Working On Getting It Right

One thing Mrs. Lion and I make a point of doing several times a day is letting each other know how much in love we are. It’s always the last thing we say to each other before we go to sleep. I’m a little superstitious that way. If I should die in my sleep last words I’ve spoken were my declaration of love for my lioness.

Over the years, there have been times when we went to sleep with Mrs. Lion angry at me. At some point during the day or evening I had done something to piss her off. This was before we began our disciplinary relationship. It doesn’t happen anymore. Don’t get me wrong, Mrs. Lion doesn’t rise up, get her paddle, and spank me if I say something that annoys her; at least not up to now. But she lets me know that I did something she didn’t like. That’s a big step and appears to relieve enough of the tension to restore our loving behavior.

We’ve both wrestled with how to handle things that genuinely upset her. Even if she was inclined to punish me on the spot, she has yet to work through a concern about spanking me when she is angry. She’s worried that she would really hurt me. I don’t share that concern. In my experience, people are a great deal more controlled than they imagine they are. Mrs. Lion has been known punch walls (not with me, but her ex) and do other angry things. She’s said that she worries she might be as out-of-control when giving me an angry spanking.

I know she wouldn’t. Even in red-hot rage, people somehow manage to understand what would be too much. At least most people do. You read about the people that don’t in the news. I am not advocating punishing while angry, at least not on a regular basis. There are plenty of good reasons to avoid that. What I am suggesting is that it can be appropriate, even valuable to express anger in a permissible, physical way.

A great deal of the lexicon of appropriate punishment behavior is drawn from parenting experience. The longer I’ve been in a disciplinary relationship the more I realize adult discipline is very different from the sort you learn to do as a parent. That’s not to say that I don’t act like a toddler sometimes. I do and Mrs. Lion’s quick to let you know about it in her posts. Nevertheless, punishing me for being a toddler is different than punishing a real toddler.

All I find on the web that addresses adult punishment, stresses the need to do childish punishments which serve to humiliate as well as punish. I agree with that. But I don’t think that’s really the important part. In my opinion it isn’t what you do when you punish an adult, but how you do it.

Obviously a 200 pound man is going to be capable of receiving substantially more sensation than a little kid. Similarly, he will understand what’s happening to him and why. This suggests that adult punishments in the context of our Female Led Relationship with Discipline (FLRD), or as some call it domestic discipline, has to have a very different flavor.

For one thing, it can’t be mistaken for BDSM play. This sort of play can be very intense and painful. It’s welcomed by the people who bottom. I am one of them. If Mrs. Lion is to effectively punish me, I have to understand on a visceral level that this isn’t play. That can be challenging for her.

Over the years I have heard lots of people offer suggestions on how to differentiate between, for example, a play spanking and a punishment one. We’ve written about this over the years as we struggled with trying to discover how to make this distinction. One of the initial thoughts was to make a punishment spanking hard and fast. The first swat would be as hard as possible. This didn’t work for us. Mrs. Lion could no more than get seven or eight swats in before I rolled away trying to escape.

After getting some very helpful advice, Mrs. Lion adjusted her technique. She starts with “warm-up” swats, the kind you could mistake for play. I would make that mistake if I didn’t know what was coming next. After the warm-up, the swats come harder and faster. There is no mistake in my mind that I’m being punished.

The adult spanking goes on and on. The objective is to make it so painful and unpleasant that the unlucky recipient will avoid making the mistake that got him there in the first place. There is no sure way to know how much is needed to make that point. Apparently it takes a lot to get it through my head. Mrs. Lion’s spankings have been getting harder and longer.

Part of the problem is that I need to learn something about spanking as well. I have to learn to stay in place regardless of how much it hurts. This isn’t so much a conscious decision as it is training. Mrs. Lion started out by giving me a series of 10 hard swats on one cheek, then pausing for 10 or 15 seconds and doing the same thing to the other. She would repeat this until she felt she had made her point.

The stops and starts gave me time to settle from the need to escape after each burst. Over time she’s shortened that waiting more and more. As of now, she barely pauses as she delivers bursts to different areas. I’m probably at the point where she doesn’t have to pause at all. After a while, she delivers very hard single swats about one or two seconds apart. She has been increasing the number and intensity of these. I expect that my next spanking will have a great deal more of these particularly painful swats.

I also think that as we learn to manage our roles more effectively, the pause between those very hard swats will grow shorter and shorter and the number I received will become larger and larger.

There is a tricky issue here. Do my spankings continue to get more and more severe forever? Is there some point that represents an optimum punishment for me? If there is, how will we know we reach it?

I don’t know the answer to this. Some people say that when the person being spanked produces tears, it only takes a few more swats to complete an effective spanking. I’ve never cried as the result of spanking. Of course, I’ve only been spanked as an adult. I don’t agree that tears represents the sure sign of spanking success. Maybe knowing when a spanking is truly complete is like an orgasm. You will absolutely know when you have one.

Meanwhile, I am hoping that Mrs. Lion continues to dial up the severity of my spankings. I’m not asking for this because I like the idea, I don’t. I think that if we are going to do this, we owe it to each other do it right.