Disciplinary Spanking's Role in Attitude, Mood and Mindset [Club Meeting - 567]

“For the first year of marriage I had basically a bad attitude. I tended to place my wife underneath a pedestal.” - Woody Allen

Hello all. Welcome back to The Disciplinary Wives Club – Tribute blog.  Our weekly on-line gathering of women and men who are in, or would like to be in, a Domestic Discipline relationship of the type advocated by the former Disciplinary Wives Club (archived copy in the “Links I Like” list, below right).

 

I hope you had a great week.  Ours was eventful, at least by our recent standards, on a couple of fronts. 

 

First, we took a little road trip, knocking a couple of national parks off our list.  

 

Nothing too adventurous, as hiking and similar activities one might set out to do in a national park is still beyond my capabilities.  But, a piece at a time . . .

And, in any event, it was prime “leaf peeping” season.  I love this time of year, although our dry summer apparently meant "this time of year" came faster and is staying shorter than most years.

 

Second, and more germane to the subject of this blog, we dipped our toes back into DD spanking.  Though, in context, it’s probably more accurate to say we dipped our toes back into plain old spanking, as there wasn’t any real discipline involved.  It was more about testing the waters or, more specifically, testing my tailbone and its ability to withstand any level of spanking with any instrument.  We used a cane, and a tool I recently bought that is sort of like a birch bundle, comprised of three small-diameter canes.   

 

My thought process was that, while canes have never been effective for us, they have the benefit of flexibility and, therefore, might be less prone to re-injuring a still sore tailbone.

 

The “good” news is it went more or less as anticipated.  The birch-like tool did sting a fair amount, and the combination of that tool and the cane did leave more marking than I usually display, which I assume was a function of not being spanked at all for over five months.   

 

But, there wasn’t anything very satisfying about it.  Anne was pretty tentative, understandably, given that it was basically a test run to see what my butt could handle. And, because it had that limited purpose, it didn’t feel disciplinary, despite the fact that it was painful and did leave significant marks.  

 

It's probably time to acknowledge that, while I always feel like I should appreciate the cane, given how iconic it is, for whatever reason it doesn't do anything for either of us.  Also, the whole scenario emphasized just how core the accountability/consequences element is to me; without it, the act of spanking itself does little or nothing for me.

 

Still, the fact that the session didn't result in any "bad" pain, means we can start trying to get back to our normal DD routine.  I think it’s probably wise to start with the hairbrush before graduating to her bath brush or a paddle, but those are coming for sure.

 

How do I feel about it?  Well, there is an element of timidity and anxiety.  This has been the longest pause we’ve taken since starting DD twenty-plus years ago.  It feels like starting over, because it kind of is, with all that a "first real spanking" entails.

 

 

The anxiety is exacerbated by the fact that I’ve spent almost six months hyper-focused on protecting my injured areas, and it's a significant mental challenge to purposefully create a situation in which pain in that area is the goal.

 

I also suspect it may take some time to get used to having spanking lingering in the background as a live threat.  I don’t feel like I’ve taken advantage of my physical impairments to get away with anything, yet the lack of any prospect of real consequences had more of an impact than I might have foreseen. 

 

I talked about this a little bit a couple of months ago but it didn’t get much response, so I’ll highlight it again.  One of the things that has surprised me about this hiatus is the impact on my attitude.  More specifically, how the complete absence of DD as even a possibility highlighted just how much DD has affected my attitude and mindset over the last 20+ years.

 

It’s a hard thing to admit, but in the absence of having someone impose boundaries, I start feeling like, for lack of a better word, a dick. A stressed out, pessimistic, anxiety-prone dick. 

 

It’s not that I’ve been acting like a dick.  As I said, I really don’t think I took advantage of this hiatus to act out.  Yet, I also think that in the months immediately prior to my accident, Anne had been getting more assertive about things like disrespect, caustic comments, etc.  Even if I didn't consciously let loose with more of those attitude-driven behaviors, both of us probably were aware of the problem with DD no longer being a live possibility to address them.

 

 

And, regardless of any objective deterioration in behavior, at some point it dawned on me that my attitude and mindset had degenerated and, moreover, that I used to feel like this all the time before DD came into our lives.  Over the last six months, I’ve felt annoyed more often, been more prone to saying snotty things (or at least thinking snotty thoughts), and I generally have felt more negative and judgmental.

 

What dawned on me was that this was my basic mindset before I first discovered The Disciplinary Wives Club and DD.  And, while I wasn’t as clear back then as I am now regarding what exactly it was about DD that appealed to me so strongly, I did recognize that there were too many times when my temper or argumentative attitude made me hard to live with. In fact, when I pitched the idea of DD to Anne, one of the main points I made was that it would give her a way to keep my attitude in check by imposing consequences if and when she was the victim of it.

 

Over the intervening years, I’ve recognized that DD could fix individual instances of a bad attitude.  In fact, it could even fix the content reflected in an attitude, such that I could think I was right about something we argued about but, once my pants were down and her bath brush was descending with force, suddenly I could see the legitimacy of her point of view.

 

I also knew that part of me craved boundaries.  What this accident and lengthy recuperation have brought home to me is that, when left entirely to my own devices, the absence of any prospect of a hard spanking for  particular bad acts results in a generally worse attitude and mindset. I just plain feel better when someone imposes limits and boundaries on me.  

 

Being spanked for attitude wasn't a part of my teen or early adult experience.  Now that I've had this epiphany about the role that our DD relationship plays in keeping my attitude in a good place, I really wonder how life might have been had my parents, or a significant other, put me over their knee not for some specific act or omission but just for being a jerk or copping an attitude. In fact, I believe that lack of discipline when growing up contributed significantly to feeling chronically stressed out in my 20s and 30s.  Without external boundaries, I always had to try to control myself and get myself out of trouble, which seemed great when I was a teen but laid down some bad emotional patterns.

So, for me, the maternal attitude reflected in this meme never happened:

 

And, it wouldn't have had to be a parent doling out discipline for bad attitude.  I recall teachers in junior high and high school calling me out for attitude issues.  Yet, though corporal punishment was still very much a thing back then, none of them took the next logical step of paddling me until my attitude improved (or until I learned to fake it better).  There were a couple of times that I got sent to the principal's office with the expectation (in my mind) that I was going to be paddled, but it didn't actually happen.  Again, I wonder how my mindset might have benefited if it had.

When we're living the DD dynamic on a semi-regular basis, I tend to perceive my spanking needs in functional/behavioral terms: I do something that we've agreed is spankable, or I do something careless or stupid, and I know I need a spanking to reinforce that there are consequences for bad or thoughtless behavior.

 

But, that’s different from feeling the need for the dynamic itself. What I’m perceiving now is how much, before this accident, I was beginning to feel Anne’s authority--backed up by spankings and spanking threats--as a positive force underlying our whole relationship. Now, I notice it by virtue of its absence, and I notice the weakening of what was a strengthening background of respect and deference.

 

 

This realization about the strength of the correlation between DD and the quality of my day-to-day attitude feels profound, not because I wasn’t aware of it in principle but, rather, because the chronically stressed out, negative mindset of my 20s and 30s—which the frustration of my recovery and the lack of DD allowed to creep in again—seemed so distinct that it was almost like that younger version of me was an entirely different person.  One who probably could have profited from much stronger discipline much earlier in life.

 

Several years ago, one of our then-regular female contributors, Marisa, drew this connection between spanking, humbling, and attitude.

 

“That 'humbling function' allows you to let go of that ego, accept authority and become the (mostly) wonderful, charming and loving men you really are. It frees you to be yourself and that is what we are after. That is also why spanking without the mental and emotional parts of it doesn't really work. The message never gets through because you are not prepared to hear it before you have been humbled. (Parenthetically, I think a man who needs to have his pants taken down by his wife in order to behave should be plenty embarrassed).” 

 

In terms of severity, I don't really know how hard a spanking needs to be in order to result in an "attitude adjustment".  It might be that it's more about the consistency of the DD relationship itself and feeling like the boundaries are always there.  Maybe it doesn't take a lot as long as it happens at the first sign that an attitude problem is taking root.

 

Yet, I also think that the cathartic impact of a hard disciplinary spanking plays a key role.  As long-time readers know, I've always had a morbid fascination with crying, and I think part of that is it seems like it would be such a profoundly humbling experience, and part of me associates that kind of humbling and surrender with dropping the ego issues that lead to bad mindsets.  It's about clearing out the bad stuff to let in the good.

 

 

I note that among the DWC fiction stories is one called Attitude Adjustment, in which the wife--while exhibiting a loving/nurturing approach--delivers a hard two-part spanking with a brush and a strap, to cure her husband's moodiness and bad attitude.  She doesn't take it easy on him just because the spanking is to correct a bad attitude, versus correcting/punishing bad conduct. To the contrary, when she's tempted to stop, she instead gives him a dozen hard ones with the strap because she knows that he needs it and that, in the end, sitting on a sore bottom for several days will help prevent the bad attitude from returning.

 

What role does DD play for you with respect to attitude and mindset?  If it is an important tool in fixing attitude, is it about temporary moodiness, temper, etc.? Or, have you experienced the more fundamental kind of transformation I’ve been exploring; one in which it feels like after DD became a part of your relationship, your attitude/mindset shifted to such an extent that it was almost a personality change? 

 

I hope you all have a good week.

Disciplinary Spankings as Incurring a Cost - The Necessity of Severity (Club Meeting - 566)

"He that is good for making excuses is seldom good for anything else." ― Benjamin Franklin

Welcome back to The Disciplinary Wives Club – Tribute blog.  Our weekly on-line gathering of women and men who are in, or would like to be in, a Domestic Discipline relationship of the type advocated by the former Disciplinary Wives Club (archived copy in the “Links I Like” list, below right).

 

Hello all.  I hope you had a great week.  In many ways, my last week or so has been a big improvement over the 18+ weeks that came before.  It had been a tough month.  After progressing depressingly slowly but somewhat steadily in literally getting back on my feet, I had a major setback that lasted almost a full month.  It’s only been the last week or so that I’ve gotten back to where I was over a month ago.  But, once I got there, I pushed out of my comfort zone a bit.  I took some walks in the forest that weren’t super easy even when I was in good shape. And, on the five-month anniversary of my accident, I got back on a motorcycle for the first time. I was super tentative, but that probably was good, all things considered . . .

 

Anyway, it was nice feeling like there was progress made, even if I paid a bit for the over-exertion.  I was starting to feel pretty damn isolated and bound by a seemingly never changing routine.  Usually, it's great to have unstructured time on your hands, but I can testify that there is such a thing as too much time with too little you can do.

 

Which almost led me to skip posting, for the third week in a row, as Anne and I are about to head out on a little road trip.  But, I hate it when more than a couple of weeks go by without a substantive post.  So, I decided to see if there was more to be made of a suggestion TG put out there last week:

 

Dan, I know you’re always interested in possible contents for posts and discussions. This may be a little too vague and esoteric but I’ll put it out there any and you can use it or not, as you wish. I’ve been doing a lot of thinking recently, trying to understand better the motivations and emotions behind this DD lifestyle that we’re in. We’ve covered much of this stuff in the past. My view is that these punishments provide her with a way to work off any anger, assuage any feelings of guilt I may have, and overall, hugely benefit a marriage as problems don’t hang around poisoning the atmosphere for hours or days. I’ve been coming to the conclusion, however, that there’s more to it than that, related to cost - in the sense that to be real, a punishment must have some kind of real cost associated with it (I don’t mean monetary.) I guess I’ll elaborate if this turns into a discussion. The second area I’ve been pondering will only resonate with some of the participants here. I have had an interest in spanking since my teens (on either side of the paddle) but only discovered DD when I found the DWC website around 2000. Spanking was obviously sexual for me until then, but I’ve never been into the idea of gentle. Whether giving or receiving, I always expected it to be at least quite hard, with a good after-glow. So my question is, for those who have such an interest, and I guess people who use maintenance spankings as well, what distinguishes a real punishment spanking from any other kind? Is it just a matter of intensity or is there more to it?”

 

I wasn’t sure I fully got the first point he raised and asked for clarification. He replied with:

 

Hmmmm. I’ll try, I don’t promise it will be very coherent, but here goes….. One can apologize for something said, done, or not done. It’s only words, it’s easy and costs nothing. I’d suggest it may be a good start but it can be just a brush-off to make it go away with minimal effort. So I guess the next step is buying flowers or something like that. It’s something I do sometimes for no particular reason, but I’d never do that to say sorry. It’s always felt to me like a cop-out. Again, there’s no real cost to this - I don’t count a few dollars for the flowers. I suppose this feels like “I can do stuff that I know will upset her, whether deliberately or carelessly, and just make it better without it really inconveniencing me in any way.” I see a punishment spanking as something that, in terms of genuine physical pain, costs me something. It should be long and hard enough that I really want to avoid it. If I’ve screwed up in some way, it shouldn’t be too easy for me to repent, and saying sorry or buying flowers is too easy. It also clearly is related to behavior modification, which I think we’ve discussed before. The punishment should be severe enough to discourage a repeat of whatever the behavior was. (Which of course ties into my second question) So I guess “cost” to me is a genuine consequence that I really want to avoid. I’m not sure that that’s any clearer, but hopefully it will help.

 

As an aside, TG’s reference to flowers conjures up one of the very first spanking drawings that I recall getting my attention after I found the Disciplinary Wives Club and became near-obsessed with experiencing real discipline.  It was this one by Jay Em.

 

This one, and several other pieces of Jay Em’s work, tie in nicely with some of TG’s musings, as a recurring theme is a husband (and in a few instances a son or daughter) being held to account in circumstances where they seem to be surprised that they are unable to talk, or emotionally manipulate, their way out of it.  It also ties into one of TG’s points about the nature of a true “cost”: “If I’ve screwed up in some way, it shouldn’t be too easy for me to repent, and saying sorry or buying flowers is too easy.”

 

I think one reason I needed clarification about this point about “cost” is that, for me, the “penance” element—which I tend to think of more in terms of “accountability”—is so firmly at the core of DD for me that, without it, I wouldn’t consider a spanking to be “real” at all.  It’s so central to my DD interest that I don’t think of DD as existing without it.

 

It’s why, for me, DD has always required two elements: First, the spanking must be for some real offense, misbehavior, or significant carelessness.  Second, the spanking must be severe enough that it feels like authentic punishment. 

 

A third element that isn’t absolutely required but adds a critical additional element of realism is that the spanking is “imposed”, i.e., I’m going to get it whether I agree with it or not. In other words, I’m being punished because someone else thinks I need to pay a cost, to use TG’s description.

 

TG’s comment raises the issues of apologies in relation to DD and suggests that the problem with them is they are simply too easy.  I largely agree, though I will say that I personally find apologizing for bad behavior very hard at times.  And, sometimes the verbal recognition of responsibility adds to the humbling process.

 

 

But, I still get his point.  Apologizing, with or without flowers, is sort of a “necessary but insufficient” element of getting to the other side of the bad behavior.

 

And, the fact that an apology isn’t always sufficient doesn’t mean it isn’t sincere. It very well may be. When searching for appropriate memes for this post, I found examples going both ways.  In a few, the wife expressed something to the effect of, “You say you’re sorry, but I want to make sure you really are.”

 

 

In others, the wife acknowledges the apology and its likely sincerity but decides that, for whatever reason, it still requires an additional “cost” in the form of a spanking.  The gist was usually that, although she didn’t doubt he was sorry for what he did or didn’t do, she wanted him to be sorrier than that.  There is an inherent recognition that while expressions of regret may be genuine, a spanking inherently increases that regret in a very tangible way.

 

 

It also seems generally true that even if the husband is truly sorry and feeling regret when he apologizes, a spanking ensures that he stays that way for a while.

Another thing about the cost of a spanking -- the wives and husbands' respective perspectives are likely very different as it is happening.   From the man's perspective, the cost imposed by a spanking seems very significant at the time it's happening or about to happen.  

Yet, from the wife's perspective, it's just part of making you the "sorry boy" she knows you sometimes need to be.  Perhaps not always, but she often likely comes at it from a much more casual perspective.  You've done something wrong, and she's going to make you pay up for it, but in the scheme of things, it's not that big a deal.

For her, right?  She's clearly right about the fact that, in the overall scheme of a DD relationship, each spanking is just one of those things.  It doesn't last all that long, and after she makes you pay the appropriate cost for your conduct, you both move on.  Yet, for us spanked husbands, it feels like so much more than that at the time.

 

Another angle on the role of paying a real cost in the form of a hard spanking is that it may increase the stakes in a way that leads to better decisions.  In my work life, I was pretty prone to thinking about authority and rules in terms of: “It’s better to say you’re sorry than to ask permission.” In many life situations, that may indeed be true.  However, the risk-reward calculus changes a little when an empowered Disciplinary Wife enters into the picture.

 

Regarding severity and TG’s observation that, for him, spankings must be hard for him to have any interest in them, I share that bent.  For me, it’s all part of a package – for a spanking scenario to do anything for me emotionally, it has to combine the elements of a real offense, that is punished with a real spanking, and the reality of the spanking hinges to a large extent on it being very hard to take.  

 

I think there is also a connection between the severity of the spankings and Anne's perception of her own power and the reality of the hierarchy we've agreed to.  She's always said that it's not the spanking itself that she enjoys (though I think that has changed over the years) but, rather, the feeling of power she gets when she tells me to get ready for my spanking and watches me comply.  She has said that part of that dynamic involves knowing how hard it must be for me to submit to her in that way, knowing how hard she is going to spank me.

 

Looking back, the lines on the DWC website that held the most morbid fascination for me when I first discovered it were those that emphasized the severity of a real disciplinary spanking and the cost one imposes on the husband:

 

“The training methods suggested do involve strict discipline, and strong doses of corporal punishment. . .. Some of the physical punishments described are meant to be painful. There is no question that welts will be raised and bottoms bruised . . .”

 

“A dose of corporal punishment should have a dual effect. It should be extremely painful while it is being applied, and the area it was applied to should remain very tender for a period of time afterwards.”

 

“If you give a spanking the way it should be given, the results should still show a week later. He should wince every time he tries to sit for days after.”

 

To those who don’t have this bent, it may sound not just harsh but overly so.  Yet, the DWC emphasized that the men who want a real DD relationship want and need the spankings to be that hard:

 

“If you feel the least bit sorry for him during all this, remember, a submissive man does not want a weak or lenient woman. He wants someone very strict and dominant. If he wanted anything different, he wouldn't be over your knees in the first place. This isn't a small child you are holding over your lap by force -- this is a grown man who needs and wants a hard spanking.”

 

As TG points out, his need to pay a significant cost is tied up with the issue of severity, which may or may not be present with non-punishment spankings, like maintenance.  We don’t do maintenance, so I will let others comment on his particular questions around that. I do recall that some who use maintenance regularly, like Al, have opined that although maintenance spankings are less severe than punishment spankings, for them they are still substantial. 

 

A final note on severity.  I saw this picture a while back, and it caught my attention for a couple of reasons. First, I have a thing for spanking pictures and art involving women ascending stairs, though it's usually the spanker climbing stairs with a paddle.  Second, the level of damage to her bottom is pretty true to how much I used to mark after a hard spanking of the type we've been discussing in this post, though I now don't exhibit anything close to this.  Anyway, something about this one attracted me so much, I've wanted to find a reason to post it. 

 

 

I hope you all have a great week.  Because we’ll be on the road, I may be less active in weighing in on this one.  It’s also why I posted a little earlier in the week than usual.

No Post This Week

 Hi all. Sorry to do this two weeks in a row, but we have some family stuff going on this weekend, so I won't be posting.

No Post This Week

Hi all. I hope you're having a good weekend and, for those in the US, a peaceful and/or adventurous long holiday weekend.  

We had some social commitments this week that left me pretty worn out, with some errands to catch up on.  So, I'm going to enjoy my three-day weekend by doing a whole lot of nothing.

Have a great week.  Feel free to keep commenting on/discussing the DWC pamphlets I posted last week and any thoughts they stimulate for you.