The Club - Meeting 269 - Limiting Beliefs

"One is not born a woman, one becomes one." - Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1949

Hi all.  I hope you had a great week.  Mine was both exhausting and relieving at the same time.  The exhaustion came from WAY too much business travel combined with WAY too many business meetings and WAY too much business socializing.  All while trying to get some real work crammed in here and there. The relief came from the fact that the overwhelming work project that was going to keep me under water for five or six weeks came to a screeching halt.  Knowing myself as well as I do, the temporary feeling of freedom will almost certainly be replaced soon by frustration and anxiety about not having enough to do.  That's just the way I'm wired.

But, it is good to have a weekend mostly off, especially at this time of year.  I really do love the Fall.  Walking the dogs this morning was wonderful.  The briskness of the air, the gorgeous colors . . . it really is my favorite time of year, though Christmas season is a close second and probably comes in behind only because I don't like the cold all that much. 

Also, this month brings Halloween, which is hands down the most interesting of our U.S. holidays.  No others combine mischievousness with a touch of kink. Imagination also plays a role, with certain costumes and displays appearing innocent if you're, well, innocent, but perhaps just a tad kinky if that's your thing.  For example, is this guy engaging in some innocent mooning, or perhaps bending over for his spanking:

Because of my travel, our DD and FLR activities got put on hold. But, my wife's interest seems to be stirring again.  We talked last week about why the "bottom" partner seems always to be more into than the Top. But, lately, if anything my wife brings it up more than I do.  Which is good.  Even though we have been doing this for a dozen or more years, it really is only in the last year or so that she seems to have gone mentally from just accommodating my need and seeing some collateral benefits to her from using DD to end arguments and express her dissatisfaction, to really starting to enjoy the power exchange and being more openly dominant.  In other words, the real change has been in her attitude.  I think deep down inside, the Domme was always in there, but it was so buried in layers of cultural and social and familial and personal inhibitors, it stayed dormant.

So, what are the things that hold your disciplinarian back from being all they can be?  I'll kick it off with a few of the things my wife probably had to overcome, some of which are still a work in progress:

• Following is more acceptable than leading:  I think for both men and women, following is more socially acceptable than leading.  We dress the latter up with pleasant labels, like being a "team player" or a "good soldier."  And, while we respect people with strong leadership skills, those who exercise them can quickly come under criticism for being "uppity," presumptuous, or "too big for their britches."
• Social pressure to be nice and to put others' needs ahead of our own:  There is a constant pressure in our society to be nice.  Polite.  Self-effacing. Those who put their own interests first are often seen as selfish or "not nice."  For the dominant party in a DD relationship, it can be hard to give yourself permission to express your own desires and preferences, let alone to express them as a command.
• Fear of hurting the other party:  This has both physical and emotional dimensions.  Many new Disciplinary Wives fear literally hurting him via a "too hard" spanking.  They fear hurting him emotionally via a "too strict" demeanor.  Ironically, most of the husbands want the physical discipline to be harder or longer, the non-physical discipline to be more humbling and unyielding, and the dominant partner's exercise of authority to be far more strict, more authoritarian and to be that way more consistently.
• Fear of being powerful:  I think some Dominant Wives worry deep down inside about what will happen if they really give in to what Nietzsche called the Will to Power.  We are all so conditioned to deplore dictators, authoritarians, sadists--basically anyone who shows too much comfort with exercising power over others--that budding Disciplinary Wives and Dommes fear the stigma of being seen to revel in exercising power over another human being and probably have some socialized aversion to being that kind of person.

My wife's newfound enthusiasm for being dominant seems to have two aspects.  First, she is finally really accepting that I want this.  That while it may be hard for me to accept in the moment, part of my wants and needs boundaries and rules.  And wants them to be imposed strictly and consistently.  Second, she is finally getting comfortable admitting that she enjoys bossing me around, setting the rules, and being served.  Another aspect that we are both getting more comfortable with--but which I will save for a future post once I can come up with a new angle to hit it from--is that there is a relatively strong "maternal" energy at play for both of us, which in the past there was a lot of reticence about acknowledging let alone exploring.

So, what attitudes are holding back your disciplinarian or have held them back in the past.  Are those attitudes something they have overcome?  If so, any thoughts on how that came about?

Have a great week.