;-) I´m with Tom too, there are many factors playing together to form our personality. Some are set, some develop depending on the surroundings. We learn how to cope with the things we experience.

I have not made any experience with rape, no experience with sexual assaults. Still i had what i can tell from lookig back now, submissive fantasies.
at the age of 17 perhaps i was pretty insecure but gathered all my courage to tell a boy in my class that i was interested in him. this resulted in me beeing bullied by almost the whole class, all the boys and at least some girls as well. This taught me to hold back a lot, not to open up to any one easily and not to make the first step in a relationship... still it did not influence my beeing submissive. it neither made me less submisse nor reinforced my submissiveness. What i perhaps need more in a relationship than others now is security. I want to feel wanted even more than before and it costs me a lot to open up as I´m pretty much afraid of getting hurt. Also in that time I had some problems with my submissiveness. Because of what had happened to me I was struggeling with myself, with my feelings. I was not in peace with myself and with my desires.
There was a time I actually felt that I was abnormal. Fotunately I have overcome that by now
This is no setting. it is something I aquired over the years. And it has become a habbit hard to break.
What a good D/s relationship has to offer in this respect is the trust that has to build between the lovers, the closeness, the communication that should be there in any relationship but is inevitable in a good D/s relationship. Still my aquired way to cope with feelings makes it harder to reach this point.

Ultimately I can only say one thing: The setting within me was there early but there were a lot of factors that influenced my beeing able to handle it, to reach a point where I was finally selfsecure enough to live what was programmed early on.
And I could even Imagine people beeing turned around in a way. Depending on outer factors I could imagine one, especially someone with a hard life, never to find to him or herself.
As some of you already mentioned there are those people who have been abused and end in a circle of abusive relationships... Some, like you Gem, have broken out, but some perhaps never will. Due to outer circumstances they will perhaps never find to their submissive, dominant or vanilla setting and live it in a way that makes them happy.


Sorry for taking so long.
Greetings, Liz