We all have those little voices in our head that tell us what to do. Sometimes it tries to convince us that our disobedience is okay. The voices are very convincing at times and then we have guilt riding with us until we come clean. Perhaps you've heard these voices yourself:
"Come on, he won't see me have this Pepsi I'm not supposed to have. I can drink it before he comes home and no one need know."
"As long as it looks like I cleaned the kitchen he won't care, I can bend the rules a bit with this one."
"He won't know that I didn't go to bed on time if I stay off the computer; I'm not ready to sleep just yet."
These are simple voices, but only you know how far your voices go to stray you from the path of your personal submission.
If you give in to the voices you have a choice to make. You can keep it a secret and live with the guilt until it eats you up so much that you just have to tell them. By then the infraction isn't only that you had a pop, for example, but that you hid it from them, perhaps even lied to keep them from finding out and you are in deep deep trouble. Or you can do the good submissive thing and admit your misdeed as soon as you can. The sooner the better.
Honesty is always the best policy, even if that means you are going to be in trouble for a time for disobeying. The pain of guilt and added punishment is far far worse. Coming clean isn't easy. It means admitting to the person you serve that you didn't take their rules seriously enough to obey them. It means that you failed them.
The level of the failure varies on the infraction, but admitting it to your Dominant does give you some level of uplift when the punishment is handed down. I've even had my Dominant tell me that since I brought it to him so quickly that my punishment would be less. If you count sitting in the kitchen facing the microwave for 15 mins as less (ugh I hate time out).
Coming clean does not mean you can listen to those voices again. You need to learn from your mistakes and make a conscious choice not to do it again.
How do you come clean? What is the longest you held something in and how did you get disciplined for it? Share your story so that others may learn from your trials.