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.