“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.
Once again, before we get
started, I would like to thank the female commenters who have recently joined
us and to extend an invitation to all others who may be inclined to move from
“lurker” to “commenter” status. We like having you around.
I hope you all had a great
week. It was a pretty momentous one here. I’ve talked about Anne’s surgery and how it
brought the Domestic Discipline aspects of our relationship to a screeching
halt. It happened back in September. But, we had hit a spanking lull well
before that. Looking back at some old journal entries, I think my last spanking
may have been as far back as late May. So, a summer hiatus turned into half a
year with an unspanked bottom.
Until this week.
It seems fitting that the reason
wasn’t some huge drinking failure or big marital fight. No, it was a “small” thing that has earned me
more than one spanking in the past.
Namely, leaving the damn front door
unlocked. I had gone to the gym while Anne was out somewhere. I forgot to lock the door when I left. The above text arrived as I was wrapping up
my workout. It wasn’t followed by an explicit
spanking order, so I thought maybe it was just a warning. No such luck. It took a day for her to follow
up, but she did.
As I said, the context seems
fitting for breaking our months long hiatus.
It wasn’t for some huge bad act. It wasn't for something I had asked for help with. It wasn’t even for something we both agree
should be a priority. Instead, it was
for something that she cares about and that I really don’t. In the context of a DD relationship that we
both want to take in at least a slightly more FLR direction, it feels right
that my first spanking of this renewed phase was for something that she, and
she alone, decided merited punishment and that was more of an everyday, domestic thing.
And the experience was . . . punishing.
“Excruciating” is a fitting descriptor.
It’s not at all atypical for me
to be surprised at how much more a real spanking hurts than I seem to remember
between sessions. After twenty years, what
is remarkable is that I underestimate how much it is going to hurt pretty much
every single time.
But, this was truly different. I was in pure agony from the first swat, and
it was not just worse, but WAY worse than I had anticipated. Mid-way through, she switched from the bath
brush to the heavy wooden hairbrush, which hurt less but it was still much more
painful than I recall spankings being six months ago.
I am confident this was more than
the normal amnesia I get between sessions.
This truly felt an order of magnitude worse than most spankings. It was a very painful reminder that there
really is a trade-off between frequency and severity.
I doubt many of us truly want to
get spanked more often. It’s true that we often want more
consistency, and indirectly that does usually entail getting spanked more
often, but that’s not quite the same as saying we want to be spanked
more often.
Yet, the experience this time reminded
me that there really are paradoxical benefits to getting spanked more often and
that, given just how badly this one hurt, I really would choose to be spanked
more often if it meant that each spanking was closer in pain severity to what I
was used to in the past.
And, it’s not just about avoiding
the extreme pain a too-infrequently spanked bottom can entail. Before our
imposed pause, we had one session that involved something Anne had spanked me
for multiple times before. While I was over her knee, she paused between swats
to comment on the fact that I had been spanked for this before. She asked me, “Do I just need to spank you
way more often?”
It seemed like a rhetorical
question at the time, but even as she asked it, I knew the real answer was “yes.” There are too many habits and attitudinal issues
that have remained problems year after year.
Although I’m aware of how difficult it will me if it really happens, part
of me wants to experience her ramping up the strictness and rigor to something
that leaves me feeling much more concerned much more often about another
spanking on an already sore butt.
And, it’s not just the
spanking. Part of the desire is to more
often be in that emotional place where I feel I’m not the one in control. One of our intermittent commenters, “DD”,
left a comment a few months ago that got my attention at the time. Here is a shortened version:
“The first time I cried it wasn't from the
intensity of a particular spanking itself but from a culmination of spankings a
few weeks after my wife first took me in hand. I had been spanked and
disciplined a lot in those first few weeks, and I think I felt a loss of
control.
Leading into this particular spanking, I was
balking and trying to get out of it. I had a sense of panic at the point she
brought me into the room. I had just
been spanked the day before for something else, and this was the second time I
was being disciplined for the same issue in a week. I felt frustrated with the
frequency of my misbehavior. I think deep down I was realizing I wasn’t the
mature, responsible adult I thought of myself as. Getting disciplined really
highlighted that.
I don’t know why, but that spanking was the first
I really tried to talk my way out of. My wife continued to tell me to bend over
and take my punishment and that we would talk after. Eventually, she told me I
was now going to be spanked for disobedience, in addition to the original
reason for the spanking. That got me lowering my pants and bending over.
After the spanking was over, she sat me down and
said I was permitted to tell her what was so important before the spanking. I
tried to rationalize not getting spanked so much, but this conversation is what
turned into us formalizing our FLR relationship. My wife doubled down on the
fact that things were going to continue where they were heading if I wanted to
be in the relationship. She said the only way I was going to get out of getting
disciplined like a bad child was to fix my bad behaviors and attitude and always
respect her as the authority in the house.”
MW had a somewhat similar comment
a few months ago regarding the near-panic he felt when being spanked much more
frequently for a certain behavior he knew he should be able to fix but, for
whatever reason, hadn’t:
“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.”
Although I’m sure it would bring
out a level of resentment and resistance way beyond what I’ve experienced
before, I find something about the very challenge of that kind of a loss of one’s
sense of being in control morbidly alluring.
One might think that being spanked
frequently might actually remove some of the emotional edge and make it feel
too “normal”, but that hasn’t really been my experience. Instead, I sometimes felt like I was “walking
on egg shells,” with a more constant awareness of the need to adjust my
behavior. It was definitely a form of fear, but what I would call a “healthy
fear” of consequences, knowing that I had some control over the outcome.
Yet, while I might have had some ability to
avoid particular spankings, it still felt like my control was being curtailed
because my ability to avoid the spanking was dependent on actually fixing the behavior,
instead of resulting from delaying or talking my way out of one. If I’m getting
spanked more frequently, and it’s not the result of something like maintenance
spankings, it’s almost inevitable that I’m going to feel less in control,
because it means any efforts on my part to delay or get out of it aren’t
working.
Al has commented several times on the value of weekly maintenance
spankings, on the premise that they help maintain the spanking
practice, which eliminates any awkwardness about imposing one when one has been
earned. I didn’t see that as a real
problem for us until this long hiatus, but now I appreciate more fully what he
meant. There definitely was an awkwardness
with us the last few weeks, with multiple times that she really should have
spanked me, and she probably was sufficiently recovered to have done so. It just seemed very difficult to actually
take the next step and make it happen. I
suspect that the lack of regularity has contributed a lot to our lack of
consistency over the years, as Anne seemingly has never been fully conditioned
to take the “spank first and ask questions later” approach.
I don’t think I’m quite ready to
embrace maintenance spankings, because I still think I need the element of
accountability for the spanking to feel “real”. But, I think we might get most
of the same benefit by recommitting to our weekly “check-ins.”
I suspect that spanking more
frequently would also be easier on her in some ways. If she did adopt
more of a “spank first and ask questions later” approach, it would almost
certainly reduce some of the mental energy and self-doubt involved in analyzing
each instance of bad behavior for whether it was bad enough to “really” merit a
spanking. Consistent with Al’s point
about maintaining the whole spanking dynamic, increasing spanking frequency would
harness the power of habit. One reason habits
are so powerful is they don’t require as much mental energy as does consciously
weighing whether to do or not do a particular action.
I don’t
have a well-defined topic here, other than inviting comments about frequency. We’ve addressed that topic before, but the
last time it was a full topic was over a year ago.
How
frequently do you get/give real disciplinary spankings? Do you think it should be more frequent? Less frequent? Does anything change for you mentally or
emotionally when you are getting spanked much more frequently?
For
the women, do you find spanking frequently to be a burden? Or, does it actually
make things easier in some ways, whether because it results in better behavior
on his part or because it becomes more of a habit that requires less mental
energy?
I’m
also curious, have others experienced what I did this week, i.e. a long
hiatus from spanking that caused the first one after the break to feel off-the-charts
painful?
I
hope you all have a great week. Be safe
and well-behaved at those holiday parties. Are we all good and sick of Christmas music yet?
b+(4).jpg)
