Early psychiatrists concerned themselves with mental illnesses: delusions, depression, hysteria, and so forth. If you did not have a mental illness, you were presumably normal, although being normal was not necessarily a happy condition. Freud expected that analysis could help people move from the misery of neurosis to the ordinary unhappiness of everyday life.
The mid- and late-twentieth century saw a revolution in psychiatric thinking. We now know that one can be not-sick, but also lack the many positive ways that vigorous people express health. As D. W. Winnicott put it, "We are poor indeed if we are only sane" ("Primitive Emotional Development"). The modern view, as expressed by Stephen Mitchell, is this:
Psychopathology, in the contemporary psychoanalytic literature, is often defined not in terms of pieces of conflictual, unwanted fragments intruding into experience; psychopathology is defined by a missing center or lack of richness throughout experience. What the patient needs is not a rational reworking of unconscious infantile fantasies; what the patient needs is a revitalization and expansion of his own capacity to generate experience that feels real, meaningful, and valuable." (Hope and Dread in Psychoanalysis, 1993, p. 24).
This applies directly to our lives; here's how.
Most of us grew up in social settings (families, schools, groups of friends) where we were expected to behave in certain ways; this includes school, job, family, and it also includes sexual expectations. For most of us, these sexual expectations were of heterosexual vanilla sexuality, the kind in which oral or anal sex might be winked at, but anything beyond that was out. By "out" I mean that sure, if we enjoyed a little spanking play, that would be all right; but to make spanking an important, or even the dominant, part of our sexual expression would be completely unacceptable.
With so little choice in the matter, many of us have found ourselves in long-term relationships, and usually in marriages, that are not fully satisfying to us sexually. We have constructed our lives according to the expectations of others, and the part that is least true to our inner feelings is the sexual part. Sexuality is an important part of most people's lives, and if you're reading this, the chances are good it's important to you.
This artificial life, lived according to other people's expectations, is what Winnicott called a "false self." As Mitchell puts it,
Winnicott, like Fromm, sees the key problem as the generation of meaning and the organization of experience around compliance and adaptation to externality, what is presented or suggested from the outside, rather than from genuine internal desire or need. ... Psychoanalysis, for Winnicott, is a treatment aimed at the texture of experience, its richness, its felt reality, rather than at functional capacity. Sanity alone provides a shadowy, empty existence. The well-adjusted person may be missing the central features of experience that mark one's life as a personal life, felt as real, valuable, meaningful. "The false self," Winnicott argues, "however well set up, lacks something and that something is the essential central element of creative originality." (Mitchell, Hope and Dread, p. 23).
None of this means that you have to go into psychoanalysis to make your life better, although I'm not ruling it out. But most of us can best improve our lives by working to bring our actions into alignment with our talents and desires. If you find yourself flitting from one shallow relationship to another because you want spanking and aren't getting it, you are, at least sexually, living a false life. If you make the effort to connect with other people who share your passion for spanking, your life will become more authentic. I have learned that to share this passion with some of the people I most care about is liberating.
If you are in a stable relationship, or married, then any change will come at a higher price; this isn't the right spot to talk about those decisions, although they are important and worthy of discussion.
Forming a closer connection with your spanking interests, and with people who share them, doesn't mean leaving the rest of your life behind. Everyone integrates their sexual life with their ordinary life, and there is more to life than just sex. As a bondage.com poster once put it, "After the ecstasy, the laundry." But if your sexual life is unfulfilling, that's one more thing making it harder to get up in the morning. If your sexual life is exciting and satisfying, you carry that positive energy through the rest of your day.
Spanking can't make you sane if you aren't already. But it can be part of a genuinely better life.