Mailbag: He Wants Domestic Discipline To Help Her Low Self-Esteem

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We received a Contact Us message that touches on a subject that anyone considering domestic discipline should consider:

“My wife has severe anxiety and low self-esteem. If she were even willing to try to be my Domestic Discipline wife, would it help her or make things worse? I try to be very gentle with her, but there are times that I know that I upset her that she frequently won’t tell me about. I’m thinking that this might be a way for her to feel more in control and free to tell me what I do wrong so I can fix it. If we were to give this a try for one to three months, is there a place that we could go to train her how to spank me? Should I consider restraints so that she knows that she is completely in control and I can’t move out of the way or cover myself up? I would really like to help her, but just trying to be super nice to her doesn’t always work.

On the surface, domestic discipline appears to offer a wife an opportunity to express her displeasure more easily. I don’t think that’s true. First of all, she isn’t the one who wants the ability to punish her husband. He wants her to spank him. He is initiating it because he likes the idea of her dominating him.

That’s what I wanted too. But just because I want to be a disciplined husband doesn’t mean my wife wants to assume that role. I asked Mrs. Lion to try, and she agreed. I had hoped that she would use it to let me know when I do things that annoy her by giving her this ability. That hasn’t worked out. The issue isn’t that she doesn’t have the tools to express her displeasure. It’s that she has trouble expressing herself when I do something she doesn’t like. Domestic discipline isn’t really the point.

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The first step for her, and I expect your wife too, is to be able to growl when she is displeased. Mrs. Lion is trying hard to snarl or growl when I annoy her. Once she has learned to express her displeasure safely, she can move on to use her paddle to teach me better.

The spanking is for you, not her. You are disguising your desire to be spanked behind her low self-esteem. If you want to be spanked, then ask her to spank you. Be direct. She may be willing to paddle your bottom if you ask her nicely. Mrs. Lion spanked me for years just because I like to be spanked. We began DD years later.

The bottom line (see what I did?) is that DD is for you, not her. You want it. It’s unfair to try to tie it to a problem she might have. If you want her to communicate her feelings, then talk about that with her. If you want to be spanked, then ask her to spank you just because you want it. It isn’t very ethical to use domestic discipline to satisfy your need while pinning it on solving her problem.