It is rare that I am given the opportunity to bring such a moving and articulate story to my readers as this one. Carol has given me permission to quote or use her story as she sees fit.
While not everyone has the same spanking result as Carol, there are millions of people who are too embarrassed and humiliated to tell their story or believe that, like many people, “it didn’t hurt me so I may not. I will do no harm to my son. ” Unlike Carol, they do not connect the cause and effect of their emotional dysfunction and physical illnesses with their ‘Loving Spanking’. Read Carol’s story in its entirety, because the first-person truth is better than any research finding made by a double-clinician. blind study or case studies.
Non-abusive “affectionate spankings” ruined me for life
When I was a little girl and my mother thought I needed discipline, she would throw me face down on her lap and give me a series of painful slaps of her hand on my bare buttocks as I cried. In fifteen seconds it was over. I’d be crying and grabbing my ass for a minute or so, but it didn’t really hurt much after that, just a hot itch. My butt would be solid pink right after. But in a few hours he would be back to normal. And that was that.
I was not “abused” as a child, just “whipped with love.” He never left a bruise when he “lovingly spanked” me. The permanent markings were inside, not outside.
The mother strongly believed in spanking as a discipline for her children because it “worked” so well. All she had to do if she disliked my behavior was say, “Carol, do you want a beating?” and that would scare me into obeying her. And if she told me to wash the dishes and I didn’t wash them very well and I got spanked for that, you can bet those dishes were unusually spotless for the next few days. But spanking also left me with lifelong emotional and sexual problems that I still don’t know how to fix despite years of therapy. My mother has an obedient daughter and cleaner dishes and I have a life-long mess inside of me.
If I was growing up today, my mother could post on parenting web forums about how “effective” spanking is as a discipline for her daughters. You could set aside concerns about emotional damage by saying “an hour after I spank, Carol is happily playing or doing her chores.” I could talk about my good grades in school. She could talk about how polite and respectful I am to my elders, and how she receives praise from other adults about what a good girl I am in public. And if someone tried to warn her that she might give her son a fetish, she might laugh and say, “Carol would never go back like this. She hates being spanked!” And nothing he said would be a lie.
I tried very hard to be good. But sooner or later I would always find myself face down on my mother’s lap getting another beating. I just couldn’t control it, except in my fantasies. In fantasy I could make everything happen like this, as if it were really under my control. My mother’s preferred method of discipline upset me so emotionally that I sexualized him, everything about him: the kind of clothes she wore and I wore, the things he would say before and after my spankings, the position he put me in, and again. . The fantasy allowed me to deal with my trauma and have a sense of control over something really out of my control. When I envisioned myself as a naughty girl on her mom’s lap getting her little butt bare, I envisioned myself crying and begging mom to stop. However, it was my fantasy, so I really was in full control. And by eroticizing, I turned something horrible and terrifying into something delicious and pleasant.
And it worked. Becoming a Spancophile at a young age kept me from falling apart. It comforted me when nothing else could. It made me feel in control when I wasn’t. And it gave me a mock escape from something for which there was no real escape. (How do you escape when it’s your own mom who’s hurting you ???) And now I’m stuck with it for the rest of my life.
Parents who say “he didn’t hurt me, so he can’t hurt my child” just don’t get it. Everyone is different. My mother was spanked when she was little and she followed the same tradition with my sister and me. But my mother did not become a spankophile. And although my sister received the same type of punishment as me, in the same lap and from the same palm, she did not become a Spancophile either. But I did it. There is no way you can know in advance which of your spanked children will have a guilty sexual fixation for the rest of their life. So any parent who spanks their child is putting them at risk. Punishing your child with spanking is like playing the lottery, where if you “win” you will ruin your child for life.
Most spanked children are not as obsessed as I am. But some of us do. And we are not rare. When I was little, I met two other girls who were spanked by their parents and both loved to play house the same way I did: play spanking, play spanking, and more play spanking all afternoon without ever getting bored. (At least two of us were also strict disciplinarians with our dolls!) One girl even made me pretend to be her mother in real life so she could reenact real episodes for which she had been disciplined at home. For me, meeting two others so much like me in this way would be almost impossible if children like me were rare.
Now I am retired, single, childless, taking medication for depression. At a tender age I used my fledgling sexuality to cope with something that I didn’t know how else to cope with. And it has left its mark on me forever. I’ve been paying the price my whole life and I will never stop paying. I’m not married because the circuits in my brain that should have been used for romance were smashed with spanking. I have no children because I never married. So there is a direct link between my spanking, how I handled it, and my being sexually abnormal and therefore never marrying and having children of my own.
Not all damage is sexual in nature. A pattern of “it made me what I am today” emerges whenever someone unexpectedly confronts me in an angry way about something I did. I have a bad habit of saying the first rationalization that comes to mind, sometimes even lying. It just escapes me. And I don’t know how to change It goes back so far. It’s a habit I learned as a preschooler that sometimes saved me from overheating. Usually it wasn’t, but something that works only occasionally is better than nothing.
Another negative effect of my spanking for life is that when someone orders me to do something in a stern, authoritative voice, I usually give in and do it even if I don’t feel good about what I’m doing. It just happens, seemingly on its own. And it all goes back to my early years. Growing up in my “traditional values” family, the children did as they were told and did not respond. If you did, Mommy would roll you over on her knees, pull your panties down, and “teach you a lesson” right then and there. I sure learned my lessons! The problem is, how do you unlearn that lesson as an adult in the world who has to defend himself? Now I hate myself every time I realize that once again I let myself be someone’s doormat.
Today’s kids shouldn’t have to go through what I went through. Now we know more. Now we have websites like nospank.net where someone like me can tell what happened to them without sacrificing their privacy. My mother regretted spanking me once I finally told her about my adult fetish. She at least has the excuse that no one told her how serious the side effects could be. Parents reading this website no longer have that excuse. No child should have to sacrifice their developing sexual self just to face the painful violence of a parent who claims to love them.
Spanking children is harmful, hurtful, violent and must be stopped. Parents reading this: please do not use physical pain to discipline your children. ### Carol