The Club - Meeting 502 - The Trade-offs of Spanking Frequency

“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?