I've only recently acknowledged my "submissive" nature to myself these past few months, and I'm trying to deal with the implications. It's been a lifelong uphill battle to repress these thoughts and instincts... and I lost. I used the internet and stumbled into the "scene" this past year, and now I have mixed feelings... and I was hoping others could help me understand them. Here's the problem I'm facing... I feel a great sense of relief now that I know there's a way to express what has been inside me for so long, but I also feel... ummm... ashamed (word choice?) that I could want/like this.
Now a little background... I guess I'm a submissive and a masochist based on recent experiences. I've had these thoughts/fantasies, though, since I was quite young, óay 7 or 8 even. (The fantasies at that time weren't sexual, of course, but they turned that way after puberty.) I played a little with light spanking and bondage with a high school boyfriend and found it thrilling, but until recently chose to ignore that desire. Many factors led to me becoming desperate enough to look on the internet for more than just information (heh), but that's not really important. I think I'm still in a state of shock, though, both about what I have experienced (how far it went) and how much I liked it. Do other people have these mixed emotions of relief and shame? Do you get over them? Maybe it's just my personality... I'm a "type A" professional woman with control issues in a very high stress field. At least from what I've read, that seems to be a common stereotype among submissive females. How do other women deal with these desires and this lifestyle when it seems so inconsistent with, say, their professional self?

Jen