The Club -- Meeting #260 -- Am I Getting Through to You?

Discipline yourself and others won't need to. - John Wooden

Hello all.  Welcome back to the Disciplinary Couples Club.  Our weekly gathering of men and women who are in, or interested in being in, Domestic Discipline or Female Led marriages.

First off, welcome to Sherri, Susan G. and Jeanne.  It's great to have more Disciplinary Wife participation.  I hope you will continue to chime and will also tell us all a little more about your DD or Wife Led relationships.

Well, last week's discussions were . . . what's the right word . . . wide-ranging.  There's nothing wrong with that and, in fact, many things are good about it.  As I've said before, the whole topical format can seem very constraining sometimes, so I usually not only don't have a problem with things deviating from the suggested topic but it actually can yield a more interesting conversation and takes some pressure off me as the blog owner.  The general line for me is, does this deviation from the topic have a damn thing to do with Domestic Discipline or FLR relationships, or is it one more instance of someone trying to hijack the blog for their own purposes?  And, I'll sometimes even ignore that line if the conversation is interesting enough.  Though, we all have different views on what is interesting, don't we?  The wonderful thing about Blogger and all the other blogging and web developer tools that are out there is anyone can talk about anything they want any time -- on their own blog.  All they have to do is put in some time and effort.

There have been a couple of threads over the last two or three weeks that I want to come up with some kind of topic around, though I need to think it through more.  We had a discussion back in January about the "maternal" aspects of Domestic Discipline and the extent to which it brings out the unruly boy in some of us.  I feel like the topic deserves a more thorough treatment than it got last time, and it does keep coming up.  So, if anyone can think of an interesting angle on it, let me know and I'll consider it.  I also liked the point ZM raised about  there not necessarily being a conflict between the erotic side and the disciplinary side of domestic discipline and that the former might actually fuel the latter but without detracting from the disciplinary aspect. I need to think about that more.

In the meantime, Helen raised the following topic suggestion:   "What strategies does the disciplinary couple employ to determine the effectiveness of punishments?  I think there may be many strategies we can share with each other. For instance, Andy and I have a rule that if the behavior is repeated, the punishment must be harsher because it obviously didn't "take" the first time. I also do a Q&A with him during the spanking that demonstrates his willingness to improve his behavior. And I also am very observant when I let Andy off my lap: If there is any resentful body language, or a grunt of disagreement,  or the hint of an erection, back over he goes! His contriteness must be complete."

Let's go with that as this week's topic.  I don't have anything all that interesting or novel to say about it myself.  In the early days, and to some extent through to today, our focus was on making punishments hard enough to match the crime, but not necessarily on assessing them after the fact. 

I've talked before about how in the early days we would assign a minimum number of swats for particular offenses, to guarantee I did not get off easy. I guess our most used post-spanking assessment tool is the journal I share with her, which often shares thoughts on previous sessions.

Other thoughts?  What do you to assess the effectiveness of your disciplinary procedures or what do you incorporate to make sure they are, in fact, effective at getting your message across?

Have a great week!