Phillip continued to try to make amends, but I wasn't having any of it. There was no way I would ever have felt safe with him again. It was a serious spanking, but probably no worse than some you and your readers have delivered or experienced. But it was not consensual. Looking back, I probably overreacted. He probably was genuinely sorry about the incident. But as far as I was concerned at the time, I had been deliberately assaulted and humiliated by a man who was supposed to love me and respect me.
One evening about three weeks after the incident, Phillip showed up at my door. By this time I was at least talking to him again, although I made it clear that we were finished. He had a set of car keys in his hand. He had bought me a new car as a peace offering. That was just so typical. He always thought he could buy his way out of anything. I told him I didn't want the car or anything else from him. So he left. A few days later he got drunk and drove the car through the railing on a bridge and killed himself.
The general conclusion among our associates was that Phillip was despondent over our breakup – no one knew the details of what had happened – and had committed suicide. The Highway Patrol listed it as an accident, and he certainly may have been just drunk and reckless. I have no way of knowing if it was deliberate or not. There was no note or final phone call or anything like that. It could have been either. Doc, I've had to live with the possibility that I was responsible for his death for all these years. I keep asking myself whether or not things would have been different if I had been able to step away from my own pain long enough to see his.
I have tried to remember all of the absolutely wonderful times we spent together. I try not to think about that final spanking. Maybe now that I've told you about it, I can finally bury it. It didn't end my cravings to be spanked. But it did leave me with a full blown phobia of hairbrushes and wooden paddles.
My question is, whether it's better to be happy and relieved that I can still enjoy being spanked with leather implements and stick to that, or if I should try to overcome the fear? Why shouldn't I have the right to not be spanked with a wooden implements? But if I don't work through it, how will I ever be completely comfortable with this worry at the back of my mind that it could happen again? It was just a hypothetical problem for years, but now I have started spanking again. Now I have to face this and decide what to do about it.
I suspect that my real fear was of losing emotional control, of straying into the forbidden territory of tears, failed self-restraint and hysteria. I believe the reason Dan's ordeal made such a lasting impression upon me was my horror at the possibility of breaking down the way he had, the utter humiliation of it. Then I transferred that fear onto the implements that caused him to scream and beg and sob uncontrollably. But knowing this doesn't change the fact that the thought of being spanked with a wooden paddle or hairbrush terrifies me.
Doc, on one level I enjoy the spankings my top gives me. But I can never completely relax. I'm sure my sexual response is muted by that nagging fear that if I let myself fully enter into the experience it could result in trauma and humiliation. So I'm consciously on guard, enjoying to a degree but never completely. It's also pretty inconvenient for a bottom to refuse to use two of the most common implements. My top has agreed, but I wonder how long it will take before he wants to press the issue. And no, I haven't told him what I've just told you.
I'm trying to work through both the phobia and the emotional issues, which is another phobia, I suppose. Truthfully I don't know if I'll ever get past all of this or not.
Mary