# Why it helps > Short fiction. A hundred and eighty decisions a day for other people. On Thursday evenings she makes none, and she is tired of being told what that means. - Canonical URL: https://consensualspanking.co.uk/fiction/why-it-helps/ - 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 Do not cite it as testimony or as fact.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. A woman looking back on the worst year of her working life, describing what one hour a week actually does for her, and losing patience with everyone who wants it to be a symptom. --- > **Fiction.** An invented story about consenting adults. Not instruction, and not explicit. The mechanism she is describing is set out at [stress relief, and what it is actually doing](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/why/stress-relief/). I counted, once, out of spite. Between half past eight and six o'clock on an ordinary Wednesday I made a hundred and eighty decisions that affected somebody other than me. Not big ones, most of them. Whether to push a hearing. Whether to tell a client the thing she does not want to hear on the phone or wait until Friday and do it in person. Whether the trainee is struggling or having a bad week. Whether we can afford to take a case we should take. Then home, and the second shift, which that year was my mother. Whether the carers are doing enough. Whether to have the conversation about the stairs. Whether my brother is going to be any help, which is not really a decision, more a weather report. --- My father died in the February. The firm nearly went under in the May, quietly, in a way only three of us knew about. I made a woman redundant in the July who cried in my office and then apologised to me for crying. I am not telling you that for sympathy. I am telling you because people want there to be a wound, and if there is going to be a wound in this story then it may as well be the obvious one, and I want to be the one who puts it on the table rather than having it produced later like evidence. Here is the thing though. I was fine. I do not mean I was secretly not fine. I mean I was doing the actual work of grief in the actual way, with a therapist, on Tuesdays, for eleven months, and it was useful, and I would recommend her to anybody. Thursday was something else entirely. --- Thursdays we do this at eight. There is nothing dramatic about the arrangement. He does not have a title. I do not call him anything I would not call him in Sainsbury's. There is no contract and there are no rules that apply on a Monday. What there is, is a fixed hour in which I am not the person who decides. He decides how long. He decides what with. He decides when it stops, and the number, and whether the number changes, and I have no view. I am not permitted a view. That is the entire product. --- What it feels like, since that is the part nobody manages to write down. For the first ten minutes I am still at work. I am somewhere near the ceiling, watching, and part of me is drafting an email, and I can feel myself assessing his performance, which is a horrible habit and one he has never once complained about. Somewhere in the second ten minutes there is a handover. That is the closest word. It is exactly like the moment in a meeting when somebody more senior than you walks in and takes the chair, and your shoulders drop about an inch before you have consciously registered why. After the handover there is nothing for me to hold. I cannot overstate what that is like for somebody who holds things for a living. It is not pleasure. It is not even really relief, because relief implies you were braced. It is closer to the feeling of putting a heavy bag down at a bus stop, when your arm goes on believing for a while that it is still carrying something. And then, at some point, it stops, because he says it has, and I do not have to agree with him, and I do not have to have an opinion about whether it was the right moment. Somebody else has taken responsibility for the ending. There is no equivalent of that anywhere else in my life. --- Now the part I have got sharp about. Ellen is a psychotherapist and one of my oldest friends and she said it at a wedding, kindly, with her head tilted. That it made a lot of sense, given the year I had had. That it was probably about control. That there was often something underneath. I have been thinking about my answer for two years and it is this. I have wanted this since I was nineteen, when my father was alive and well and I had no staff, no clients and no responsibilities beyond an essay on the law of tort. The year did not produce it. The year made me use it, in the way a bad winter makes you use a coat you already owned. And when a man in the same firm plays eighteen holes on a Saturday and comes back saying it is the only time his brain shuts up, nobody at that wedding asks him what is underneath the golf. --- I want to be fair, because Ellen is not a fool and I have had two years to argue with her in my head, which is not the same as arguing with her. It is true that I use it. That is not in dispute. There were weeks that year when Thursday was load-bearing, and I know what it looks like when something becomes load-bearing, because I do employment law and I have watched people hold their entire selves up on a job title. So I keep an eye on two things. Whether I could stop, if there were a reason to, and whether I would still want it in a good year. The answers so far are yes and yes. I know the second one is true because this year has been better and I have wanted it slightly more, not less, which is not what the symptom theory predicts. --- The honest limits, since I would rather say them than have somebody else say them for me. It does not fix anything. It did not bring my father back and it did not save the woman's job. It is not therapy and it does not do therapy's work, and I would be suspicious of anybody who claimed otherwise, particularly if he were the one holding the hairbrush. It also does not last. By Sunday I am back to being the person who decides, and the bag is back on my arm. What it does is give me a floor. One hour a week when I am not responsible for the outcome, and a Friday morning that starts from further up than it otherwise would. --- I am better at my job on a Friday. Sharper, kinder, less inclined to snap at the trainee. My colleagues have noticed and put it down to me finally taking some time off, which is technically accurate. That is not a justification. I want to be careful there, because I notice the temptation to make this respectable by pointing at productivity, and it does not need to be respectable and it does not owe anybody a return on investment. It is just true. And when Ellen tilts her head, what I would like to say, and have not yet found the moment to say, is that not everything that helps is treatment for something. Some of it is just Thursday. ## Read next - [More fiction and fantasies](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/fiction/) - [Stress relief, and the honest limits of the claim](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/why/stress-relief/) - [Power exchange and surrender](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/why/power-exchange/) - [Does wanting this mean I was abused?](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/questions/does-wanting-this-mean-i-was-abused/) - [Headspace](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/why/headspace/) > ## 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.