# Why the crying is often the point > For many people the cry is the object and the spanking is the means. Why a scene gives permission to fall apart, and why the release often arrives afterwards. - Canonical URL: https://consensualspanking.co.uk/why/crying-and-release/ - Section: Why we want this - Updated: August 2026 (2026-08-01) - Audience: consenting adults over 18 only. Everything on this site concerns consenting adults over 18. Two other pages here handle the practicalities of tears. This one is about why a good number of people, women more than men in my experience, arrange the whole evening in order to reach the crying, and what a scene gives them that the rest of adult life does not. --- ## In short - For a substantial number of people the release is the object of the exercise and the spanking is the means of reaching it. - A scene supplies what adults almost never get: a reason to cry that needs no explanation, and a definite end to it. - Crying often arrives after a session rather than during, because holding position is work and work keeps the guard up. - The popular claim that crying flushes stress chemicals out of the body is not something I can support, and it does not appear here as fact. There is a group of people, larger than most writing on this admits, for whom the crying is the object of the exercise and the spanking is how they get there. Ask one of them what she cleared her Thursday evening for and the honest answer is an hour in which she was allowed to come apart. That is a different arrangement from crying because it hurt. A woman braced against a hairbrush who loses composure has had a reaction. A woman who set the evening up so that tears would have somewhere to go has built something and switched it on. I have never seen it written down, though at any munch you can find people who will say it about themselves after two drinks. ## Permission is the word that matters Count the situations in which an adult is allowed to cry without it becoming a problem somebody else has to solve. Funerals. A film, in the dark, if you are quick about it afterwards. That is close to the whole list. Everywhere else, tears create an obligation in whoever is watching. They have to ask what is wrong, and then they need an answer proportionate to the crying. If you cannot supply one, the crying itself becomes the thing under investigation. The bill is higher for women and steeply higher for competent ones. A woman who cries at work is managed, and it goes into somebody's private file on her. The ones who are good at their jobs stop spending tears where they can be seen, then find at forty that the mechanism has seized and will not operate on request. A scene changes the accounting. It supplies a reason that requires no disclosure at all. You are crying because a man is hitting you with a hairbrush, which is a complete and accurate account of the situation, and it goes exactly as deep as you want it to. It supplies a container. One room and one hour, with a person in it whose whole occupation is to be present and to stop if you say a word. Crying alone at two in the morning has no floor under it and can go on until you frighten yourself. This has a floor, and somebody standing on it. And it supplies an ending. The scene finishes, there is a blanket and a kettle, and the crying stops because what occasioned it has stopped. Nothing had to be resolved for it to be over, which is unlike most adult crying. > **The alibi.** An honest explanation and a door you can hold shut are not often the same object. For some people that combination is the whole appeal. ## Three sorts, and one of them surprises people Two of them are straightforward. Pain makes eyes water with nothing attached to it. Release crying belongs to the room, arrives as the holding together comes undone, and often has no sadness in it. The third is the one nobody expects. Something unrelated has been waiting for an opportunity and this is the opportunity. Nobody arrives intending to cry about a dead parent. A heavily defended person is put in the one situation where the defence has no work to do, and something queued up for two years walks through the gap. It is nearly always old rather than current. Current trouble keeps you thinking, and thinking is what stops this. Old grief sits and waits. I have had people cry through an unremarkable session and then apologise repeatedly, as though they had smuggled something private into a stranger's evening. My view is that this is the machine doing the job it was built for. ## Why it usually arrives afterwards During a session you have work to do. Holding position, keeping your breathing somewhere useful, counting if you have been told to count, working out whether you can take another one. Occupation keeps the guard up, and almost nobody cries while they are busy. Then it stops and the job ends. Your nervous system gets the news that nothing further is coming, the guard has nothing left to defend, and down it comes. That is why a top who finishes and immediately starts tidying up has shut the door on the thing the evening was for. For plenty of people even that is too soon, and it turns up in the car, or the next morning over the washing up. Late is ordinary. ## I cannot tell you why it works You will read, on wellness sites and in a good deal of kink writing, that emotional tears carry stress chemicals out of the body and that crying flushes them away. It is a satisfying story and I cannot support it. It traces back to a thin line of work from the 1980s that never became anything I would put my name to, and the effect people describe is far too large for a few millilitres of anything. What I can point at is more modest. Ambler and colleagues, in *Psychology of Consciousness* in 2017, documented altered states during consensual BDSM, including reduced self-awareness in the receiving partner. Baumeister argued in 1988 that masochism works as an escape from high-level self-awareness. Both describe a state in which self-monitoring goes quiet, and self-monitoring is what prevents adults crying in front of each other. That fits what people report, and fits is a weaker word than proves. The effect does not wait for the explanation. Aspirin worked for about seventy years before anybody could say how. I would rather tell you I do not know the mechanism than hand you a tidy one that turns out to be wrong. ## What it needs from the other person They do not stop, which means pausing and staying close rather than packing the evening up at the first tear, since that removes what was working at the moment it started to work. They keep it ordinary, with no emergency in the voice. And they do not need reassuring themselves, which is the requirement that gets missed. I got that last one wrong early on. Someone I had played with twice started crying ten minutes in, and I stopped dead, sat her up, apologised and asked four times whether she was all right. She spent the next half hour looking after me, and told me the following week, kindly, that she had been about thirty seconds from something she had been trying to reach for a year. The practical side, including how to tell release from distress, is on [what if I cry](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/questions/what-if-i-cry/), which is the page to send a partner who asks. ## If you never cry Some people do not cry here and never will, and a fair number of them arrive at a page like this convinced they are failing at something. Nothing here is graded. Dry-eyed relief is the same relief, and the settled feeling on Saturday morning does not check what your face did on Friday night. Several of the people I know who get the most out of this have never cried during it. If you want to and cannot, [does everyone cry](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/questions/does-everyone-cry/) sets out what helps, and the short version is that trying prevents it. ## When the cry becomes the thing you are chasing Two patterns I would notice, neither a crisis on its own. One is escalation, where it takes more each time to reach the same place. Some of that is ordinary tolerance, and it matters only when the force is climbing specifically to get to the release. The other is frequency. Once a fortnight becomes once a week becomes whenever a bad day happens, and the arrangement has quietly changed what it is for. A release you book when you are settled behaves differently from one you book when you are in a state. The signal that matters is set out on [when it stops being play](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/guide/when-it-stops-being-play/). None of which makes wanting the cry suspicious. Most people who want it are plainly just people with nowhere else to do it. The conditions around it are on [stress relief](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/why/stress-relief/), and the state itself on [headspace](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/why/headspace/). > ### If what comes up will not go back down > > > > A scene is a container rather than a treatment. If something surfaces that is still with you at the end of the week, that is a conversation for somebody qualified. Samaritans, **116 123**, free, any hour. Mind has practical information at [mind.org.uk](https://www.mind.org.uk). If you cried because something happened that you had said no to, the National Domestic Abuse Helpline is 0808 2000 247 and the Men's Advice Line is 0808 8010 327. ## Read next - [What if I cry?](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/questions/what-if-i-cry/) - [Does everyone cry?](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/questions/does-everyone-cry/) - [What it is actually for](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/why/what-it-is-for/) - [Aftercare, and why the comedown is real](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/guide/aftercare/) - [Wanting it when you are low](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/why/wanting-it-when-you-are-low/) ## Sources 1. Ambler, J. et al. (2017). "Consensual BDSM Facilitates Role-Specific Altered States of Consciousness." *Psychology of Consciousness*, 4(1). [doi:10.1037/cns0000097](https://doi.org/10.1037/cns0000097) 2. Baumeister, R. (1988). "Masochism as Escape from Self." *Journal of Sex Research*, 25(1), 28–59. [doi:10.1080/00224498809551444](https://doi.org/10.1080/00224498809551444) ## Common questions ### Why do I want to cry when I am spanked? Because a scene is one of the very few adult situations where crying is permitted and does not have to be explained to anybody. You get a reason that is completely true, a person who is present for it, and a definite end to it. For a substantial number of people that access to release is the point of the exercise, and the spanking is the means of reaching it. ### Why do I cry after a spanking rather than during it? During a session you still have a job to do: holding position, managing your breathing, working out whether you can take another one. That occupation keeps the guard up. When it stops, the job ends, and the crying arrives in the gap. Delayed by an hour or a day is common and does not mean anything went wrong. ### Is it normal to cry about something unrelated after a spanking? Yes, and it catches people out more than any other part of this. Something that has been sitting unattended for months or years, a bereavement or an ended marriage, will take the opportunity when your ordinary defences have nothing to do. It is not a sign that the session went wrong, and it is usually about something old rather than something current.