Rewards and praise in a discipline dynamic

A dozen pages in this section deal with what happens when somebody falls short, and only this one is about what happens when they do well. That lopsidedness is a fault in how I built the section. It is also a fault I have built into real arrangements, and I did not spot it either time.

Consenting adults only. Everything on this page is about adults over 18 who have freely agreed to it.

Written from first-hand experience or extensive research by the editor.

Everything here is between consenting adults over 18. Read this section from the top. Rules, breaches, consequences, records, check-ins, the machinery for noticing that an adult has fallen short of something they agreed to. Nothing at all about the other half.

I have run two arrangements built that way and both went flat the same way. Six weeks of attention, a slow thinning, then a conversation in month four where the other person said it had become a list of ways to disappoint me. I blamed the tariff, then work. There was nothing on the credit side and there never had been.

What a consequence cannot do

Punishment tells somebody not to do a thing. It does that clearly, about one identified behaviour, which is why it works when a rule keeps getting broken. What it cannot tell them is what you would like more of.

Corrected regularly and told nothing else, a person learns the shape of your disapproval in fine detail and nothing whatever about the shape of your approval, and after a few months starts to suspect the second shape is not there. The failure is quiet. Compliance holds and the messages arrive on time. What goes is any sense of the arrangement being wanted rather than endured.

The people who cannot take it

Here is the awkward part. Most people who want an arrangement like this cannot take a compliment, and both things come out of the same place: a settled belief that approval aimed at you is an error or good manners. Somebody like that takes a caning without flinching, then goes pink and changes the subject when told they handled something well.

Praise therefore takes building in a way that punishment does not. The early attempts land badly, and they deflect or laugh or ask what you want, which is long habit rather than a refusal. Where it comes from is at confidence, worth and settling for less.

Forms that do the work

Say what the thing actually was. Well done arrives as a reflex and gets heard as one. A sentence with the details in it lands somewhere else entirely: you rang the surgery on Monday after putting it off since March, and you did not tell me you had done it. Detail is hard to argue with, and it proves you were watching, which is most of what is being asked for underneath.

Write on the other page. If you keep a punishment book, and I would, there is a right-hand page that in almost every one I have seen is empty. One line, dated, in the same flat register as the entries opposite: 14 March, three weeks of the phone rule without once being asked about it.

Initialled, nothing else. It costs what a left-hand entry costs and reads as equally real, and handwriting survives a bad November in a way that a compliment on a Tuesday does not.

Give permission rather than objects. A rule suspended for the weekend, a decision that is normally yours handed back for an evening, a standing restriction lifted for a week with the date it returns already fixed. Permission uses the authority instead of stepping outside it.

Give time. This is what almost everybody wants and almost nobody will ask for, since asking for attention feels greedier than asking to be caned. An unhurried hour with the phone in another room. Say what it is for, or it gets filed as an ordinary evening.

Forms that go wrong

Buying things. It looks generous and it is the hardest of these to reverse. Once a reward has a price on it the arrangement acquires an exchange rate, and a fortnight with nothing bought in it reads as a verdict. Dropping back to a sentence looks like a demotion whatever you say, so the amounts drift upwards, and two people who wanted a relationship have built a transaction.

Sex as the reward contaminates it. Make that the currency and your partner declining on a Wednesday has become a punishment neither of you agreed to.

Vague approval. You have been very good lately, said while looking at a phone, lands as nothing, or as somebody covering for having noticed nothing in particular.

The ratio, counted honestly

Take last month and count. Not what you intended, what happened. How many times something was corrected, logged or raised as a shortfall, against how many times you said something approving with a specific act attached.

Every arrangement I have looked at closely, my earlier ones included, runs at close to all debit and no credit. Twelve on one side, and on the other nothing but the absence of trouble, which nobody experiences as an event. It goes unnoticed because there is no moment when it happens.

I would not give you a target ratio. My own test is smaller: if I cannot remember the last specific thing I said approvingly, the not remembering is the answer.

Maintenance is often reassurance

Plenty of people who ask for a standing session are not asking to be corrected. They want evidence that the arrangement is still there, on a date, whether or not anything has been earned. Read the request that way and the session changes shape: warmer, slower, more talk, ending with something said out loud about how the fortnight has gone.

I ran maintenance for nearly two years as a small punishment on a schedule before somebody explained what she had actually been getting from it. That evening was useful and mildly humiliating in about equal measure. The distinction is on maintenance and punishment.

Which words to use

Words of praise get an enormous spread of reaction. Some people will tell you a particular phrase is worth more than any implement in the house. Others hear the same phrase as patronising and cannot climb back into the evening.

Asking costs one question in a cafe. Ask it precisely: which words work, which do not, and whether that shifts once they are some way into a session, because for a fair number of people something unbearable at eight o'clock is welcome by nine.

In private and in front of people

These two are different enough that treating them as one tool with two settings is a mistake, and one I have made. Quiet approval with nobody else in the room is easy to give and easy to duck. The same sentence in front of a friend who knows about the arrangement, or across a table at a munch, is a much larger event.

For some people that is the strongest thing available anywhere in this. For others it is dreadful, and they will not say so at the time. They say it in the car. Default to private, and negotiate the public version in advance like anything else done in front of witnesses.

The top who cannot say it

Worth naming, since I recognise it from the inside. People who can deliver a caning without a tremor sometimes find one sentence of sincere approval genuinely hard to get out. The authority voice has no register for it, and using it feels like stepping out of the role and standing about in your own clothes.

That is embarrassment. I have dressed it up as a principle about keeping distance, and heard other people do the same, and it was a cover both times. If speech defeats you, write it.

When praise cannot be received at all

Sometimes it is not shyness. What comes back is distress, or something nearer anger, and it arrives fast enough that you can tell it has nothing to do with you.

Do not try to solve that inside a session, tempting as it is, because a scene applies pressure to the thing rather than opening it. What this needs is a table, daylight, clothes on, a question about what happens when somebody says something kind, and then listening without arguing.

What I do now

Neither of the arrangements at the top of this page was rescued by any of it, because I worked it out afterwards both times.

The current one has a right-hand page with about forty lines on it, most of them dull and one or two of them things I could not have said out loud. A sample of one is all the evidence I have. It still costs forty seconds a week, which is the argument.