From the Wild Collective Heart series: Part 31

Content Warning: Dissociation/DID, coercive control, BDSM and power-exchange dynamics, sexual manipulation, psychological and emotional abuse, spiritual abuse, scapegoating, and trauma.

At the beginning of reconnecting with our ex Dom, he told us we were like a succubus, incessantly on him. He distanced himself from us, and it was all very confusing and painful. On the one hand, we thought we were doing as he had trained us to do, but it displeased him, so we waited for him to give us new instruction.

The Raven stood up for us, noticing we were hurt and confused. He seemed to listen to her, which encouraged her investment in his approval as her Dom. He could then tear down her self-confidence and protective nature until she could no longer protect us from him.

Along the same lines, he used our emotional, physical, and spiritual investment in him as our Dominant partner. Years into the relationship, after the Rogue and the Raven had been decommissioned from service because he had hurt them so badly, he began telling us he would never actually engage sexually with us and hadn’t in a very long time. He claimed he was just helping us with our needs and that he had learned not to engage with us sexually because when he did, it went badly.

It was very painful and humiliating. We felt confused and betrayed. We didn’t trust him the same after that, which allowed him to leave us for longer stretches. We filled in the gaps for him, telling ourselves he must have needed a break from all the heavy lifting it took to be our Dom. Because we are a DID system and that experience is complex to us, we were open to seeing it as difficult and complex for others.

Even though we are the ones who live it.

We felt like we were being pitied. Like we were being handled as though we were obsessive over him, regardless of the fact that we were behaving how he had taught us we needed to behave for his attention. He completely knocked around our ego, and regaining our balance was nearly impossible. We had given ourselves to him deeply, only to have him tell us the relationship was a fraud. It destroyed our understanding of who we were in relation to him and what we thought the relationship had been.

-Star

Like somehow our sex was bad. Like we caused problems in his life. His explanation to us was that anytime he engaged with us sexually, he would get attacked, or something would happen to his life or to someone he loved, and this was clearly our horrible bloodlines doing it through us, because his bloodlines were good and ours were bad.

We couldn’t really argue over bloodlines because we didn’t have a connection with our ancestors yet and did not know that a few bad eggs did not define thousands of generations of ancestors. We just knew our more immediate experiences with family and had our trauma with them to go by.

We came to understand later that he was redirecting his own darkness onto us for us to take responsibility for, just like our family had used us as a scapegoat. He was cleansing himself through us and even being protected by us. We prayed for him regularly. For his happiness, his well-being, and even that, if he needed to move on from us, he would find the strength to do it and have a happy life.

We felt grateful he would still work with us at all for the purpose of our healing. From the beginning, we’d set an intention to heal through this dynamic, and that extreme focus on healing kept us from seeing what else was happening. It also kept us in the dynamic because anytime we questioned it, we could look at ourselves and say, but we had healed through it. That became our proof that it was good.

But we were only his wash rag.

We were healing ourselves in the middle of being abused.

-Lilith

Side note: I need to say here that he took all the parts of us capable of running our adult life out of service. That left Star and Lilith, neither of whom had any frame of reference for running our external life based on their own experiences and memories. Both of them are deeply spiritual and rooted in spirituality, not earthly life.

-Raven

And another thing worth mentioning is that he actively taught us not to protect ourselves, which mirrored how our boundaries were treated in childhood: as resistance rather than self-protection.

He knew that our whole goal in healing ourselves was not just to raise our quality of life, but to not add to the trauma in life. We weren’t looking at any of this like, I need to protect myself. We were only seeing where we could heal ourselves more or help because that was our agreement with him when entering into the D/s. We’d use the energy of the dynamic to heal ourselves.

-Rogue