Giving Up Control to Gain Power

First, before I begin telling you about my awesome experiment that went horribly wrong, I should let everyone know that my laptop decided to crash a few days ago. So, between my husbands breaking last week and mine crashing the other day, we're pretty much screwed. Thankfully, his was still under warranty so he gets a new one. I, however, wasn't so lucky. And since getting me a new laptop really isn't high on anyones priority list right now, it'll probably be a long time before I get one. So, I've had to resort to blogging from my iPhone. I got this sweet blogging app for it, but still, I'm not sure how the formatting and all that will turn out, so bare with me. :)

A couple of weeks ago, a friend of mine got into an interesting discussion regarding control within a DD marriage. Prior to that conversation, I never really thought about it before. I don't really like the word control, because I think people often associate that with a controlling and possesive husband which often leads to them thinking abuse. But control is one of those things within a DD marriage that's actually really important that it function correctly, as I recently found out.

So, my friend essentially began telling me that she felt like her husband wasn't stepping up enough when it came to DD, and specifically punishing. She felt like she had to make all the decisions, even down to what punishment she thought was appropriate and she didn't like it. In a roundabout way, she felt her husband had given up all the control.

I, on the other hand, didn't have that problem. I never get to pick my punishments, and so when I heard that she did, little lightbulbs went off in my head. I talked to another friend about it who agreed- if we could essentially control our fate every time we broke the rules, that would be kind of cool! And thus, the great "what would happen if WE had control" experiment was born.

My friend and I recruited about 4 of our other friends who practiced DD and agreed to trying out this experiment with us. Our goal was not to intentionally get in trouble (Ever) but IF we did get in trouble for something over the course of our 30-day experiment, we would try to control (or essentially choose and leave no choice to our husbands, lol) how we got punished.

The problem with this, as some
of us soon discovered, was once one of our husbands decided to spank, we couldn't really do much. So we decided to change our experiment to not control the punishment but essentially the details of it (how many times, etc). The point was basically to see how many of our husbands would just freely relinquish the control. However, this didn't go as planned.

A week or so into our experiment, I got spanked for something (honestly, I can't remember what). About mid-way through the spanking, I'd decided I had enough and decided to just stand up and essentially stop the spanking. That didn't go so well. I pretty much always cooperate with whatever punishment he decides, so to just flat out stop cooperating like that I think really shocked him.

The way I handled that punishment essentially caused me to be punished again. You would have thought I learned that my control idea sucked by now, but I didn't. Actually, I think with every punishment I received last week as a result of him "cracking down on the rules" sent me deeper into my "need to control" mode.

The truth is, I don't really like having the control. I like having the power to make my own decisions but having control AND power isn't good for anyones marriage, including mine. Therefore, I've learned that I need to give up the control in order to gain power. When we first started DD I entrusted my husband to have "control" over the DD portion of our marriage. Obviously there are some behavioral things I need his help with to make me a better wife (and person) so for me to ask for his help (verbally or non verbally) then take that control of how he helps away from him doesn't make any sense, and is wrong.

My goal is to get back to that mindset where I have the power, he has the control. I have the power to choose the decisions I make and if they turn out badly, he then has the control to decide how he fixes them.

Last week sucked and I pretty much dont want a repeat of that. My control experiment was a nightmare and something I totally don't recommend any of you try. It's going to take some time (but hopefully not too long) for me to get back to where I was before I started this awful idea, but I'm hoping I can do so soon because being in trouble is no fun.

-Chelsea



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