The Club - Meeting 504 - Disciplinary Spankings and Strong Emotions

“We cannot selectively numb emotions, when we numb the painful emotions, we also numb the positive emotions.” - Brene Brown

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.

 

Before we get started, Google seems to once again be wreaking havoc with its adult content controls.  Some have complained that they are being blocked from viewing the blog.  It seems to be a matter of being logged in to Google.  I've played around with multiple browsers, and it seems to be the case that I can access the blog from any browser if I'm logged in and not at all if I'm not.  I hope this isn't an insurmountable issue for anyone, as it does appear that people can login and still post anonymously.  I'm still considering making a full move to Wordpress, though it's hardly censor-free either.

 

I hope you all had a good week.  It suddenly got very cold where we are.  I used to be very into skiing.  Now, I’m very into hanging out in warm clothes in front of the fireplace.  Given the temps were in the single digits when I woke up this morning, it would take a lot to lure me out for anything more ambitious than dog walks.

 

The last few weeks have been an emotional rollercoaster for me.  So, perhaps it’s apropos that even before our holiday season became so laden with hard emotions, I’d flagged an exchange I’d had with a new-ish commenter going by CalSpankee as a great candidate for a new topic.  Here’s his first comment that forms the basis for this week’s topic:

 

“Time and time again I see the same adjectives being used to describe a first reaction to spanking as a young person: scary, thrilling, exciting. Very strong emotion is being evoked. When we hear about another person being spanked, it's mostly thrilling and exciting. Ditto if we think of ourselves being spanked when there is no real chance of it happening. But if we are a kid and there is a real prospect of being spanked, the scary part predominates over the thrilling and exciting part. What's going on is that we crave strong emotion. Hence the connection with risky activities such as mountain climbing, motorcycle riding, etc. Later we enter puberty and another very strong emotion appears in our lives: sex. Somehow the brain ties these two very different things together. So as an adult the thought of a spanking can be sexually arousing. But, as I think most of us would say, actually being spanked hard is not sexy as all, it just hurts a whole lot. Still, we crave the incredible excitement of it all.”

 

I responded:

 

“Great observation. I totally agree that we often crave strong emotions. And, perversely, it can include strong negative emotions. It happens to me sometimes with books that have very dark themes. For others, maybe it's something like horror movies. Real life can seem so bland sometimes that anything with strong emotions attached to may seem attractive. You're undoubtedly right that the craving for strong emotions can somehow become associated with something like spanking. I suspect it may also be a core part of the attraction some have to embarrassment and humiliation.

 

For me, real DD spankings are "thrilling" or "exciting" only in the most abstract sense. I guess they are literally "exciting" in that I used to almost always get an erection before one (that's no longer the case - it still happens but not nearly as often), yet from the very beginning that excitement was closer to fear or anxiety than any more positive form of excitement.

 

I do think that when she is in a very bossy mode, that can be exciting in a positive sense, though the timing is important. At the moment she is bossing me around, I very seldom am excited about it. Instead, I'm annoyed. And, she knows it. Part of the excitement for her is making me do something when she knows I genuinely don't want to and that, in that moment, I resent the authority. It's only later, in retrospect, that it becomes sexy or exciting for me.”

 

In a comment on last week’s post, referring to some of the things I hoped to bring into our DD relationship in a bigger way in 2025, CalSpankee again brought up the subject of spankings’ ability to evoke strong emotions:

 

What you described -- maternal, strictness, openness, frequency, etc.-- is certainly totally up my alley and is quite probably what a great many of the males on this website would like. What's at the very bottom of this (pun intended), I think, is a desire to experience great emotion. There is a lot of emotion in contemplating a spanking, and there can be a lot of emotion in receiving one. The key to the latter, I'm convinced, is a stop-and-go type of spanking where there is very hard spanking interspersed with pauses where there is scolding. If a spanking has few pauses and there is only continuously unbearable pain, what I find is very counterintuitive. When it's "hold on for dear life" survival mode, I cannot think of anything but the pain and surprisingly there is no room left in my mind for regret, remorse or even fear or panic.

 

So, let’s talk about emotions evoked by spanking specifically and by a Domestic Discipline or FLR-style relationship generally.

 

As a preliminary matter, do people crave experiencing strong emotions? Although I believe I do, I really don’t know when it comes to others. It was illuminating that, when searching for an appropriate quote to lead off the post, the vast majority of the popular quotes I found regarding strong emotions stressed either (a) the necessity for controlling motions, or (b) the undesirability of “negative” emotions like anger and fear.  When I searched specifically for quotes acknowledging that such “negative” emotions have value and should be experienced and embraced, there were vanishingly few.

 

Yet, my attraction to DD began with what I would describe as very powerful, dark emotions, evoked by the stories on the Disciplinary Wives Club website.  Although they were “exciting” in the literal sense that I got an erection reading them, at the root of that excitement was fear and anxiety at any thought of asking Anne to try such a lifestyle. In fact, 20+ years later, I vividly recall how anxious I was about talking to her about it, and it wasn't really fear of a negative reaction. Rather, it was an almost nauseous anxiety about what it would mean for me if she had a positive reaction.

 

I’ve described the initial reaction as a “morbid fascination,” but the emphasis would have been heavily on morbid.  Whatever “excitement” I felt was rooted in something totally different than what I might have gotten from looking at garden variety porn or reading about any other kink.  This was far deeper and far darker.

 

In retrospect, one reason my favorite story on the DWC has always been Al’s Even More may be that it’s probably the only one that acknowledges the dark emotions at the heart of the subject’s DD interest.  Indeed, the story uses the term “morbid fascination” to describe the impact of the lead character’s discovery of the DWC.  Upon reading Aunt Kay’s advice that, "The longer and harder you spank, the more he will love you for it," the story says, “That final remark haunted him, touched something deep and dark far down in his soul, as he read the pages in the site over and over.”

 

That really nails what it my discovery the DWC and DD was like for me.  Although there clearly was a deep erotic component, the experienced emotions were something much more akin to fear.  If I had to pick only one word to describe it, I think it would be "vulnerability". A really deep, gut wrenching sense of having made myself vulnerable to someone--and someone's authority--in a way that was totally contrary to how I usually lived my life.  My wife was very supportive during the whole phase of talking about it and getting ready for the first disciplinary spanking, but what I was experiencing was pure fear.  Not so much fear of the pain, but fear of how I would react and, as I said, fear of being that vulnerable.

Even today, twenty years later, fear and anxiety are at the top of the driving emotions.  And, as CalSpanker noted, many of the elements I’d like to explore more in 2025—strict control, maternal authority, open displays of authority, witnessed or overheard spankings—do engender emotions that most deem “negative”.

 

Loss of control and the vulnerability that comes with it. Having one’s status diminished in relation to another’s authority. The frustration of being told what to do or being subject to externally imposed consequences.  Embarrassment at an overheard or witnessed spanking. Being subjected to a hard scolding in front of others.

 

And, of course, there is my perennial fascination with tears.  To me, tears can be both (a) indicative that strong emotions are being experienced; and (b) a cause of very strong emotions, such as embarrassment or fear of showing the extreme vulnerability associated with being an adult, male, sobbing from someone’s exercise of punitive authority.  It’s why this meme has always been on of my very favorite captioned spanking photos, as it incorporates an express acknowledgement that crying may be extremely embarrassing, yet that embarrassment may be something she actively wants to put him through.

 

 

The fact that I haven’t cried in 20 years of doing DD may, in fact, be a great example of how we can crave yet avoid experiencing strong emotion. I have no doubt that a big reason I haven’t been able to let go and cry is that I’m afraid of experiencing the embarrassment and extreme vulnerability inherent in it.  There’s also the fear of being so overwhelmed by the whole situation that it could make me sob.

 

I also think I experience much more emotion from the anticipation of a spanking than from the spanking itself. 

 

 It’s possible CalSpankee is right I don’t have a lot of chance to experience emotions during it, because Anne is systematically blistering my ass without a lot of breaks in-between.  I also think it’s because I tend to “man up” and just try to get through it. We’ve talked about letting me practice emoting more during the spanking, and perhaps that’s something I should put on my 2025 list of things to explore.

 

CalSpankee referenced how non-spanking activities I’ve referenced like motorcycles and mountain climbing also reflect a craving for strong emotion. Yes and no. I’ve always had a thing for speed and acceleration, which explains a lot of my attraction to motorcycles and skiing. But, motorcycles are also oddly meditative for me, often causing me to experience a reduction in emotions. 

 

As for mountain climbing, I’ve only climbed one serious mountain, and part of that experience does share some emotional elements with spanking. What I took away from that climb was not the thrill of summiting, or the accomplishment of the ascent but, rather, the sheer agony of the hike down, when I was totally drained of energy in a way I’ve never experienced before.  But, a storm was coming in and I had to get down.  I’ve never been pushed so far beyond my limits, and there was a strong non-consensual element in it; I simply had no choice but to stay in the experience until the mountain decided I was done. It really shook me up in a way that stayed with me for weeks.  It did feel like an amped up version of the emotional drain we can feel at the end of a very long, hard spanking.

 

 

I also think CalSpankee is right that, for some of us, the attraction to DD as adults may be connected to strong emotions experienced in being subject to spankings as a child.  I definitely think that the emotions I experienced from the reality, or the threat, of childhood spankings was stronger than what I experience as an adult, probably because of the inevitability and pure powerlessness.

 

 

It's also the case that a very large proportion of my spanking art and picture collection that involves a strong display of real emotion on the spankee's part takes place in a school setting. And, almost always involves a female spankee.  Whether in drawings or photos, there just aren't many good examples of men showing anything like real fear, anxiety, or remorse.

 

 

We also shouldn’t forget to address the spankers’ emotional experience.  I hope some of our wives will weigh in here.  I have no personal experience with it, having never been a switch and never having given a real disciplinary spanking (or any adult spanking at all).

 

I’ve told Anne frequently that I hope she enjoys the emotions associated with being in charge and with giving spankings. She has told me that she does enjoy the feeling of power that comes from bossing me around, including making me do chores or perform services for her when she knows that I do not get off on those things.  As for giving spankings, she’s more equivocal. She’s said she experiences a rush of power in telling me to get ready for a spanking and watching me comply. I've also detected a few times that she seems to get antsy if she hasn't had an opportunity to exercise that power in a while.

However, in the past she’s denied enjoying the spanking itself, though I it’s clear she doesn’t dislike doing it.  She also seems to like having a way to express emotions like anger, aggravation and disappointment.  I like this drawing by RedRump, and one thing that's always attracted me to his spanking art is that he allows his women to fully express the anger that so many of our wives undoubtedly feel regarding our behavior.

Share with us anything that seems relevant to the topic regarding your own desire for and experience with strong emotions from anticipating a spanking or from getting one, or strong emotions associated with the whole concept of being in a DD or FLR relationship. What emotions do you experience?  Are there some emotional boundaries you don’t want to cross or emotions you don’t want to experience?  Are your strong emotions mainly “positive” or what we usually deem “negative”? 

 

For the wives, what emotions do you experience in ordering, anticipating or giving a spanking?  Are there strong emotions you associate with being in charge?  With displaying to him, or to others, that you are in charge? Are there certain emotions you try to evoke in him when spanking him or making him submit to your authority, the way Anne likes making me feel vulnerable.

Have a great week.