Club Meeting 309 - Confessing & Snitching

Between lovers a little confession is a dangerous thing. - Helen Rowland

Hello all. Welcome back to The Disciplinary Couple’s Club.  Our weekly on-line gathering of men and women who are in, or would like to be in, a Domestic Discipline relationship. 

I hope you had a great week.  Mine was up and down. We are slow at work again, but I also had a lot of work-related travel and socializing.  Bad combination.  I don’t do well when I’m not busy with concrete tasks and projects.  The week was also book-ended by work related socializing that left me depleted energetically.  But, at least there is the weekend . . .

We had a good discussion last week about our experiences with parental discipline.  Over the years of blogging and polling about “origins” and how we come to this lifestyle, the surprising pattern is the lack of any common pattern.  Some experienced lots of spankings as kids.  Some none at all.  Some of us grew up with consistent discipline and enforced boundaries. Some were left to basically raise ourselves.  After years of discussion this, I really don’t see any pattern at all, and I’m at a loss to explain what triggered my own attraction to being disciplined and to having power taken away from me.  I have this sneaky suspicion that if there is a common pattern, it has more to do with the parenting style of the fathers than mothers, though thanks to Freud we tend to see this stuff through an Oedipal lens.  

We also explored again the maternal aspects of discipline, with Danielle observing: “I guess my FLR is more maternal than many of the DD relationships people here have for a couple of reasons. First, my authority is not limited by some sort of agreement about “spanking infractions.” I decide when discipline is needed and what form it will take. Second, I don’t limit consequences to spanking, but add the kinds of consequences I used to discipline my sons when they were teens.”  I think that touches on some of my own needs for discipline with a maternal vibe.  ZM said he would like to explore the maternal issue in more depth, and I heartily agree but can’t quite figure out an appropriate topic formulation.  All thoughts and suggestions on that are welcome.

As for this week’s topic, I’m feeling kind of lazy, so I will once again take advantage of a topic suggestion from “A husband who knows.” He suggested:

“Possible topic: the Confession Challenge. Dan, above you reveal three work behaviors your disciplinarian does not know about. And you did so knowing that your wife reads your blog. Repeat that confession and challenge the rest of us to confess behaviors our disciplinarian does not know about for which we likely would be punished. Challenge Part 2: Challenge each of us to read our confession to our disciplinarian! Then report back here what happens!”

Tomy responded: “"Confessional Sessions" were the most popular of activities in Aunt Kay's Gathering events (group events). In those cases men submitted a written confession to Aunt Kay and she studied them and assigned them to one of the other wives who then took appropriate action. It was super-cool.”  Tomy, as an aside, I would love to hear more about this.  Your allusions to ways in which the DWC really was a live "club" always intrigue me.

The “confession” AHWK was referring to was this comment from me identifying behaviors at work that either hold me back or that I just feel like I should correct because it is the right thing to do:

(1) Temper and lack of patience with others, whether directed up or down. I try really, really hard not to "punch down," but it wasn't quite true when I said above that it "never" happens. It's rare, but it can happen, especially if I'm dealing with someone who is being kind of mindless rule follower and getting in the way of getting something done. But, if it someone a lot lower than me in the pecking order, losing my temper or being rude to someone in those circumstances is something I really wish someone would rat me out for.

(2) Failure to keep up on some required paperwork and reporting. There is one task that is fundamental to how we get paid, but that I just absolutely hate. I'm always behind and, while it doesn't impact the organization much, it means I spend a lot of evenings and weekends playing catch up. It would be great if someone told my wife, "BTW, he's a week behind again in turning in X report . . ."

(3) Getting snotty with bureaucracy from "on high." This is a variant of (1), but I really do have a problem dealing with entrenched foolishness and, while it's fine to bring it up, I tend to do it snarky, sarcastic ways.

As I told AHWK, my wife does know about these behaviors because I’ve talked to her about them before, but she doesn’t have any way to find out about specific instances of those behaviors unless I report it myself.  Which I often don’t.  Why not? Well, it’s not really about fear of punishment.  It’s more that I really am embarrassed that I engaged in the behavior, and I don’t want to tell her about it because I don’t want to look bad.  

It’s really that simple.  But, since the AHWK dropped the gauntlet, and since there is no mechanism in place for anyone at work to snitch on me, I will man up and confess to three specific examples of bad behavior, all of which are loosely work related:

(1) I did “punch down” a bit recently, expressing some dissatisfaction to someone in our IT department about a policy that has been driving me crazy.  I wasn’t mean exactly, but he doesn’t really have any power to change the thing that was making me mad, so it was more about me venting my spleen than about accomplishing anything. 

(2) Last week, I got frustrated for about the thousandth time with some communications coming from the “C-Suite” that I see as a distraction and an example of focusing on small things to the exclusion of more important issues.  I made that view very clear in an email that went to a dozen more people, some peers and some up the chain.  Again, it wasn’t that I was saying anything that was wrong, but saying it yet again in way that was a very direct challenge to the thinking and priorities of those at the top just didn’t really serve any purpose, so why do it.

(3) I had a fairly significant instance of losing my temper last week, when a fairly new colleague started criticizing some things the organization was doing, without having any real understanding of what he was talking about.  I took it for a while, then rebuked him pretty directly, in a large meeting, for mouthing off before he had sufficient background to really understand an issue.  I alluded to this incident in last week’s blog post.  There is not a question in my mind that he was out of line. But, the way I reacted is not how a leader should act.  And, ironically, I am sure that some of the leaders I directed the communication to in (2), above, feel like I was behaving exactly like the guy I went off on in my meeting.  

Also, since this topic originated with some comments relating to enlisting co-workers and others to “rat out” a DD husband for bad behavior at work, I would like to expand the topic a bit by asking have you ever gotten spanked for something because someone “told on you”?  Perhaps a work colleague let something slip at a party?  Maybe a friend referred to some shared adventure you hadn’t shared with your wife? For all the wives, do you have any kind of “intelligence network” in place that will tip you off to bad behavior?  Have you ever been shocked to find out through a third-party that your husband did something and failed to report it?  How did you deal with it? 

Content Note:  I'm adding this note, because several comments indicate an issue that is becoming a problem and that I want to nip in the bud.  I do not mind when regular commenters drift off into other territory sometimes after addressing a topic. But, the last couple of weeks have seen several people--mainly various iterations of "Anonymous" and a couple of new commenters--attempt to use this as a convenient place to strike up a discussion about their Femdom fantasies, BDSM scening, etc.  Enough.  The masthead at the top of the blog says what it is about -- and what it is not.  I'm going to just start deleting comments that don't have anything to do with the topic or that kind of pretend to for a sentence or two before launching off into whatever Femdom or BDSM fantasy the commenter feels like talking about at random.

Have a great week.