From the Wild Collective Heart series: Part 39

Content Warning: Dissociation/DID, childhood trauma, coercive power dynamics, spiritual abuse, manipulation, degrading sexual language, religious trauma, and spiritual themes involving deities, energetic bindings, and ritual practices.

A new concept came into my awareness that I couldn’t ignore. There is a path of love available to us human beings, and it echoed a wish I’d held as a child. When I was a little girl, I saw that there didn’t seem to be enough love for each of us children and my parents. That is why I believed my father relied on me in the ways he had. I wished to bridge that gap and be loving and help there be more love in the world.

I prayed, and my system prayed, all parts of us aware that we were in a horrible situation we couldn’t put our finger on with our ex Dom and couldn’t break away from, even though it was our will to. We couldn’t heal our wounds fast enough either and were tired of how demanding the relationship was on our time, our body, and our stability.

We all prayed to Jesus to have our life serve him. We heard nothing and only felt his presence at the edges, not coming in to take our offering. It was a curious feeling and not as devastating as we would have assumed his rejection would be. He didn’t really reject us, just our offering. We read the emotional landscape of it, and it was like, I see you. I hear you. I love you. You do not have to keep on a path that caused you so much trauma. And it was a relief inside me to be set free from my Christian-adjacent roots. I cried, grateful, because it let me know he really did see me and that I was willing to go into that whole tangled web of my trauma from the religion of my upbringing to break free from the situation we were in. He honored my offering by setting me free of it. Any good parent does that, and we understood we weren’t being condemned. Jesus didn’t want us trauma bonded, even to him.

So, I wanted us on a path of love. I brought this to my Dom, that I wanted a path of love, and so if we could move our relationship into a more loving arrangement, that would be great, to which he completely froze. It was so weird to experience. I wasn’t sure if I was triggering his childhood wounds or what it was, but he backed up, tried again with me, and then backed up some more and came back with, “You wanted love and it didn’t work,” like I was trying to manipulate him. That is when the nightmare began for us because awareness does that. Suddenly there isn’t an avoidance, and we could see things we hadn’t seen before. In between his words, I heard the truth: he didn’t love me, not at all. I wasn’t asking for romance or a relationship past what we already had together. I was only asking that it be less about whoredom and name-calling and things that I never actually enjoyed but he did. I was aware I needed a more loving experience to heal, and I did think there was an underlying love reciprocated between us, less about romantic love and more devotional in nature. Devotion to healing, to growth, and to each other’s well-being.

He’d told me repeatedly that he loved me. So, realizing he was only manipulating me to gain access to my system really hurt me and our people. We dropped away from him right then and went about our life, as he did, keeping to himself in silence.

We kept up with our learning and spiritual things, and we ran our Etsy shop. Eventually, letting our Etsy shop go became a reality, and it was one of the sacrifices we made to break a chain link with him. He’d used our shop as a point of manipulation a lot and broken our confidence in the work. He’d bought two of my bracelets like trophies and then had me give him a third bracelet as a gift, sent to him when he told me I was allowed to. It was a very veiled magic language he was using with me through the material bracelets and the ritual. He basically told us he’d use the bracelets to energetically summon us, and we experienced that link as working, so we had to destroy it fully. It took a long while and was difficult, but unrooting him from us became our will. Nothing was worth slavery. We also had to wake up to the painful reality that we could do more with our time than whoring. We were more than whores, and we’d been living as if that was our sole purpose.

I believe that when Loki left us for that year, he was giving us the space to sort ourselves out, and we did. I’m grateful to him for allowing us that grace period.

-Star