The Club - Meeting 327 - Consistency & Slippage

“It's not what we do once in a while that shapes our lives. It's what we do consistently.” – Tony Robbins

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 all had a great week.

It’s a depressing pattern that I often can measure the length of my adherence to New Years resolutions around health and balance in days countable on one hand. I did a little better than that this year.  If you count the pre-New Years, post-Christmas period when I was uncharacteristically well behaved, I had a window of 23 days in which I really did get my act together.  It didn’t come to a screeching halt exactly, but the very high resolve I was feeling, and executing on, around health issues definitely started to dissipate this week in the face of the usual challenges – travel, exhaustion, and doing that “just one” think that leads to a chain of lower standards and increased slacking. 

An exchange with ZM highlights the issue and this week’s topic.  He observed,

"The longer I am actively involved in this lifestyle (rather than just thinking about it like I did for 40 some years before), the more convinced I am that consistency is the real key to effective discipline and to building a more disciplined life."

I responded that I couldn't agree more and discussed how this week’s events illustrate the challenge. I noted (in slightly edited form):

“Where personal behavior and achieving goals are concerned, small slippages can be deadly. It was that kind of week for me. I had been really good on several fronts since around Christmas Eve. Very little alcohol, working out every single day, maintaining the diet I had started before Christmas, etc. Then, this week it started to slip. I got very little sleep on Sunday night, which left me really exhausted on Monday. For some reason, I had a really hard time getting back on my feet, and it may be that I was fighting some illness, because I did try to catch up on sleep on Monday and Tuesday but it didn't seem to help. When I get tired, I get really hungry, so the diet started to slip and I started doing a lot of snacking and So, there went the track record on fasting. Then, yesterday I had a long flight delay, and I was still feeling lousy, so I decided to treat myself to an afternoon beer while sitting at the airport. One became two, then those became two drinks on the plane. I woke up very tired today and had some early morning calls, which led to blowing off my workout today. My point is, I went from being really self-disciplined to one or two small slips, and everything went downhill fast from there.

I sometimes come down on myself pretty hard where such slippages are concerned.  This time, I’m cutting myself a little slack.  I do think something was going on this week with a bug or something.  I just felt really, really off and tired all week.  And, I have been exercising so diligently with pretty hard workouts, I may have let myself drift into a state of pretty severe overtraining, and my body simply pushed back and refused to keep going at that pace.  But, it does still illustrate how one slip leads to another leads to another. . . .

Now, in an ideal world, Domestic Discipline would be there as an extra little incentive when our efforts at self-discipline waver.  And, theoretically it is.  Yet, consistency seems to be a very consistent challenge even for well-established DD relationships.  Why?

Well, there are all sorts of impediments.  ZM’s comment explored a particularly interesting angle – the complicated relationship between consistency, severity, and perceived “fairness.”  He noted: "In order for it to be a real punishment for an adult, a spanking must be quite hard and long. This is especially true if the recipient is an adult who may fantasize about spanking. So pretty much EVERY punishment is going to be relatively big, and this doesn't seem quite as fair for seemingly "small" things.”  

I’m not sure I agree with that, though I also don’t have a lot of personal experience to counter it.  My wife is pretty binary in her approach to spanking.  Each one is hard and long.  Every time. That may not seem fair in the context of “small” things like chores, but that’s largely an academic concern since the plain fact is she is not at all consistent with punishing for such small things.  In fact, spanking for things like poorly done chores and other small offenses is the exception, not the rule. It’s not really a matter of fairness.  Rather, she just doesn’t think about going right to spanking for “small” things. 

I think there also is a very practical timing and effort issue at play; we can’t expect busy wives to take 30 minutes out of their day to deliver a long, hard punishment spanking on a frequent basis.  But, I’m not sure that is what is required. I do agree with ZM that severity is a big part of the equation when it comes to effectiveness, but I wonder whether it may come unnecessarily at the expense of consistency.  I recounted the example of getting a hard spanking for repeated failures to clean a rice cooker.  What if instead of giving one really long, hard spanking after repeated failures, she had given a short but intense paddling each time after one warning?  What if, upon discovering the latest failure, she just took out a paddle and delivered ten or fifteen really hard swats?  The whole thing could be done in under a couple of minutes.  If done consistently, I think that approach might be even more effective than one longer but overdue session with her paddle.

  

Of course, fairness and timing issues are hardly the only impediments we face when it comes to consistency.  Family and guests are chronic issues that get in the way of any kind of consistency, and it’s been a very big issue for us over the last month and isn’t going to get better for another month or two.  While those distractions are always going to be there, the degree to which they prevent discipline from happening is still a series of choices.  We could choose to be more open, such that if visiting adult kids overhear a spanking, then they overhear it.  Or, we could experiment with something more silent like the cane, for short, intense sessions that might not be overheard and would take only a few minutes. 

Or, we could be more diligent and flexible about working in a spanking during those inevitable brief moments when the kids or guests are out of the house for an hour or two.  The point is, distractions are inevitable but allowing them to completely frustrate needed discipline is a personal choice.

Then there are my chronic failures around self-reporting.  She has her entrenched issues around “fairness,” and do I “really” want her to assume such rigorous control, while I have my own entrenched mindset that resists the embarrassment of coming forward on my own to admit that I've done certain things wrong, and in so doing basically initiate my own spanking.  

One big question I have around consistency is directed to the wives: Which is harder, being consistent, or not being.  I really can see this cutting either way. On the one hand, consistency does take effort, and concerns about fairness and equity probably do lead to a lot of self-doubt about just how rigorous to be. But, what if you really did just let those concerns go and step fully into an empowered role?  Wouldn’t that be tremendously freeing, even if it meant some additional work in terms of stepping up and swinging the paddle more often?  A blogging friend of mine had a post a few years ago that really summed this up well.  Here is an excerpt, and you can find the entire post here:  https://learningandlivingaflr.blogspot.com/2015/07/operation-boss-lady.html

“I often struggle with balance or worrying about my husband feeling something is unfair or that it could be "too much."  The vast majority of contributors all suggest just taking control, owning it and acknowledging that while resistance or "unfairness" may happen, it is kind of what we each signed up for in deciding to walk this path.  In fact, my husband does not want an equal relationship. He wants me to lead. So in spending countless time and energy trying to make it seem or feel equal or worrying too much about the impact something will have, I am really just spinning my wheels and depriving us both of what we actually need/want. It was this realization that got me back on the path of leading.

While I feared increased control or strictness could breed resentment, it has the opposite effect.  He needs the structure and the clarity. He needs the consistency and knowing what is expected. I also think, although probably less so in the moment, that he craves the accountability as well.  Being in this type of relationship really requires some shifts in conventional thinking and finding ways to make sense of concepts that perhaps seem counter intuitive.  It is the difference between viewing follow up as being a nag or as holding him accountable.

It also is not just better for him. It is better for me.  It is easier for me to know that when I make a decision, it will be followed because I am not leaving room for resistance. It is also easier because I have control over my own life and can be responsible for the choices I make, which also means I have no one to blame but myself if it turns out not to be the best choice.  It is just simpler and easier.”

That really makes total sense to me, but I’m not the one who would have primary responsibility for implementing something that all-encompassing.  I’d really like to get the perspectives of the wives on this one.

Let’s explore this topic of consistency in all its angles.  What level of consistency have you achieved in your DD relationship? Is consistency even a goal, or are you content with an on-again-off-again approach? For those for whom consistency is a desired state but remains challenging, what are the big impediments to getting there? What are you and your spouse willing to do, if anything, to overcome those impediments? 

For the wives for whom consistency is a problem, what are the challenges? Is it practical things like lack of available time, or is it more an an attitude issue? Is it concerns about “fairness” or whether he really wants it, or does training a husband like you would a child or a puppy just seem like too much of an investment of energy sometimes?  Does that kind of diligence and "always on" responsibility have a maternal vibe, and is that good or bad?

For the men, do you want your wives to be more consistent in setting boundaries and imposing consequences?  What do you do that makes it more difficult, like not reporting when you’ve been bad, trying to avoid a spanking or punishment, etc.? Have you talked to her frankly about any desire you have for her to keep you on a tighter, more consistent leash?

I hope you all have a great weekend.