottom's pain by talking about it and making it worse."

Of course, the more likely scenario is that ALL tops reading this will rub their chins in a gleefully evil way, and go "Mua-ha-ha, what interesting information, I need to refine my patter a little bit!"

Then there'll be no end to the "This will hurt you more than it hurts me"s and "You do realise this is going to hurt, don't you"s. Of course, I'm not a top, and therefore not that imaginative in this area, but I'm sure there are plenty of other phrases that could be used to exacerbate a poor bottom's pain.