Even though every BDSM relationship is different, discipline usually plays a crucial role in the experience. It’s well known that there is no discipline without punishment! Even the most obedient subs sometimes break the rules, so a Dom should establish a proper punishment system to reprimand them.
The beauty of consensual punishment is that it allows for a great deal of creativity and exploration. However, even as a Dom, figuring out the right way to discipline your partner can be challenging. For instance, if a naughty sub always breaks rules and agreements, you might need help developing new ideas to establish dominance. Some subs might require different punishments, so you must think outside the box to apply appropriate discipline.
If you’re a Dom looking for new ways to punish your sub or want to explore this aspect of a BDSM relationship, how can you spark your creativity? Keep reading to find new ideas about giving your sub new pleasures and establishing proper punishments for their misbehavior.
How Does Punishment Work in BDSM?
BDSM relationships operate in a fully consensual manner. This means not all BDSM relationships include physical or emotional punishment. Some Doms focus on positive reinforcement and rely more on bondage to train their subs.
However, in most cases, the dominant partner will use various methods of punishment to discipline their sub. This goes hand in hand with providing encouragement or even rewards when they do good or follow orders.
To ensure both parties are safe and happy in this type of relationship, they must consider and disclose acceptable behavior and agreed-upon punishments when establishing Dom-sub roles. The methods of discipline that work for them should be clearly outlined so the Dom knows when and how to discipline them.
D/s relationships might also involve written or informal agreements where all these things are clearly defined. If both parties decide to incorporate submission or slave training, punishments and rewards can take various forms inside and outside the bedroom.
The dominant partner plays a crucial role in this process, as they should design the discipline with “attention and detail.” Subs give up all control and allow the other party to decide when and how to punish, meaning the Dom is responsible for ensuring it is done correctly.
Tips on How to Properly Punish Your Sub
As we explained, training a sub is a delicate task. To ensure both parties enjoy the process and your roles in the relationship are clear, you must stick to the agreements and stay true to your purpose when things get tough.
Besides agreeing beforehand to include punishment in their relationship, partners need to discuss the nature of the punishments, their severity, timing, rules to be followed, etc. Here are several topics to discuss with your sub.
1. Know Their Limits
As a Dom, you hold most (if not all) of the power in the relationship. According to your agreement, you might even decide the smallest things in your sub’s life, like what they eat or drink for each meal. This, in turn, obliges you to know your sub’s likes and dislikes, even beyond what they explicitly state. It also makes you responsible for their well-being and teaching them a lesson when they disobey you.
Knowing a sub’s limits is essential for their satisfaction. In most cases, subs will specify which things are off-limits, but given the exploratory nature of BDSM relationships, they might not know all the types of punishment they can endure. Regarding discipline, this puts you, the Dom, in charge of learning and predicting which forms of punishment your sub can enjoy and which will be overwhelming.
Additionally, you must consider other factors, such as your sub’s physical and mental state. If you’re already in the middle of disciplining, it is crucial to look for signs of distress. Subs sometimes deliberately push themselves to please the Dom, but their partner’s job is to protect them from self-harm and avoid dangerous situations or behaviors. For instance, if you enforce punishment through some form of bondage, you should always pay attention to your sub’s circulation, pain tolerance, and comfort or discomfort during the process.
2. Predefine Which Behaviors Will Be Punished
Obviously, this is one of the key elements of slave training in a D/s relationship. Punishment is a way to let your sub know that you’ve noticed their disobedience and won’t let it slide. However, to get them back “in line,” they need to know what they did wrong.
If a sub doesn’t know why they’re being punished or feels you’re punishing them for no reason, this is considered a breach of your mutually agreed-upon BDSM agreement and will undoubtedly undermine trust. Since punishments are meant to please them, Doms shouldn’t use discipline to physically or mentally torture them at their whim. Instead, punishments should be consequential and purposeful.
Ambush punishments are also a no-go. Before you start disciplining your sub, you should discuss their rule-breaking behavior and how you plan to punish them. As a Dom, you must tell them why they are being punished. One form of punishment even makes the sub think about their mistakes and torment themselves trying to guess.
Of course, you also need to pay attention to timing, as waiting too long to punish your sub might reduce the punishment’s impact. Once the sub has modified their behavior and learned their lesson, you can move on.
It’s best to establish rules for the relationship beforehand. Even if you didn’t initially discuss acceptable forms of punishment, there’s still room to do so as the relationship progresses.
3. Make the Punishment Proportionate to Their Behavior
If you’ve ever faced severe consequences for minor behavior, you’ll know why this is important. No sub wants to feel like their Dom is overly harsh or doesn’t consider the magnitude of their rule-breaking. For example, having a bad attitude or talking back is a minor offense compared to disobeying a specific command. Your punishments must be equal to or less severe than their misbehavior. So, for the former, you might withhold their punishments or restrict them for a time, while the latter might be suitable for a spanking.
As a Dom, you want to design the least severe forms of punishment that get your message across. If a sub repeatedly breaks the same rule, you can increase the punishment’s severity. However, it’s crucial to remain calm and view punishment as a tool for their well-being, not just your satisfaction.
Additionally, you should always expect your sub to disobey in one way or another. Having too high expectations for a sub can lead to anger, quickly resulting in poor decisions. Punishing your sub while angry will cloud your judgment, and you might use overly harsh or potentially harmful punishments. This easily undermines trust in the relationship, and you might also cause mental and physical harm to the person you should be protecting.
4. Don’t Go Too Easy
Most subs perform best when they feel their Dom closely monitors their actions daily or weekly and disciplines them. If the sub has stopped trying to please their Dom, this usually indicates they need to be punished. After all, there is always room for correcting human behavior or improving relationship rules.
Moreover, as a Dom, you are responsible for looking for patterns of behavior to see when your sub intentionally or unintentionally undermines the relationship. Bratty subs enjoy the attention and often break rules to get their partner to discipline them. Just as subs need to respect agreements and follow rules, Doms must always be prepared to design appropriate disciplinary measures. If you selectively decide when to punish specific behaviors of your sub and when to let it slide, you undermine your authority in the relationship.
Many Doms tend to hesitate to enforce more severe punishments at the beginning of their BDSM journey, which can disappoint subs. However, safewords are a great option in these situations. Subs can use specific words or phrases to let the Dom know they’ve gone too far or when they want the punishment to stop entirely. If your sub is too eager to please you, you can have them count, say a word or phrase during training, and gauge their pain tolerance based on their voice.
5. The Importance of Aftercare
While many think aftercare is just ointment after a spanking, it’s much more. Physical and emotional punishments should be followed by aftercare, as this is when the Dom shows their softer side. Regardless of the severity of the training, you need to make your sub feel safe and give them as much time as they need to recover.
Overall, aftercare focuses on the sub’s needs, so it’s crucial to listen to them or, if the sub needs to get used to voicing their needs, decipher what might make them feel more comfortable, loved, and cherished from their state. Blankets, a meal, and electrolyte drinks can help in these situations; if you’ve practiced impact play, caring for their physical well-being is a priority. Additionally, you can include hugs, kisses, positive affirmations, and congratulations on how well they did.
Skipping aftercare might leave your sub feeling disappointed or unappreciated for their efforts. This easily undermines trust or damages the sub’s mental health, harming the relationship’s nature.
15 Punishments to Try
There are many ways to train your partner in a BDSM relationship; punishments can range from mild to extreme and extraordinary. Now that we’ve covered when and why to punish your sub, we’ll discuss how. Of course, not all punishments are physical, as many Doms prefer to combine psychological and emotional discipline before resorting to the whip. We’ll cover all categories of discipline below and reveal familiar and lesser-known forms of punishment.
1. Timeout/Enforced Silence
In many cases, this is an effective form of punishment for minor disobedience. You can put the sub in a corner, have them face the wall like we did in school, order them to their room, or forbid them from speaking a word out loud. Other ways for subs to pass the time include kneeling on the floor, holding a ping-pong ball between their knees in a squat position, or performing any other static punishment you can think of. It’s easy to reestablish dominance without using bondage toys or physical force.
2. Restrain Your Sub with Ropes and Chains
Restraint is a notch higher on the punishment scale. Doms can use bed restraints to bind subs to the bed, cuff them to a piece of furniture and forbid them from moving for a period, or cuff their legs and make them walk like that for the rest of the day. For repeat behavior and disobedience, you can bind the sub in uncomfortable positions with ropes, such as the ceiling, or tie their hands and feet behind their back. There’s a lot of room for creativity in this department, so you can repeat the same form of punishment in different ways.
3. Orgasm Denial
Simple and effective: Bring your partner to the brink of orgasm and leave them hanging. Better yet, you can make them start touching themselves and then order them to stop before they climax or physically restrain them.
4. Forced Orgasms
This punishment pairs well with bondage restraints. Instead of tying your sub to the bed, why not force them to orgasm? You can repeatedly bring them to orgasm and make them climax while dry and exhausted.
5. Spanking, Paddling, or Whipping
This punishment is the most common form in the BDSM community and is usually preferred by subs. The difference is that spanking requires using your hand, paddling can be done with any hard object with a handle, and whipping requires a whip. The effect is the same; they all cause physical pain and quickly remind the sub they should behave.
6. Put a Collar on Them
This punishment is both a humiliation tactic and a form of restraint. You can walk your sub around the house and outside like a dog or tie the leash to something and make them act like an animal. Doms can also have subs eat or drink from the floor.
7. Deny Them the Pleasure of Pleasing You
As a Dom, you can take sex off the table and forbid your sub from performing oral sex or kissing you. Additionally, you can deny them any physical contact, or you can masturbate in front of them and make them watch without being able to do anything to please you.
8. Wax Play
Another way to use this is to let your sub inflict the punishment themselves; for instance, you can sit back and order the sub to use a candle on different parts of their body. If the sub is comfortable with more advanced play, you can even go for a Brazilian wax as punishment. The wax should be body-safe, and care should be taken when playing with hot and cold temperatures to avoid burns or injuries.
9. Golden Showers
No, we’re not talking about buying them jewelry but about, you know, peeing on them. Some D/s relationships take a more extreme approach to this form of punishment. However, this is unsanitary and might lead to unnecessary health issues later.
10. Make Them Wear Toys
You can punish your sub all day and show them that you’re in total control. For example, making them wear vibrating toys or a chastity cage while at work or with others is a perfect way to remind them that you are punishing them.
11. Chastity
This is another simple form of punishment that can be used in many cases and is often practiced in long-distance BDSM relationships or when the Dom isn’t near the sub. By forbidding them to masturbate, you control their sexual pleasure without lifting a finger, toying with their mind as much as their body.
12. Menial Chores
If your sub particularly dislikes housework or chores, you can use that to your advantage and make it a form of punishment. You can order your sub to do simple things like mop the floor while repeatedly spilling things on it, do the laundry, or cook. For a more extreme punishment, you can give your sub a toothbrush instead of a mop and have them clean the entire house. Better yet, menial chores can be mind-numbing, so they can easily be used as torture.
13. Use Them as Furniture
Has your sub crossed some lines while you’re getting ready to dive into a good book? You can always use your partner as human furniture and prop your feet up on them. You can also use them as a table, coat rack, or any home decor you can think of as a form of punishment.
14. Deprive Them of Their Favorite Things
Grounding your sub is a great way to assert your dominance and teach them a lesson, just like parents do with children. You can take away your sub’s phone, forbid them from watching their favorite shows or accessing the entire TV, or even punish them by forbidding them from engaging in any sport or activity they love.
15. Cuckolding
While a bit extreme, many BDSM relationships provide room to explore partners’ sexual orientations with others. If you’ve previously agreed that you’re willing to bring others into your bedroom, cuckolding can be an excellent form of torment and punishment for subs. Doms can make subs watch them engage in sexual acts with another person and deny them the pleasure of joining. Of course, both parties should agree beforehand on what acts the Dom is allowed to perform or engage in, and they can decide together which people are allowed in their sex life.
Conclusion
With great power comes great responsibility! Punishment is no easy task and should be taken seriously by Doms. While considering controlling someone else’s life or behavior might seem fun, understanding the agreement’s parts is crucial.
Doms should always consider the extent of the sub’s mistakes, not be too harsh or too lenient, and find the appropriate punishment when disciplining their sub. Timing and aftercare also play significant roles in this process and are part of the dominant partner’s obligations in the relationship. As long as Doms and subs agree on the rules beforehand and respect each other’s limits, they can enjoy this relationship.
After all, BDSM agreements are based on mutual trust, and doing something the other party doesn’t consent to is considered abuse, regardless of the nature of your connection.
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