From people pleaser to Professional Dominatrix

I've wanted to share this story with you for some time about two seemingly very different roles - one of which involves emotional tyranny, misery-making, and the disempowerment and manipulation of others. The other can make you a very interesting person to speak to at parties! 

Hi, I’m Lex, and I’m a recovering people pleaser. 

Allow me to take you back to a time in my life over a decade ago. I was living a pretty idyllic life. I was growing my own vegetables in the garden of my “forever” home, working my way up the career ladder in the corporate world, engaged to my partner, well-educated, and with savings in the bank. And I was also the unhappiest I’d ever been.

There was nothing “wrong” per se with this privileged life I was living. It just wasn’t my life.  

That’s a major problem with people-pleasing - I became so engrossed in making and keeping other people happy that I’d lost sight of what made me happy. If you had asked me then to make a decision - even on what to have for dinner - I would have become lost in these swirling, overwhelmingly complex internal calculations of what would be best for everyone. And inevitably, I would have deflected the decision back to the other person. It seemed easier that way. But, over time, the feeling that this wasn’t right became undeniable. 

Whilst we may be able to see more obviously the power dynamic that is occurring in a Dominant/submissive dynamic, there is still a form of power play occurring in people pleasing. It is more likely though to be implicit and subconscious. 

People pleasers give beyond their capacity, which means crossing their own boundaries and denying their own feelings to do so. It’s making ourselves and our wants and needs smaller by prioritising others. In people pleasing, there is a diminishment of our own personal power as an indirect strategy to get our needs met. What looks on the surface to be someone going “above and beyond” is more likely the use of acts of so-called kindness as an unspoken demand for acceptance and reciprocated niceness. I can tell the difference in myself between true altruism and people pleasing by how quickly frustration and resentment appear if I don’t receive sufficient gratitude, reciprocity, or a feeling that I’m invaluable to the other person.

In a way, as a people pleaser we Dominate ourselves in the most abusive of ways, hyper- controllng our behaviours and emotions, changing who we are, often because we don’t feel worthy of having love and acceptance for simply being. 

So, how did I get from there to becoming a Professional Dominant? It may not surprise you to hear that, in part at least, I initially did this because someone else wanted me to! I don’t know whether it was my curiosity or their persistence that got the better of me in the end.

I never would have dreamt in a million years that I would be a Dom/me! I’d never knowingly met a Professional Dominant in real life, let alone considered it as a possible career. I used to think that being a Dominatrix involved being hyper-feminine, stiletto and leather-wearing, man-hating, and whip-cracking. None of these things were true of me!

BUT I gave it a go, and what I quickly noticed was that - as in other roles of power I'd occupied, such as leadership and teaching - you can perform the role of being in power yet still feel deeply disempowered. I could still give beyond my capacity and ignore my own needs, and if anything, the more role power I had, the more demands were put on me. 

It was through stepping into an explicit power role as a Dominant that I could start to see where I had blocks or resistance to my own power, just how outside of my comfort zone it was to truly take the lead and to prioritise my desires. The intensity of these scenarios highlighted just how wobbly the foundations were. 

What I really needed to do was to reconnect with my personal power. In other words, I needed to start listening again to my own wants, willingness, and limits. I had to get much, much clearer with my boundaries. You won’t last long in this work without them! 

I also discovered that there were many transferable skills that I had acquired from my people pleasing: 

• I can be very present with others, attentive, and attuned to their emotions and desires 

• I am very adaptable - I can bring out different parts of me to suit the situation 

• I am more likely to notice when others may be people pleasing and can gently encourage them to step into more authentic power 

So, there was a silver lining to being a people pleaser after all! 

Today, most of the work I do - whether that’s teaching groups about Ethical Dominance, creating experiences for individuals in my private sessions, or working with burnout in the workplace - it’s all about power and our relationship with it. 

That, for me, is one of the greatest benefits of kink - that it allows us to create a contained space in which we can exaggerate, contrast, and flip the existing power dynamics that are present in EVERY relationship. Kink can enable us to externalise these inner conflicts we all have so that we can look at them from different angles.

What would it be like to be SO WORTHY of love that someone wants to worship you? 

Yes, kink can be sexy and fun and playful. It can also change your life by helping you to become a more whole version of yourself! 

I love that I now get to be in service in an Empowered and Empowering way AND get my needs met because of the skills I've learnt along the way. I love that I have the honour of witnessing the most vulnerable and at times unseen parts of other people. 

Being in the role of the Dominant has been an incredibly powerful antidote to people pleasing.

One of the biggest lessons I've learnt has been that I can lean into the parts of myself that feel the weakest or most vulnerable and make them bigger, rather than trying to pretend they don’t exist. I’ve found power in embracing what I thought was weak, because if I wasn’t willing to reject those parts, I was less fearful of others doing that. In fact, I’ve learnt that it’s quite possible that others will adore me for those very parts. 

AND, I still don’t need to fit any of the stereotypes of a Dominatrix. I can just be me. 

If this resonates with you, perhaps you’d like to join me on an embodied journey into Ethical Dominance? My POWER & PRESENCE course is all about this - helping you to feel more comfortable in your power and more confident taking the lead, without feeling as though you need to fake it. Find out more at: https://www.pleasurerebels.com/powerandpresence 

This post is based on a talk I gave at the Sex Chats in Brighton in April 2024.