Healthy Fear of Disciplinary Spankings and/or the Disciplinary Wife Giving Them (Club Meeting 525)

“The cave you fear to enter holds the treasure you seek” – Joseph Campbell

 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. Mine was pretty quiet, which I think I kind of needed. This has been a tough year on many levels, including my physical resilience. I felt like maybe a week off, hanging out mostly by myself and not doing much beyond hikes with the dogs, helped me gain a little ground back on that front.

 

It also felt like the participation on the blog ticked up a little, which is a great thing, even if it’s still a little quieter than I'd prefer.  It’s not just about having a good discussion on a discreet topic.  Rather, I’m not sure readers fully appreciate how much I rely on one week’s discussions to provide good launching points for discussions the following week. It’s why I’m supportive (within reason) of people meandering from the official topic, because it’s often those departures from the main topic that give me ideas for future topics.  Even if a topic has been done to death, a reader comment may suggest a new angle or point of approach.

 

It's also interesting how we each bring our own perspectives to something as simple as a spanking meme or piece of spanking content.  Two weeks ago, I was surprised at how much meaning ZM managed to extract from a fairly simple audio series on Tumbler. Last week, it was Glenmore seeing the picture of three guys drinking juxtaposed with three wives holding spanking implements as involving the three guys knowing they would be spanked but choosing to throw caution to the wind.  On the other hand, I took it to be three guys with alcohol-related amnesia regarding the likelihood they would get spanked.  In retrospect, Glenmore's interpretation does seem more viable, but it is still interesting how much we each read into simple memes and pics.

 

So, I appreciate those who jump in and participate, even if the official topic doesn’t resonate that much with them.  Even if it's simply providing your own spin on one of the drawings or memes.

 

In that vein, one of the comments that did resonate with me last week came from Jackson, and it involved his reaction to his wife’s increasing strictness and the increasingly severe spankings she delivers when he disobeys her:

 

“I have been in a pretty strict FLR/DD with Lauren for almost 3 years, and I have noticed that in just the last 8 months or so that I almost never misbehave or break rules in Her presence. As the spankings have become more and more severe (as She has become very comfortable with causing pain and leaving marks) I am quite honestly afraid of Her. I know on one level that I need and have earned the Discipline when it is delivered, I Do Not want to provoke it.

 

In that same comment, he qualified a bit what he meant by being “afraid of Her.”

 

Her Discipline has always been real and severe, but there are some sessions that stand out and have truly changed my view of Her. Don’t get me wrong I don’t go around in fear of Her all the time, but I have gained the perspective of having a very healthy respect for what I know she is capable of doing and especially what I don’t know about how far She will go.

 

A few months ago, I copied down a comment from ZM, which also addressed the topic of fear and its role in DD.  Although the specific topic it addressed was caning and whether the cane is truly among the most fearsome instruments, his observations about fear and spanking were more general and included:

 

One common thread that I have noticed this week among commenters and our early exposure to spanking is the word "fear." Most of us were somewhere between being somewhat scared of being spanked and being terrified. While each couple's DD or FLR relationship varies, over the years I have mostly heard that we are not particularly afraid of upcoming spankings. We might feel some butterflies in our stomach or something like that, but not the deep knot of fear. There are many reasons that we are not necessarily as afraid of being spanked as adults, including but certainly not limited to:

 

- more emotional maturity

- more ability to see things from a wider perspective

- higher pain thresholds

- less humiliation or embarrassment (due to the generally private nature of adult spankings)

- more feeling of control (since even consensual non-consent is still consensual, and we COULD always stop it if we wanted to)

- a whole lifetime of experience telling us we will survive

and so on and so on...

 

Whatever the reason, our wives might be able to command respect, but not necessarily instill immediate, real fear. As CalSpanking mentioned a few weeks ago, many of us who are wanting this are at least partly motivated by wanting to feel strong emotions. There is nothing that is stronger than fear. Sometimes, the thing I want (and at the same time don't want) the most is to feel that visceral fear that spanking used to instill in me. I think that is at least part of what makes me want the humiliation of having witnesses so much, because I am afraid of that.

 

I was thinking about Jackson and ZM’s comments in light of my own recent desires to crank up the intensity of our DD relationship, meaning I’m going through one of my not infrequent phases in which I (think I) want her to be much more strict and severe, similar to what Jackson describes.  

 

And, yes, I am aware of the very big "be careful what you wish for . . ." danger where strictness is concerned.  Yet, that doesn't stop me from wanting to experience it.

 

Does a desire to feel a stronger sense of fear or anxiety play a role in that?

 

I think it does. 

 

Maybe it’s about, as ZM alluded to, a desire for strong emotions in general; fear being among the strongest of emotions.  That’s possible. I do think that I sometimes have an outsized desire to feel things intensely, even “negative” feelings.

 

ZM’s comments also suggest that there is something fundamentally different about the feelings aroused by adult spankings, no matter how severe, as compared to what some of us experienced as kids.

 

 

I’m not sure I fully agree with that one.  Perhaps it’s because I came upon the concept of DD so suddenly and unexpectedly when I stumbled upon the DWC, but I have very distinct memories about the nature and intensity of the feelings it caused to roil up within me.

 

It wasn’t subtle in the least, and part of it was definitely fear-based.  So much so that it took about three days for me to build up the courage to broach the subject with my wife.  Not because I thought she would reject the idea. To the contrary, while there was a lot of ambivalence, I think I probably was more concerned that she would NOT reject it.  I had instantly become obsessed with the idea of getting a “real” adult spanking along the lines of what Aunt Kay described in her Tips & Methods session, yet part of the obsession lay in acknowledging how bad the “real” spankings she described seemed to be.  I was obsessed with it, to the point that I could not NOT bring it up to Anne, but that's not quite the same thing as "wanting" it.

 

Although it’s hard to remember how I felt when a spanking was coming (or I thought one was coming) when I was a kid, I’m not sure the fear involved in the prospect of a real adult spanking was all that much less than what I experienced back then.  At least, not the fear or anxiety I felt when we first started down this DD path.

 

In fact, I think one aspect was probably even more fearsome for me, i.e. the possibility of losing emotional control, culminating in real crying. 

 

When we are kids, crying from spanking—or from any significant physical pain—was simply expected.  Although it might have added to the embarrassment, it wasn’t like your spanked peers didn’t cry from a spanking, or perhaps even from the mere threat of one.  Even if it happened with others present, the embarrassment factor probably wasn't as strong, because it wasn't that uncommon and the role of parents and kids made surrendering to the whole thing more palatable in the sense that ego wasn't as tied up in it as much.

What I recall being anxious about when spanked as a kid was the pain and, moreover, the inevitability of it all.  Even back then, the anxiety of being spanked by adults centered in large part on the fact that there was no way to get out of it. I think that's what made school paddlings so emotionally impactful (no pun intended).  Someone had decreed you were going to get spanked, so you were.  But, it was also the case that a swat with a hard paddle hurt like hell.

 

As an adult—particularly an adult male—it’s different.  The spankings I receive today are much, much harder than anything I received as a kid.  Yet, when I came upon the DWC, it wasn't really the severity of the spanking that obsessed me so much. 

 

It was more about the fact that the wives were imposing them whether the husband agreed or not and, even more so that it often seemed to result in full-blown sobbing tears.  The tears depicted in the DWC stories weren't unlike those experienced in childhood spankings, but the context was very, very different in terms of the ego hit involved.

Turns out, being spanked like a child when you are a one is very different than being spanked like a child when are an adult.

 

The context is so obviously different. And, unlike when we were kids, it isn't a context shared by our peers.  We experience getting spanked for being bad.  As far as we know, they do not.  Further, as kids, most of us were in the same boat; there was a certain egalitarianism in knowing pretty much everyone got spanked from time to time.  As a disciplined husband in this modern era, however, we are usually the only one in our household who gets spanked.

 

In short, there are all sorts of ego and embarrassment issues associated with being spanked as an adult that weren’t in play to the same extent as a kid, including especially for me, the prospect of crying in front of my wife as a direct result of her exercise of authority over me.

 

For me, the embarrassment surrounding the very prospect of being spanked to tears seems to be way more about the exercise of authority—and my submission to it—than about the pain of the spanking.  In fact, I think one reason I reacted so strongly to some of the DWC stories was because tears were not just a byproduct, they often were the wife's stated goal.  I've used this spanking meme a lot over the years, because it summarizes how those stories made me feel: being spanked to tears is embarrassing, but being spanked to tears because the person spanking you told you to cry is so much more so.

As ZM’s bullet-list suggested, as adults we DO have higher pain thresholds. Or, at least we’ve been socialized to react less dramatically to physical pain.  But, the opposite is true with respect to control and power hierarchies.  As kids, we are expected to surrender to authority.  Perhaps that’s another reason why there is less embarrassment and shame when being spanked as a kid – surrender was natural and expected, including the demonstration of surrender involved in full-blown tears.

 

As an adult, however, we’ve been socialized that surrender is equated with weakness or with being lower in a relevant power hierarchy. Our egos—or at least mine—rebel more at overt displays of surrender to someone else’s authority than at giving in to physical pain. 

Another way to articulate the distinction might be that, for me, being "disciplined" is more fear-based than merely being spanked, because the former involves someone else setting rules for me, someone else holding me accountable, someone else making me do or not do what they want.  I'm not sure I was really aware of it at that time, but I now think it was that real change in the power hierarchy that caused me such fear when I first read the DWC stories, and the hierarchy change was most embodied in the wife being so thoroughly empowered as to cause real sobbing tears.

 

So, for me it’s not quite true that adult spankings entailed none of the fear involved in being spanked as a kid. In the earliest days of our DD experimentation, I think I did experience something similar to that degree of fear, and perhaps with an even stronger fear around losing all emotional control and crying hard from a spanking. 

 

What changed over time is that I came to realize how unlikely I was to cry from even very severe adult spankings.  Paradoxically, I suspect the same fear that I might surrender to the whole situation and cry during a spanking is exactly what keeps me from actually doing so. Twenty years into this thing we do, I think I’m still so resistant to the embarrassment of letting myself go in that way that I can’t bring myself to do it, despite the fact I’m still more or less fascinated by the prospect.

 

So, when Jackson talks about being afraid of his wife, I get the perverse attraction to it, and for me the attraction lies in his characterization of how the fear lies in not knowing how far she might go.

 

For me, the “how far” isn’t really about the pain level itself.  It’s more about the level of control and strictness. It’s about the ego threat that would be inherent in her really assuming the maternal role we talk about; a role that is more or less limitless in its authority.  

 

I don’t really fear the pain of being spanked more often, but I do fear the emotional challenge that would result from her really tightening the reins and challenging my autonomy much more consistently than she has to date.  What I fear isn't so much frequency or severity but, rather, the prospect of her spanking me more frequently and more severely because she has decided on her own that she wants to spank me more often for more things that she cares about, whether I do or not.

Though, that fear does include that at some point she might simply announce that she wants me to cry, expects me to cry, and will prolong a session (with as many breaks as necessary to get around any numbing), until I finally do cry.  Honestly, after twenty years, the prospect of that kind of emotional surrender still scares the hell out of me.

 

So, in that sense, I am still very much afraid of being spanked, and I am still perversely attracted to the idea of having a “healthy fear” of my wife.

 

How about you?  What role, if any, does fear have in your DD relationship? Do you genuinely fear being spanked by your wife?  Or, are there other aspects of being a husband in a DD or FLR relationship that scare you?

 

Do you feel like behavior improvement requires a certain amount of fear? Do you feel that spankings need to be hard enough to make you feel genuine fear, or at least strong anxiety, about her spanking you again in the future?

 

 

Do you feel a healthy fear of your wife or of her authority? If so, do you find that fear to be attractive or something you want her to consciously cultivate?

 

A couple of notes regarding the pics/drawings I chose for this week’s post. First, I usually mostly use pictures depicting males as the disciplinary recipient.  However, in my collection spanning thousands of pics, drawings, and spanking memes, those in which a male has a facial expression approximating anything like real fear or anxiety are few and far between.  So, when illustrating "fear" as I intended in this post, I was forced to use more drawings where the person about to get a spanking was a female.

 

Second, although I find myself increasingly turned off by AI-generated spanking “drawings”, I had recently downloaded a few in which the subject about to be spanked looked very fearful/anxious about what was about to happen.  But, again, the subject was female.

 

I hope you have a great week.