Is “healthy fear” ever healthy?
In a disciplinary (spanking) FLR, it’s not only healthy. It’s necessary.
I had an interesting experience this week. A husband who had read some of my articles here on Medium reached out to me by email, saying he had just asked his wife if she would consider spanking him for real discipline. He let me know how it was going over the next couple of days as she “processed” his request. Ultimately, she agreed to give it a try!
I really felt for the guy as it was going on. While there are lots of details about our domestic discipline relationship that I’ve forgotten over the years, the night I brought the concept to my wife, followed by a short period in which she processed what I was suggesting, are forever burned into my brain.
I just hope the reality meets his expectations, though I think it’s really hard to have any realistic expectations where disciplinary spankings are concerned until you’ve actually had one.
The first few are often a letdown, as the new Disciplinary Wife is learning her own strength and assessing “how hard is hard?” But, once she gains confidence in her role she likely has less sympathy with each successive spanking. His sense of letdown is replaced with one of those “be careful what you wish for . . . you might get it” realizations.
As Aunt Kay of the Disciplinary Wives Club said in one of her publications:
“My goal is for you, the man in the relationship, to one day ask yourself, “Oh, NO! What did I get myself into?” as you await an upcoming spanking session that you desperately want to avoid. Yes, that’s right. I want you to be genuinely anxious and dreading an upcoming discipline session. Why would I say such a thing? Because it means your wife has taken the role of disciplinarian seriously, has made a decision that you are going to get a good sound licking, and you have nothing to say about it.”
That anxiety, dread, and plain old fear is what this article is about.
Desire and fear are not mutually exclusive.
As I said, those first few days after I discovered the Disciplinary Wives Club (DWC) and the concept of “real” discipline using “good old fashioned spanking”, as the DWC website explained it.
I still don’t understand exactly why, since I didn’t have a spanking fetish, but something about it hit me like a ton of bricks. I spent hours on the DWC website reading every fiction and non-fiction story. The ones that hammered me the hardest were those in which the relationship was imposed by the wife, whether the husband liked it or not, and where the spankings ended in real tears.
(Over the years, I’ve learned that neither of those elements happens very often. In real life, it’s almost always the husband who requests this type of relationship, and if tears do come it’s usually only after many, many spankings have chipped away at a male ego that otherwise has a very hard time with tears.)
I stayed in that obsessive state for three days, then simply couldn’t take it anymore. I told my wife that I’d found an “interesting” website. I told her generally what it was about. I didn’t come right out and admit that I wanted to try it, but I told her I would send her the website name and URL.
That’s where the first taste of “fear” entered the picture. Given the depth of obsession I’d been drowning in for three days, at first the fear was that she wouldn’t be into the idea and would think she had married a weirdo.
But, after she called me at work the next afternoon and said she had taken a look at the DWC website and found it “interesting,” my fear that she wouldn’t be into it transformed instantly into fear that she would.
She ended that first conversation with the instruction, “Well, if we’re going to try this, I guess you need to buy me a good wooden hairbrush on your way home.”
Gulp!
I remember walking our local mall for over an hour trying to find a high-quality wooden brush. Turns out, they aren’t a staple item in even high-end salons these days.
But, what I remember most vividly about that search was that I had a raging erection! It simply would not go down.
Yet, I also was overwhelmed by the butterflies in my stomach. All those DWC stories that ended in husbands sobbing over their wives’ knees replayed like movies in my head, over and over and over again. I really, truly was scared of both the inevitable pain and the prospect of severe embarrassment if it proved so overwhelming that it resulted in real tears.
The unlikely combination of my raging hard-on and churning stomach demonstrated that fear and sexual arousal aren’t necessarily incompatible, even for those of us who don’t have a fetish-like interest in pain or domination.
(As I alluded to above, the reality didn’t quite live up to the fears. The best brush I found still turned out to be fairly flimsy, and the OTK position proved awkward for two first-timers. Looking back, a heavy leather belt with me draped over the bed probably would have been better options if the goal was to give me a taste of what a “real” disciplinary spanking is supposed to be like.)
I do have a healthy fear of my wife, with an emphasis on “healthy.”
That combination of sexual energy and fearful energy has never really gone away during the twenty years that we’ve been in our female-led disciplinary relationship. The two go hand in hand.
In this disciplined husband’s opinion, that’s how it should be in these kinds of relationships. In fact, if it truly is a disciplinary relationship— versus sexy femdom-ish role play — it kind of has to be that way.
Suggesting that a goal of domestic discipline might be to develop a healthy fear of one’s spouse probably is going to raise some hackles, but isn’t it kind of inherent in the whole concept?
If you don’t fear the consequences your wife may impose, then what’s the likelihood you’re going to change your behavior?
I suppose I could make the “healthy fear” concept more palatable by acknowledging it’s really about fearing consequences and not fearing the spouse per se, but if the spouse is the one doling out those consequences, that seems like splitting hairs.
I also could probably replace “fear” with something like “anxiety” but, again, that seems like hair-splitting.
Discipline is something that SHOULD inspire some fear.
The bottom line is that, for disciplinary spankings to work as discipline, they must be sufficiently severe to be a real deterrent.
Part of coming to terms with the nature of the relationship I proposed to my wife all those years ago is accepting that, although the erotic energy is always part of the mix, at the time it is happening, and in the dreadful period between her telling me I’m going to be spanked and when I’m taking down my pants and going over her knee, I am not enjoying myself. At all.
A female blogger I know who is in a Male/female dynamic talks about coming to terms with the fact that she craves this kind of relationship but really does not like being spanked. She explained that to a friend in the lifestyle, and that friend responded:
“Of course not. You’re not supposed to like it. You’re being punished.”
That’s so simple, right? But, also profound and instructive. If the punishment is real, then I am not supposed to like it. To the contrary, I’m supposed to fear it.
For this lifestyle to work, I need to have a healthy fear of not playing by her rules. I have to be genuinely afraid of the consequences of disobedience and misbehavior.
In short, I need to dislike where she is taking me, while accepting that it is for my own good.
For those of us who are of one of the generations for which corporal punishment was very much a real thing, isn’t that what we were always told? “It’s for your own good.”
The difference is that, as an adult, I actually believe it.
Fear isn’t just about spanking. It’s about control and having it taken away.
As our relationship has become more FLR-ish, as opposed to narrowly focused on physical discipline, I’ve learned there is more to fear than getting a hard spanking.
There is also the less dramatic, but still very real, anxiety that comes with giving someone else control, particularly when it comes to setting the rules.
In the early days, the rules we established for what would earn me a trip to the metaphorical woodshed were mutually agreed upon. Over time, however, I told her it was more challenging for me (and hence good for my personal growth) if we adopted an “any reason, any time, anywhere” approach, with her firmly in charge of making those determinations.
I can promise you, a spanking is much easier to accept when you are on board with the “why” part.
Another one of those spankings I recall super vividly was the first time she showed me just how comfortable she had become mentally with not just enforcing the rules but also with making them.
We split household chores relatively evenly. She cooks, and I clean up. However, I sometimes get distracted or lazy and leave a few aspects of the job uncompleted. A few years ago, I had a string of incidents in which I forgot to clean out a rice cooker. The third time it happened, she texted an angry emoji along with a picture of the cooker with the rice still in it. I apologized. She did not reply.
That night, I was sitting at the kitchen table doing some work on my laptop, when she walked in from her office.
“You were supposed to sweep the floor this weekend, right?”
“Yes, and I did.”
“That’s ‘Yes, Ma’am,” she snapped. Pointing to some dog hair on the hardwood floors that I had missed, she demanded, “Does this look “swept” to you?”
“I’m sorry. I will do it again later,” I responded distractedly, still looking at my laptop screen.
“You also left the closet door open again this morning. You know the cat goes in there and tears things up when you leave the door open.”
“Did I? OK. Sorry.”
“So, you did a half-ass job on the floors, you left the closet door open repeatedly after I told you not to, and then there is the damn rice cooker.
Shut down your computer and go to the basement. You are going to get spanked.”
I didn’t respond right away. It hadn’t quite registered yet.
“What are you waiting for?” she demanded. “Get down to the basement, get out the tools, and get your pants off. You are getting spanked, and I mean now!”
And, that’s what she did. I thought since these were fairly small lapses, it might be a fairly light spanking. No such luck. She thoroughly blistered my ass with a combination of the strap, paddle, and bath brush.
As I collected myself after it was over, part of me resented getting such a hard spanking for “small” things. And, it had happened without any kind of warning or chance to correct things in lieu of getting spanked.
However, I also felt a deeper level of respect, along with the first glimmerings of that “healthy fear.” The resentment and the respect were inextricably intertwined.
The fact that she had spanked me for things that were important to her but hadn’t violated any agreed-upon rule, delivering a spanking that was more severe than I thought the offenses merited, demonstrated just how real this part of our relationship had become.
It also demonstrated that I was no longer in control. She was.
For a professional whose career life was all about controlling gnarly situations — not just losing control but having it taken away from me — was scarier than a hard spanking.
The spanking itself may not be the biggest fear-inducing agent.
While spankings can and should be fear-inducing, sometimes the circumstances surrounding them are what should really make us disciplined husbands anxious. At least if we have wives who are OK with a “whatever it takes” approach.
An older disciplined husband who participates regularly on my blog has told the story of how his wife proved her willingness to escalate to get results. According to him, after she retired she became increasingly open about her authority. Things came to a head at a party they attended at a friend’s home, where she warned him multiple times about being a little too loud and rambunctious.
Finally fed up, she asked her friend if she could borrow a room. He could not believe what seemed to be happening and continued to believe she wouldn’t do what she seemed to be intent on doing. But, she marched him up to a bedroom, took out a heavy wooden brush she always carried in her purse but had never actually used in public, and blistered his ass.
He’s not entirely sure whether any guests overheard it, but he thinks it’s unlikely that no one did.
As one of the other commenters observed:
It’s all well and good to talk about “anytime, anywhere, for any reason,” but it’s kind of a meaningless grant of authority until she uses it in a way that truly pushes the envelope. By spanking him in a semi-public scenario, it undoubtedly left him feeling a sense of “healthy fear.”
The recipient confirmed that was the case:
I totally agree that escalating the punishment to semi-public had a profound effect on me and our relationship. It planted a healthy fear in my heart and made it clear how much authority she really wielded!”
My wife has never taken things in that direction, but I know she could, and that knowledge is fear-inducing.
And, since she too is now retired (we both retired young, which may be a testament to what two decades of imposed discipline did for my focus and work ethic), the possibility is not remote.
A few months ago, we had dinner with another couple. The wife is the only vanilla friend who knows about the disciplinary aspect of our relationship. As we were driving home, my wife let me know that she thought I had been too loud and domineering over dinner and that she would be spanking me the next day.
Then, for good measure, she let me know that when the husband and I had left the table to get a drink at the bar, she told our friend that I was going to get a spanking.
I felt very embarrassed the next time I saw them. I don’t know whether she’s told her husband that I get “for real” spankings, but spouses talk, right? Every time I looked at either of them I couldn’t help wondering whether they were picturing my naked, blistered butt under my wife’s brush.
Moreover, even if only the friend knows, for some reason it is far more embarrassing for someone to know about a particular, very recent spanking, or that one is coming, than if they know about the lifestyle only at a general level.
So, do I have a healthy fear of my wife? You betcha. It’s not just the spankings, although those alone anxiety-producing.
It’s also that it’s not a big leap from telling a friend in private, to tell her in front of me, to telling the husband and wife both in front of me, to asking if she can borrow a room at their next party.
If you would like to discuss these issues directly but don’t feel comfortable leaving a public comment, feel free to reach out to me directly at dwc_husband@proton.me.
