The Club - Meeting 447 - Arguments and DD's Role in Ending Them

“Nothing is as frustrating as arguing with someone who knows what he's talking about.” - Sam Ewing

 

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 good week.  Ours was pretty sedate, though I somehow still managed to do two things that probably will/probably should earn one or more spankings. First, there was yet another incident with the garage door.  Second, Anne and I got into mini-tiff about something.  More on that below.

 

 

I thought last week’s conversation was fun and interesting. Let’s face it, none of us know what we’re really letting ourselves in for when we persuade our wives to try one of these relationships. But, the variety of ways in which reality diverges from our expectations is expansive. One that many of us share is genuine surprise at just how much a real spanking hurts.  As Al put it:

 

“By far the biggest shock - Just how much spankings really hurt! I had read that nothing could actually prepare you for how much they hurt - and even incorporated the idea into some spanking stories I wrote (before actually being a spanked husband) - but nothing really prepares you for that first real - long and hard - spanking.”

 

I’ll go one further and say that I am constantly surprised by how much it hurts, and that happens almost every single time! Over the almost twenty-year history of our disciplinary relationship, I have received dozens of hard spankings.  Wouldn’t you think that by now I would have a pretty accurate impression of what they are like?  Yet, I find that no matter how often I recall past spankings or contemplate future ones, the recollection or expectation never remotely matches the reality in terms of just how much it really hurts!

 

 

We also got a couple of great comments from new commenter BenB about spanking as “retribution” and as a “teaching instrument” (emphasis added by me):

 

“Retribution is an interesting topic. For me, my deep fascination with spanking, since early childhood, was always bound up with an idealised order characterised by perfect balance. In a world where children were spanked by wise, loving parents, children misbehaved and inevitably got the punishments that they deserved, wiping the slate clean. This wasn’t the world I lived in. My parents gave occasional smacks but never proper spankings, and as far as I knew the same was true for the children I went to school with. (I think spanking was much rarer in the UK than the US by the 1980s - only once have I met someone from England my age who’s mentioned being spanked over the knee as a child.) I remember feeling almost frustrated by the imbalance of a world in which I never really got punished properly for bad things I did, and nobody else seemed to either. My fascination with spanking was erotic, but I didn’t understand that at the time. – BenB”

 

“I’m not sure it’s something I got wrong, exactly, but one of the things that continues to amaze me is how well spanking works as discipline. If you understand the point of punishment as deterrence, that makes no sense at all (because I yearn for spankings). But I’ve come to appreciate that this is too one-dimensional a way of thinking about discipline. Disciplining is fundamentally about teaching, and we’ve found that spanking is a very effective way for Emma to secure my full attention and drive a message home! With us, there’s never been any disagreement about the standards of behaviour she’s enforcing, so her spankings serve to make me confront my own failings and remind me that she expects better. (They have a retributory quality to them too - I get them simply because I deserve to suffer.) Before trying DD, my understanding of how and why it would work as behaviour modification was (by comparison) simplistic and flawed. – BenB”

 

While I think DD does sometimes serve a purely retributive purpose for Anne, for me retribution is, at best, a secondary motivation.  For me, the primary motive for DD is about consequences and the guardrails they impose. 

 

But, I think there is an aspect of my motivation that is kind of the flip-side of retribution, namely penance.  Although it doesn’t happen all that often, sometimes I am disappointed in myself to such an extent that I feel my butt needs to pay a price, regardless of whether any behavioral change results.

 

BenB also talked about a change in his dynamic that moves us toward this weeks topic:

 

“That [a reward system] somehow has led to a recent shift into a more FLR dynamic over the last three weeks. Emma made the big step (or so it felt) of ending a couple of arguments by spanking me earlier this year. Something about that prompted us to shift (at my instigation) to a situation where she’s straightforwardly in charge. Whenever we disagree, she can put her foot down and win, no arguments. It’s produced a significant shift: she’s started disciplining me for things that annoy her rather than things we both agree are spankable offences. I love it (and hate it, of course). A big part of the reason it works, I think, is that she gets a lot out of it. She no longer feels she needs to bite her tongue for fear of starting an argument with me. She’s enjoying watching me backpedal and apologise for things which, before, I’d have stood my ground on. It’s been an instructive change. I’d not realised how dominant I’d been in our relationship until I suddenly find myself having to bite my tongue for fear of irritating her to punishment levels. For now, at least, and I know it’s early days, Emma seems to be seeing major benefits from imposing the more severe, DWC-style level of discipline that come with this change. – BenB”

 

Al had a somewhat similar comment regarding arguments and attitude adjustment:

 

How effectively and quickly a sound spanking can actually adjust the male attitude and dissolve marital tensions. While I had read about this in both nonfiction articles and spanking stories, I never expected it to be as effective as it has proven to be. Invariably, when I am spanked as a result of an attitude issue (quite often) and the resulting marital tension, we both feel much better emotionally after the spanking. My attitude is always immediately improved by a sound bottom blistering, and my wife is always in a much better mood after having done the bottom blistering. --al

 

To an extent, every argument involves the parties’ respective perceptions of the power dynamic between them.  It seems to me to be very significant when a wife, such as BenB’s, suddenly discovers she has the power to bring arguments to a quick end.

 

 

That brings me to our topic and the little tiff with Anne this week.  It happened just yesterday.  In the scheme of things, it was pretty minor.  I won’t bore you with all the details, but let’s just say I got frustrated by what I felt was a meandering attempt to make some point she wanted to make, and I let my frustration show.  Her view was I snapped at her.  My view was she wasn’t giving me the information I needed to understand what the hell she was getting at and taking three times longer than necessary to get to her real question. 

 

The two views aren’t necessarily inconsistent. A full day after the tiff, I still think I was right about the meandering nature of the conversation, but I’m more willing to admit that my reaction to it was fairy childish and aggressive.  It's exactly the kind of thing I've argued she should really put her foot down on, and I've linked it very explicitly to a "maternal" dynamic.  What mother would put up with her son talking to her like that?

It fits pretty nicely with BenB’s observation: “I’d not realised how dominant I’d been in our relationship until I suddenly find myself having to bite my tongue for fear of irritating her to punishment levels.” There are, I think, times when I simply don’t perceive how forceful/domineering my deep voice and fairly emphatic speaking style can seem to others.

 

An hour or so after the incident, I kind of grudgingly tried to steer the conversation back to her original question. She wasn’t having it. She told me that she was still pissed off at me and that was why I could expect a good spanking for it. So far, it has happened. But, I won’t be surprised if it does. The timing is, frankly, better this way. At least from my perspective.  Had she done it yesterday, I think it would have been pure retribution from her perspective and very ineffective from mine. I was still deeply in denial and convinced of the rightness of my own position.

 

Though, I may be wrong about that.  I’m often surprised at how many times I can change my mind about my own rightness while in the middle of getting a hard spanking. 

 

So, the general topic for the week is settling arguments, or simply bringing them to an abrupt end, with a spanking.  Is this something your wife does? If so, is it a tool she took a while to adopt, as happened with BenB’s wife Emma? Or, did she latch ahold of that power early in the relationship? What is the timing between the argument and the spanking? Does it happen immediately or after a substantial pause for emotions to cool?  Is it a substitute for talking things through, or is it meant to humble you to the point that the two of you can talk things through?

 

Does she use it to bring all arguments to a halt or only arguments about certain topics or that involve a certain attitude on your part?

 

Have a great week.

The Club - Meeting 446 - Things I was Wrong About

“I make mistakes, I am out of control and at times hard to handle. But if you can't handle me at my worst, then you sure as hell don't deserve me at my best.” ― Marilyn Monroe

 

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 good week. Mine was pretty sedate.  Some productive time in the gym.  Read a good book.  Spent some time doing work on the motorcycle, and even some time riding it.  There wasn’t much in the way of misbehavior, though there were a couple of things that might fall into the “carelessness” category.  They weren’t things that affected Anne in any way, but they cost me time and frustration.  I don’t rat on myself all that often, yet I also do get frustrated at the time I spend fixing things that I screw up through sheer inattention, and it’s hard to envision myself paying more attention without a compelling reason to do so.

 

We had a good discussion about crying and “surrender” last week.  We also added a few new commenters. Welcome to new Brett, BenB, Lavrentyb, and Courandair.  And, welcome back K.  I hope you all keep participating.

 

The only bummer of the weekly discussion was it was another week without one of our more prolific commenters, KOJ.  I really hope he’s OK and just off vacationing or something.

 

This week’s topic is kind of a hodge-podge, though there is a uniting theme; one that relates to last week’s discussion.

 

The overall topic is this: Things I was wrong, or didn’t understand, about Domestic Discipline and Female Led Relationships when I first got into this thing we do.  

 

 

In a nutshell, I thought I’d talk about things I thought or assumed when we first started Domestic Discipline almost 20 years ago that I now know to be either untrue or much more nuanced than I appreciated at the time.

 

What’s this have to do with last week’s topic?  Well, crying was probably my biggest misconception.  So, let’s talk about that and a few other things I got wrong.

 

Crying is common.  I discovered the Disciplinary Wives Club at a point where we had experimented, for a very short time, with erotic play-acted spankings.  I had no adult experience with a real disciplinary/punishment spanking. When I read the stories on the DWC, I was left with the impression that crying from an adult spanking was very common. In fact, I went into our first session fully expecting to be brought to tears.  Even though I had suggested we try DD, I was in a state of dread and high anxiety right before that first spanking, and the prospect of sobbing over my wife’s knee was the main source of both the dread and the morbid fascination with the whole thing.

 

Well, almost twenty years later I still haven’t really cried, despite getting some very, very hard spankings.  I realize now that while some men do get to that point of surrender and release where they cry real tears, it isn’t really all that common. 

 

It’s all about the severity.  When I didn’t cry during that first disciplinary or during any spankings that first year or so, I assumed that maybe I just wasn’t being spanked hard enough. I became kind of a severity junkie, buying more and more intimidating implements in a quest to receive the kind of spanking that I assumed the guys in the stories were getting that brought them to tears.

 

Honestly, I should have known better from the start, given that most of those DWC stories in which the men sobbed and sobbed involved hairbrush spankings, and I learned relatively early on that most hairbrush spankings just aren’t all that hard.  I’m not saying they can’t be hard, but it takes a very determined spanker and a very heavy hairbrush to deliver a spanking that is remotely comparable to, say, the bath brush or a heavy paddle or strap.

 

What I didn’t know and had to experience for myself, however, is that some instruments really can be almost too hard, at least when it comes to surrender, tears, and really accepting the accountability she is trying to drive home.  My quest for more and more severe instruments culminated with some rubber straps that both of us decided were just too much. My decision was all about the fact that the pain was so immediate and shocking that I always went immediately into “man up” mode and couldn’t accept or surrender to the punishment.  Quite the opposite.  It was pure resistance. For Anne, the issue was the damage the rubber often did to my butt.  She is very capable of giving very hard spankings but doesn’t deal well with something that actually splits the skin, which the rubber instruments sometimes did. 

 

 

Over time, I’ve come to understand that the effectiveness of a spanking isn’t about—or at least not just about—the severity of the instrument and the energy behind the swats.  Duration, setting, the spanker’s demeanor – all these contribute as much as, or more than, severity to the overall effectiveness of a spanking.

 

“Effectiveness” is all about behavior modification, accountability, and/or balancing power.  When we first began Domestic Discipline, my primary focus was on giving Anne a way to correct and punish behaviors that we both agreed were a problem.  The overall goal was to eliminate or reduce those behaviors by holding me accountable.  From the beginning, I thought that giving Anne the “tool” of DD would also even out the balance of power in a relationship that sometimes felt unbalanced.

 

That was all well and good and mostly true, but I think it missed some very important nuances.  Although it was about giving her more power, in a subtle way it was mostly about effectiveness from my point of view.  I definitely did see spanking as a way for her to express her dissatisfaction, but I don’t think I really understood that it could serve that purpose and give her a sense of satisfaction even if my behavior didn’t actually change at all.

 

 

I also think I didn’t appreciate that there were going to be spankings that were really all about punishment, with behavior modification a very secondary consideration.  I’ve used this quote from Alan a couple of times now and been disappointed that there hasn’t been more discussion about it, because I think it is important and profound.  It also seems to relate closely to some of K’s comments from last week about how his true “punishment” spankings work:

 

“The other issue you raise is the length of time before discipline is no longer needed or appropriate. This taps into one of the purposes of punishment that we don’t discuss as often as we do deterrence and behavior modification. I am thinking of “retribution,” which is punishing simply because the person committed an offense where the suffering should be proportionate to the severity of the offense committed -- punishment for punishment’s sake aside from or absent any other purposes of the punishment –and no matter how long it has been since the offending behavior.”

 

Just how much spankings hurt.  When I brought my wife the idea of trying DD, I emphasized that these would not be erotic spankings and, rather, were designed to hurt, and hurt badly. Yet, somehow after almost twenty years, the reality of the pain from that first volley of swats never ceases to surprise me.  I’ve been spanked dozens and dozens of times, and every single time I’m desperately asking myself why in the world I’ve allowed myself to be in this position again, shocked at how unbearable the pain seems. I am very sure that when I read the Disciplinary Wives Club for the first time, despite its emphasis on tears and remorse and its advice to wives to err on the side of severity, I had no idea what I was getting into.

 

Most men in DD relationships are “alphas” who want to yield control. This was a pre-conception that was all about me projecting my own dynamic. I was anti-authoritarian, or type-A, or Alpha—whatever term you want to use—and I assumed that most other husbands in these relationships were as well. I still think many men fit that profile, but many like being under their wives’ control because they like following or being controlled in other aspects of their life as well. I don’t know whether it’s a 50-50 split, but some early polls I conducted here suggested that’s about right.

 

My wife would reject DD as “weird.”  When I first brought the DWC concept to my wife, I thought the most likely outcome was she would reject it as just too kinky or weird.  Yet, after her very first time viewing the DWC material, she called to tell me she thought it was “interesting” and instructed me to “go buy a brush.”  After our first few times experimenting with it, she told me that she did find it more than a little weird, but apparently there was enough upside for her to keep her interested in the experiment.

 

The maternal aspect.  Early on, I’m not sure I appreciated how much of the DWC dynamic was about “maternal” discipline.  In fact, I was surprised a year or so ago when someone pointed out that “maternal” was in the website’s masthead and appeared throughout the materials. For a long time, I didn’t really appreciate how core that “maternal” archetype was to my own desire for DD.  It took a long time for me to recognize that while my own mother was pretty erratic and definitely did not fit into the “strict mother” paradigm, I wanted that kind of parental dynamic and the strict, imposed, almost involuntary discipline it entailed.

 

Even once I started appreciating my own gravitation toward the “maternal” archetype, I was reluctant to say much about it to Anne, because of all the negative Freudian baggage it came with.  In short, if she found anything weird about DD, I assumed it was likely to be anything involving spankings from a mother figure.  While I feel like we still dance around this a little, I’ve been surprised by how much she is not turned off by my references to it and will even sometimes reference it herself.

 

My wife’s interest would stay purely utilitarian.  From the beginning, I had a pretty utilitarian view of DD. It was about correcting problems through accountability. It was about empowering my wife.  It was mainly about changing my behavior. I assumed Anne saw it the same way.  In the beginning, she probably did.  What I underestimated was just how much she would come to enjoy her increased power and enjoy giving disciplinary spankings.  It’s a bit nuanced, as she says it’s not so much the spanking itself she enjoys, as ordering me to take one and get ready for it, and then watching me comply.  But, especially over the last year, I sense that she gets disappointed if I haven’t misbehaved in a week or two, because she actually likes exercising that power over me.

 

In fact, from the very beginning one of the biggest surprises to me was how little she struggled with giving very hard spankings. Once she has decided one is deserved, she has no problem at all delivering it.

How about you? As your disciplinary relationship has developed, have there been things where your assumptions and preconceptions were wrong?  Give us some examples.

 

Have a great week!

The Club - Meeting 445 - Surrender, Crying, and Spankings You Really Don't Want

"When I let go of what I am, I become what I might be." -- Lao Tzu

 

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.

 

Thanks to all of you for your observations and personal experiences regarding when domestic discipline has worked and when it hasn’t.  Thank you to KOJ for suggesting it, though he was conspicuously absent from the conversation.  I hope everything is OK. That’s one big limitation of these purely electronic, anonymous relationships – you never quite know what is going on with your conversation partners and, if the conversation suddenly stops on their end, you have no way to check up on them.  Anyway, hopefully KOJ is fine and will rejoin us in the near future.

 

 

Some of last week’s comments touched, at least tangentially, on a topic that has been percolating in my brain on and off for several weeks. Several of them came from Brett, including these:

 

“Like with a parent, I don't tell her what needs fixing, she tells me. That's what stirs the drink. I am punished and must improve because she thinks behavior modification is needed, and she acts accordingly.”

 

“As an adult, though, it is still about having been a bad boy and getting a spanking from a parental authority figure. The profound humility would change me psychologically regardless of any practical benefit.”

 

“[S]panking is a more demonstrable and tangible way of expressing a level of concern. I relate that to how I was raised as a child. Knowing I had done wrong was one thing, but corporal punishment was the clearest message conveying what my parents thought about the misbehavior. There was no ambiguity, and no choice but to take whatever had led to the spanking as a dead serious issue that must be corrected.”

 

While focused on the parental discipline dynamic, Brett’s comments also raise a more general point about inevitability and our surrender to it.  One reason parental spankings may still carry such force for some of us today is that there was an inevitability to them, and while we might have tried mightily to talk our way out of them, if the parent had decided it was going to happen, then it was going to happen.

 

 

The topic of surrender also was lurking behind the scenes in a topic Mark posed a couple of weeks ago:

 

“On the subject of crying, I would love to hear from anyone else that was told that the spanking wouldn’t finish until he cried… and then she followed through.”

 

While Mark’s specific question was about crying, the scenario he presented entails a wife’s decision she wants a particular result, and then carries out a punishment in such a way that the husband can either surrender to her decision and give her the outcome she wants . . . or else.

 

Then, there was this, from one of the old DWC publications:

 

“My goal is for you, the man in the relationship, to one day ask yourself, "Oh, NO! What did I get myself into?" as you await an upcoming spanking session that you desperately want to avoid. Yes, that's right. I want you to be genuinely anxious and dreading an upcoming discipline session. Why would I say such a thing? Because it means your wife has taken the role of disciplinarian seriously, has made a decision that you are going to get a good sound licking, and you have nothing to say about it. It is the essence of a DWC relationship.”

 

Again, it’s the idea of having to surrender yourself—physically and emotionally—to something you genuinely do not want to happen. 

 

For me, “surrender” is a notion that covers a lot of ground.  On a philosophical or spiritual basis, it means getting better at giving in and fully accepting what is -- accepting the current state of affairs, accepting what will come, regardless of whether it reflects my own preferences and desires.  It’s about letting life come as it is because, really, what is the alternative?

 

In my work life, it should have meant accepting that, every once in a while, I might need to give in to the will of those above me in the pecking order. Though, in all honesty, I never came close to surrendering in that context.

 

When we first started with Domestic Discipline, I think I had some understanding that I was proposing to permanently give up some of my autonomy and that she would be exercising more real power over me.  However, I think my understanding was very surface-level at that point. One could argue that it stayed that way until fairly recently.

 

Ironically, I’ve internalized the “surrender” concept most deeply when my emotions were fighting it the hardest.  It’s confronted me most directly in those moments when I was being faced with that spanking Aunt Kay wished for all of us—one we really didn’t want—or when I received a punishment or a severe scolding in a situation where we didn’t entirely see eye-to-eye.  In those situations, I was faced with having to surrender to authority when I really didn’t want to.

 

 

As Anne has stepped up her level of control over the last year or so, surrender has been increasingly on my mind.  I’ve talked about her ripping into me after a dinner at which she though I dominated the conversation and behaved boorishly.  That scolding was very, very hard to take. My ego was bruised for weeks. The next time it happened, the ego hit didn’t take as long to get over, but it still was hard.  One thing that made the scoldings so hard was I was not entirely on board with her assessment of the situation, but it was clear that my views simply did not matter in terms of the expectations she had decided to set.

 

 

It's also come up a few times with individual spankings. I’ve talked about an incident in which she spanked me for failing (repeatedly) to clean a rice cooker after dinner.  While getting spanked for it was foreseeable, I anticipated a fairly moderate spanking for a fairly moderate (to my thinking) offense.  Instead, she gave me a very, very hard spanking, which she delivered with a bit of real anger and exasperation.  She finished with a warning that the next time it would be even worse. 

 

I think it was the first time I felt a bit of resentment at the end of a spanking, but I don’t think that was so much about the fact that I’d been spanked hard but, rather, that she had decided to give me that “good sound licking” Aunt Kay referred to and that it was clear I would have little or no control over when that happened going forward. 

 

 

I remember feeling a real, deep sense of disquiet that for the first time in a very long time I had received a consequence that I didn’t want and had no control over.  Much like Brett’s descriptions of parental discipline.

 

I think the reason I was left so disquieted by the whole thing is that it was the first time I felt the stirrings of that “healthy fear” some have talked about here. It’s also about fear of losing control.  It’s true that most of us asked for these relationships, but even the act of asking is a form of taking control, right?  When I talk about surrender, it’s about that turning point in the DD relationship where what you think you should be spanked for may not be what you actually get spanked for. It’s about being given an order that you do something you genuinely do not want to do. It’s about your preferences having less and less weight and your views on what should happen having less influence over what actually does.

 

A spanking you really don’t want.  An order you don’t want to obey. A scolding that leaves you not turned on but, rather, resentful or truly chastened.  Those are slipperier concepts than they might seem. On some level, all of us here (with a tiny number of exceptions) want the spankings we get, because we were the ones who asked for these relationships in the first place.  Same with giving into female authority.  For me, from the very beginning I knew that really "surrendering," giving up control in some deep, fundamental way, was at the seductively terrifying core of what I was proposing in asking my wife to enter this kind of relationship.

 

 

That included the possibility that corporal punishment might bring me to tears. For me, sobbing while my wife paddled or strapped me would be the ultimate surrender.  And, it’s a level of surrender I’ve yet to achieve.

 

I think that’s why Mark’s question about a wife issuing a decree that a spanking will not end without real tears kind of scares the living hell out of me.  At some point during such a spanking, I would have to make the conscious choice that I was going to really, truly, finally surrender to Anne’s authority including the authority to dictate that I need to go through the embarrassment of crying while she spanks me.

 

 

Will that ever happen? I’m not sure.  Anne became very comfortable with giving very hard spankings from almost the very beginning of our DD experimentation. She simply doesn’t get very concerned about subjecting me to very hard corporal punishment. When I’ve asked her about how she might react to tears, however, there seems to be some hesitation even when she says she would be fine with it.  I think she doesn’t really know how she would react.  Yet, I think to get over the emotional hurdle that kind of embarrassment represents, I would need at least a statement from her immediately before or during the spanking that she is fine with me crying and possibly something more along the lines of the express threat that Mark envisions and that ZM has experienced.

 

What are your thoughts on any of this. Regarding Mark’s specific topic, I am curious whether, for those of you who have cried, was that preceded by some statement from your wife indicating she wanted or expected you to cry, even if it didn’t rise to the issue of a directive that you do so . . . or else.

 

Have a great week.

 

The Club - Meeting 444 - Behavior change: What works? What doesn't? What makes the difference?

“The desire to keep doing what we love supersedes the desire to penalize bad behavior.” - Nell Scovell

 

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’re all doing well. It’s seemed like a long and draining couple of weeks, even though I obviously haven’t been spending much time on this blog.  I guess the converse conclusion could also be true – my energy level on this fine Sunday is down because I haven’t been engaging enough with this crew.

 

 

I am sorry for the posting delays.  Anne and I weren’t doing anything particularly adventurous, but we weren’t spending a lot of time at home.  Honestly, it was nice to spend multiple nights hanging out in restaurants together, having a few drinks and generally checking in with each other.  We don’t do that enough, despite being retired and not having a lot of other actual commitments in our calendars.

 

I also have just been in one of those moods in which DD isn’t on my mind as much.  It’s odd, because just a few weeks ago it was on my mind constantly.  I’ve gone through these lulls many times in the past, so I don’t have much doubt this one will pass. 

 

In the meantime, I’m glad that some of you suggested a topic, because I sure as hell wasn’t coming up with anything on my own.  This suggestion comes from KOJ:

 

Here's a discussion idea: Specific behaviors of the spanked husband that were successfully changed by DD, and specific behaviors that weren't changed successfully, and speculation on why DD changed some and not others.

 

DMR (New commenter? If so, welcome!) followed up with:

 

I will "second" KOJ's suggested topic of which behaviors are most amenable to correction / reduction with DD, and which are not. I might add, as an element of any such discussion, more details about (1) which behaviors are most likely deigned subject (or "prioritized") to/for such corrections, and which are not, (2) which behaviors do wives emphasize correcting vs. husband's asking for DD-assistance in correcting, and (3) how / why husbands and wives "prioritize?" (This could easily take two, or more, weeks of discussion.)

 

So, let’s go with those.  I can kick things off.

 

I’ll begin with what hasn’t worked, and it’s a bit ironic.  Cutting down on my tendency to binge drink has never really happened.  It’s ironic, because it was a major component of our original decision to try DD, and it’s easily what I’ve been spanked for most often over the years.  So, why hasn’t DD been more successful? I think the answer is three-fold. First, for all the attention that has been paid to it over the years, I’m not sure that—deep down inside—either of us really care about it all that much. Second, drinking socially with friends is close to the core of how I see myself; it’s part of my identity and certainly a big part of my English/Irish cultural background. Third, because socializing over a beer is such a big part of who I am, I have no desire at all to eradicate the behavior entirely, so I’m pretty comfortable with DD being more of a “guardrail,” i.e. a tool she brings out to get me back in line when things start to drift a little too much.

 

What has worked?  It tends to be the “smaller” stuff, like forgetting to lock doors, doing certain chores, etc.  Though, I think she’s also succeeded in making me much more careful about crossing the line from being engaged to being domineering in some social conversations. 

 

What explains when DD has worked in changing before and when it hasn’t?  Part of it certainly is how much I really care about the behavior at issue.  Like I said, although I appreciate the guardrails that Anne imposes on things like drinking too much, I’m not motivated to go much beyond that.  There also are some behaviors that I really want to change when I'm feeling acutely embarrassed or pissed at myself, but it dissipates quickly.  That tends to happen with moments of carelessness that end up costing me time or money but, in the scheme of things, aren't all that important.

 

Moreover, while my own commitment and “buy-in” are important, I think the far more important factor is her commitment.  Since getting spanked and severely scolded for it multiple times last year, I have been more careful about watching my mouth and monitoring my own behavior in social settings, even though I don’t really care about the behavior that much and, in fact, I didn’t see at least one of the instances as nearly as serious as she did.  But, since she made it crystal clear that she cared about it, I took that concern seriously. 

 

Similarly, when she has taken leaving doors unlocked or leaving the garage door open more seriously, I have gotten a lot less forgetful about it.  So, why does it still happen.  Honestly, because while she has been somewhat diligent about it, that diligence hasn’t reached the “zero tolerance” level. She tends to warn about it a lot, but the follow-through isn’t always there.  Again, I think this is an area in which her commitment to changing the behavior is far more determinative than my own.  With enough consistency and frequency, I’m sure the forgetfulness around open and unlocked doors would disappear or very close to it.

 

 

It reminds me of this comment from MW from a few weeks ago.

 

“I found that when I was spanked frequently (daily or nearly daily) for the same problem, the memory of the pain, the soreness, and the little twinge in the butt would remind me to do the right thing. For one persistent problem, I would actually feel desperate and a little fearful and work harder at it. It was a wonderful feeling after years of making no progress on it.”

 

Why has she chosen to prioritize some things and not others?  Honestly, I don't know. The unlocked doors and open garage door are obvious -- she sees them as a serious safety issue.  From time to time, however, she has gotten very focused on certain things that seemed small to me at the time. For example, I had a few incidents involving forgetting to clean a rice cooker after dinner, which she gave me some surprisingly hard spankings for.  There are other seemingly serious things, however, like being disrespectful or rude to her, that she almost certainly should come down hard on but seldom actually does.

 

How about you? Which behaviors have you successfully addressed with DD?  Which behaviors have been more resistant, or impervious, to change?  What factors do you think make the difference between the two?

 

Have a great week!

Happy 4th of July - No Post This Week

 

Well, I had some ambitions around posting this week, but it's becoming increasingly clear that it isn't going to happen.  So, for those of you in the US, enjoy what I hope is an extended weekend that includes friends and families.  Just don't go at it too hard. Be safe . . . or else.

For our friends in England, this tongue-in-cheek reminder: