About Internal Enslavement

Internal Enslavement ("IE") aims to develop practical techniques which use detailed examination of a female slave's thoughts, emotions and past experiences to establish and maintain a solid and inescapable state of ownership. In doing this, we wish to cut through the vague concept of "Slave Training" popular in BDSM fiction and websites.

The Internal Enslavement project began in the spring of 1999 under the name Internal Slave Development, with the intention of combining knowledge of Total Power Exchange relationships, with concepts from mainstream Psychology. Many of the ideas of IE where first discussed on the Enslavement mailing list on OneList / Yahoo.

The old What's New page chronicles the growth of the site from 1999 to 2002. After "hibernating" during 2003, the site moved to a news weblog format in 2004 and updates are now listed on the main news blog.

Internal Enslavement is now based on three main pillars: the Theory of Psychological Reactance, Transactional Analysis and Evolutionary Psychology.

The Reactance model is a powerful way of understanding how humans cope with restrictions being placed on their freedom. The theory makes concrete predictions about the ways in which a slave will react as her freedoms are stripped away, and this allows her Master to better understand and manage her progressive enslavement. Acknowledging the existence of Reactance is one of the main distinguishing features of IE compared to some other schools of Master/slave relationship, which see anything other than unquestioning obedience as proof of unsuitability as a slave.

Transactional Analysis is used by IE as a theory of personality, and as way of understanding some negative behaviour patterns which may need to be removed during Enslavement. Transactional Analysis also provides some other useful concepts which have been adapted for IE, including the Stroke Economy - which gave rise to our description of the Dominance Economy.

Evolutionary Psychology has emerged during the 1990's as an important source of new ways at looking at a variety of problems in social psychology. It remains extremely controversial, since it strikes at the heart of the 1960's Social Science dogma: Evolutionary Psychology argues for the existence of human nature, denying that humans are blank slates on which arbitrary behaviour patterns can be written by society. We believe many of the conclusions of Evolutionary Psychology are highly relevant to understanding gender-specific interactions of Masters and female slaves during Enslavement.

In exploring the words on this site, the best starting points are the IE FAQ and Glossary. More details are given in the Essays (about 50,000 words in total.)