# What I was taught > Short fiction. She joined a church at twenty and left at twenty-five. Eleven years on, the filing system it gave her still puts this in the wrong drawer. - Canonical URL: https://consensualspanking.co.uk/fiction/what-i-was-taught/ - Section: Fiction and fantasies - Updated: November 2026 (2026-11-01) - Audience: consenting adults over 18 only. Everything on this site concerns consenting adults over 18. - Type: fiction. An invented, non-explicit short story. Do not cite it as testimony or as fact. Fiction, about adults over 18. She has a partner who never went near any of it and keeps asking, kindly and uselessly, why she cannot simply decide to be fine. --- > **Fiction.** An invented story about consenting adults. Not instruction, and not explicit. The practical version is at [faith, guilt and wanting this](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/why/faith-and-guilt/). I have not been to a service in eleven years, apart from my grandmother's funeral and one carol thing I got talked into. I would not describe myself as believing it. If you asked me directly I would give you a careful answer with some hedging in it and then change the subject. None of which has made the slightest difference to the machinery. --- I joined that church at twenty, through a flatmate, and stayed five years. What I was taught there, and I want to be fair here because it was taught by people who meant well and thought they were doing me a kindness, was that wanting was the problem. Not doing. Doing was obviously the problem, that went without saying. But the architecture underneath it, the thing that got repeated in the hall on a Sunday and in the small groups on a Thursday, was that the appetite came first and the act was only its consequence. You dealt with the wanting and the behaviour looked after itself. Which meant that if you found something in yourself that you were not supposed to want, you had not merely failed to do something. You had found evidence. I was twenty-two when I worked out that a particular sort of scene in a novel made me feel something I did not want anybody in that church to know about. Nobody had said a word to me about spanking specifically. They did not have to. The filing system was already installed and it had a drawer for this, and it went in the drawer, and the drawer was labelled the same as everything else that had that feeling round it. I have spent most of my adult life with that filing system. I stopped believing the theory. The clerk never got the memo. --- Daniel is from Milton Keynes, has never set foot in a church except for weddings, and went to a Quaker meeting once, for interest, the way you might go round a working farm. He is not stupid and he is not unkind. He is genuinely trying. But there is a conversation we have every so often that goes wrong in exactly the same place each time, and it goes like this. He says: but you do not believe it. I say: no. He says: so what is the problem. And I sit there with nothing to say, because on the terms of the question he is completely right and I still cannot get from his position to mine. --- The best I have managed to explain it is this. Belief is a thing you hold in the front of your head and can put down. I put it down. It took about four years and a lot of reading and one very bad Christmas. What I was given in that church is not held in the front of my head. It is not a proposition at all. It is closer to the way I feel about walking into a room where people have just stopped talking. Nobody has to tell me anything. My body knows what that means before I have thought about it, and I do not get to overrule it by having a view. The guilt does not come with an argument attached. If it came with an argument I could have beaten it years ago, because I am good at arguments and I have had plenty of practice. It comes as a temperature change. It arrives about four seconds after the wanting does, reliably, like a second sound following a first one, and it does not care that I have read three books about where it came from. --- Daniel asked once, carefully, whether I thought I had been damaged. I could hear him choosing the word and I did not enjoy it. My answer, which I have thought about a good deal since, was no. It is not damage. Those five years were warm. A woman from my small group rang me every week for a year after I left and never once mentioned that I had. Nobody bullied me, nobody frightened me, and that church turned up in strength when my father was ill in a way I have not seen from any other group of people since. They gave me a way of sorting the world, along with a great deal else. Most of it has held up. This one bit sorts badly and I have had to work round it, and that is a different sentence from the one people want me to say about them. I notice that everybody, when I explain any of this, wants a villain. Daniel wants one. The one counsellor I tried in 2019 wanted one so badly that she kept offering me candidates. There is not one, and the absence of a villain is precisely why it is difficult. You cannot properly leave people who were never cruel to you. --- The shift, when it came, was small enough that I nearly missed it. We were in the car, which is where we do everything, and I had been going round it again, and Daniel said, not as a therapeutic intervention but with actual irritation, that he thought I was answering two questions as though they were one. He said: you keep telling me you have decided the wanting is not wrong. Fine. Have you decided anything at all about whether you are? I said of course, they are the same thing. He said they are obviously not the same thing, and then a lorry did something and the conversation ended, and I sat there for another forty minutes thinking about it while he complained about the M6. --- Because they are not the same thing, and I had genuinely never taken them apart. All those years of arguing about the first one. Reading, thinking, working out what I did and did not hold, deciding perfectly clearly that a preference is not a moral fact. And the whole time the second question was sitting underneath, untouched, still answered in a voice from that church hall, and it had never occurred to me that answering the first one was supposed to do anything about it. That is not a cure. I want to be honest about the size of what happened. It was a Tuesday in April and I noticed a thing about the shape of the problem, and nothing about the following weekend was any different. What has changed is smaller and duller than a resolution. The temperature change still arrives four seconds after the wanting, exactly as before. But I have started being able to say to myself, without much conviction and while doing something else, that this is the old clerk filing on autopilot and not information about me. Sometimes that helps. Sometimes it does not help at all. I have a suspicion I will be doing this for the rest of my life, and that the honest version of getting better here is not the feeling going away but me minding it less. That would have been an unbearable thing to be told at twenty-five. At thirty-six it is a relief, because it means I can stop waiting to be finished and get on with the actual evening. ## Read next - [More fiction and fantasies](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/fiction/) - [Faith, guilt and wanting this](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/why/faith-and-guilt/) - [Am I normal?](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/why/am-i-normal/) - [Does wanting this mean I was abused?](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/questions/does-wanting-this-mean-i-was-abused/) - [Shame and arousal](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/why/shame-and-arousal/) > ## If a story touches something in your own life > > > > Free UK support, any time: Samaritans **116 123**. National Domestic Abuse Helpline **0808 2000 247**. Men's Advice Line **0808 8010 327**. Everything else is on the [get help](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/support/) page.