The Terror of Submission (An Ask from Messenger)

anon: Deep down i wish to be used and submit to a rough dom but i have a hard time giving up ANY kind of control. How would you fix that.
wes: I mean, in healthy BDSM, you shouldn’t really ever give up control as the sub in the first place, or are we talking more in terms of fantasy?
anon: Terms of fantasy. Sorry about not being clear
wes: so is it a sense of being afraid of your own fantasies then? wanting to submit, but feeling a sense of terror/shame at wanting that?
anon: Total sense of shame/terror at wanting that.
wes: First, I can only really speak to my own personal experience, as someone who has come to grips with similar issues. I don’t think there’s a one size fits all solution to this sort of feeling at all, but I hope some of my own experience helps you a bit.
wes: I think a lot of the anxiety around the act of submission comes from external forces which we have internalized–or at least, that’s how I came to understand my own fear of submission. Modern society wants all of us to understand ourselves primarily as independent agents–all of us are fundamentally free, and we are all responsible for our own actions and decisions. By this model, a good person is someone exerting their will and force upon the world, acting on it, changing it. The act of submitting to someone else is seen as demeaning, humiliating, and the inverse of human drive and potential.
But that model is fundamentally capitalistic, and doesn’t come close to reflecting the actual milieu of human experience and desire. It’s taken me a long time to come to terms with the fact that humans (1) aren’t really meant to be independent at all, but are fundamentally social creatures who thrive best in community and (2) that human desires and drives are far, far more diverse that we can really understand, and that the notion that there even exists a common human nature is probably fundamentally untrue. This realization has been both freeing and terrifying to me. On one hand, it gives me permission to feel many of the things that you yourself are feeling, and has provided a window of empathy into the experiences, drives, and desires of others.
wes: But on the other hand, it creates an even larger burden of self-responsibility, because without a greater standard of human nature to adhere to, we are left in existential crisis–the only person who can effectively judge the quality of our lives is our self, but that self-judging is plagued with subjectivity and doubt.
But the root of that terror is a further mistaken understanding, that we can even really be understood as an object at all. That we have any real nature, that there is something about us which is true and fundamental to our existence. There isn’t. We aren’t things, we are a process. An unfolding, a development, a smear across time, a collection of impressions and experiences.
If we can accept that, then the question of who we are becomes non-nonsensical, there is only the question of what we do, and what we feel, and those two questions are things which possess some social and collective objectivity.
So, to loop back to the original topic, is it the act of submission which terrifies you, or is it possibility that doing so, and enjoying it, somehow carries ontological weight? That the act of submitting and enjoying that submission makes you, therefore a submissive? But submissives don’t exist. There is just the act, and the enjoyment of that act, and the human connection that allows it. The closer I have gotten to that understanding of my own experience and life, the better able I have been to come to terms with my own desires, feelings, and compulsions.