This Is Going To Hurt Me More Than It Hurts You

Domestic discipline is about education. Certainly, there is a sexual component since spanking is the principal punishment used in DD. That component is responsible for motivating the disciplined husband to comply and accept his medicine. A lot of people who seriously practice DD choose to overlook this little reality. That’s fine. The reason I bring it up now is that as I think about education, allowing any titillation to enter the equation muddies things up to the point that I’m not sure whether I am involved in a very hot, if-painful game or a serious marital activity. Let me start off by saying that I do get turned on thinking about being disciplined. I do not get turned on when Mrs. Lion punishes me.

Now that we have that out of the way, there are some realities that I think makes sense to consider: The biggest one is that one way or another couples punish one another. In some cases it’s obvious. One spouse yells and screams at the other when upset. In others, it’s more subtle. The net effect is that somebody is going to feel unhappy and the other partner is going to feel guilty for doing something wrong. Guilt is the primary tool most people use to punish their spouses. It’s destructive and there is absolutely no good way to resolve the issue.

Another, even more, destructive pattern is when the spouse who is injured simply suppresses reactions and allows the feelings to fester inside. Sooner or later these feelings come out. Almost always they come out in a way that hurts both partners. I think that this is extremely easy to fall into. It’s certainly much less risky than confronting one another. It also might be the reason the divorce rate is so high.

domestic discipline may not be right for everyone, but it is for us

I’m not claiming that domestic discipline is the answer for everyone. That makes no sense at all. What I am saying is that constructive confrontation is the only safe way to express unhappiness with any hope of resolution. For us, it takes the form of DD. Mrs. Lion has agreed to punish me when I do things I shouldn’t.

All this is well and good if it were a simple matter of flipping a switch and converting stuffed feelings into painful spankings. It’s not. This is the bump we’ve run into. In a way, it’s almost funny. The other day I upset Mrs. Lion. She followed her normal pattern of keeping it to herself and withdrawing from me. I noticed and asked her if I had earned a punishment. She said she guessed I had. So far so good. We were moving festering suppressed feelings into overt action that will result in a resolution.

The next day I asked her if she was going to spank me. She said she thought she would. I commented that she didn’t seem very definite. She rolled her eyes and said that I shouldn’t be surprised. Aha! The lightbulb went on. I wasn’t the only one who needed education. It’s true that the way I receive lessons is by the application of a paddle on my bare bottom. What about Mrs. Lion?

I’m asking her to do something that is very difficult for her. I thought that just because I could identify a situation when I upset her, it would be a simple matter for her to resolve it with her paddle. That was very naïve of me. The reason she doesn’t express her upset overtly is that it’s difficult for her.

She said she was in a bad mood

While I was writing this post, Mrs. Lion and I had an email exchange. Early this morning, I wrote her an email just after she got to work asking if she had returned something that needed to go back to Amazon. She wrote back that she had just gotten to work and the place wasn’t even open where she could return it. I realized that was insensitive of me and sounded like I was nagging her. I wrote back and apologized and suggested that I had earned another punishment. She replied that it was more the fact that she was just generally upset.

Because I was in the middle of this post, I was particularly sensitive to this sort of communication. I realized that it would be easy to agree and say that I just got caught in the winds of general upset. Then I realized that it really didn’t matter. What I did was make things worse. There were so many ways I could have asked her about the return without making her feel she didn’t do something she should. I let her know that I believe that even if this was minor in her mind, it still deserves punishing. I pointed out that she has to learn to express her feelings with her paddle. She can only do that by actually spanking me when needed.

This is exactly the same learning experience we had we first started domestic discipline. Mrs. Lion selected rules she knew I couldn’t help breaking. For example, I got spanked if I spilled food on my shirt. Neither of us thought doing that was a big deal. We had a giant bottle of stain remover we sprayed on those spots before putting them in the washing machine. That wasn’t the point. The point was for her to learn to observe and punish infractions.

We both realized from the start that our goal wasn’t to reduce buying stain remover. It was to build disciplinary habits that would carryover to situations that were much more important to us. My acting insensitive, disobedient, argumentative, or condescending were at the top of the list of things that need correction. They were also things that Mrs. Lion never confronted me about. When I did any of those things she would generally withdraw. I had to work hard to get her to tell me what was upsetting her. I couldn’t find a way to resolve her feelings about these things. Obviously, promising never to do them again made no sense. She knew I would.

As she evolved as my disciplinary wife, it became more obvious to me that we had to work on this next step. I read other blogs that talk about disciplinary relationships. Most of them are pretty much BDSM games. However, some are serious efforts to correct behavior. As far as I can tell, one of the biggest challenges, if not the biggest challenge, is getting the disciplinary wife to observe and punish infractions. Even couples who have been doing this for years struggle with this problem.

is it her job to catch me?

Disciplined husbands often write that their behavior went off the rails but their wives did not respond with their paddles. The threshold for punishment seemed to get higher and higher. This was a little disappointing to discover. This most recent exchange with Mrs. Lion illustrates a key point: domestic discipline is not a one-way process. It isn’t just the disciplining wife punishing her husband as needed. That might be the fantasy but the reality is nothing like that.

The model is not the same as punishing children for misbehavior. Children are not expected to tell their parents when they need to be punished. That’s the parents job. As a parent I know it made me feel guilty when I had to punish my kids. There’s a lot of self-doubt packed into the role of a disciplining parent. There is even more for a disciplinary wife.

Mrs. Lion wonders if maybe she wasn’t in a bad mood and misinterpreted my words. That’s valid. But it’s also a terrific rationalization to avoid taking action. I appreciate her strong need to be fair. I count on her sense of fairness to govern the way she chooses to punish me. However, at this point in our disciplinary evolution, a sense of fairness is almost guaranteed to prevent her from taking action and to continue in her old patterns.

in the beginning it’s more important to act than to be fair

The simple fact is that punishing me isn’t a very serious thing. Certainly it doesn’t require a lot of judicial analysis before paddling my bottom. As I see it, there are two very good reasons to punish me: The first is the obvious one, I broke a rule or upset Mrs. Lion. The second is far more important. That’s to help Mrs. Lion learn to create new habits. As much as I need to learn to correct my behavior, Mrs. Lion needs to learn to react in a disciplinary way when I upset her.

Since she is almost guaranteed to rationalize her upset as her fault; she’s having a bad day, someone said something she didn’t like it work, she misinterpreted my words. She has to learn to avoid those rationalizations. The only way she can do that is to turn off the filter and use her paddle each and every time something I say or do upsets her. It shouldn’t matter if anything else in the world contributed to her feelings. Until she builds these new disciplinary habits, I will probably receive a lot of spankings I might not have deserved.

There are two ways to think about this. First of all, there is that sexual component. While I absolutely hate being punished, I like thinking about it. Therefore, if I get an undeserved spanking, there is still some benefit for me. Also, each and every time Mrs. Lion reacts to being upset by spanking me, she is building the same sort of habits she built when she learned to observe that food being spilled on my shirt. It will become easier for her to translate my upsetting her into spankings.

That’s only the first step. Based on my reading, no matter how long we do this, I have an obligation to keep reminding her when I need discipline. I’m not saying that I’m the only one who gets to say when I need to be spanked. I’m simply saying that it’s my job to help Mrs. Lion remember hers. This is where my sexual attachment to being spanked is very helpful. It allows me to willingly get myself paddled when Mrs. Lion may not have remembered she needed to punish me.

The fantasy about domestic discipline is being helpless and controlled by my disciplining wife. The reality is that DD is a partnership activity. It’s her job to do her best to correct me when my behavior requires it. It’s my job to remind her if I notice that I’m slipping and not being corrected. Domestic discipline is definitely an educational process. It educates both partners. I learn to correct behaviors that are destructive. Mrs. Lion learns to immediately express her feelings in a concrete way. I think that it’s probably harder for her to use the paddle on me in these situations than it is for me to accept the beating. Maybe that old saying, “This is going to hurt me more than it’s going to hurt you,” is true.

Listen to this post.