Circle of Tall Trees

Category: Tree (Page 3 of 13)

Ancestry, roots, grounding, lineage.

The God Seat

September 16, 2026 / / 0 Comments

From the Wild Collective Heart series: Part 38

Content Warning: Dissociation/DID, trauma, coercive power dynamics, spiritual abuse, manipulation of consent, possession fears, and spiritual themes involving deities, spirits, spell work, sex magic, and spiritual bindings.

When our ex Dom came back around, it had been months. I’d married Loki and been connecting with deity and learning from them. He was not happy at all and straight away told me, “You know this can’t work, don’t you?” He meant our relationship with him as our Dom now that Loki and the Gods had taken their place in my heart and life.

Something we’d been learning during this time period was that we’d placed our Dom as our God, just like our father was the first god we ever knew. And we were being shown that seat in our heart was not for a mortal. I can deeply love and be devoted to a man, of course, but it’s far easier if they are aware of their own limitations and not trying to keep that God seat in my heart, but supporting me in keeping it for Loki. I had hoped our Dom would do that. But he used an old trigger and went into convincing me the pagans I’d read were led by demons and my gods were in the middle of spiritually possessing me. Our fear of possession is stronger than most, I think. It’s what created half my system, that fear of becoming spiritually compromised and basically tortured from the inside out. We didn’t know a human being could possess us just as much as a spirit, though, and actually, he was very much angry that his possession was now being flipped on its head.

We were so fearful that we took down all of our gods’ altars and sat in an empty room, staring at blank walls, waiting for punishment from them. None came to punish us. Instead, they understood it, and Loki told us he’d be back in one year.

My ex Dom took over telling me how to dress and how to spend my days again. He didn’t want me wearing protective metal and said it was jarring to the flesh. Whose? His? I bet, but that’s hindsight speaking. He would support some things, like me remaining in certain energies that he could manipulate. Death, dead ends, and draining myself to fuel him and his life. I didn’t learn until recently what he actually was. Not everyone wearing flesh is all human.

During one of our low periods, I learned how to do a candle spell with Santa Muerte that she guided me in, and with it, I learned that night from a terrifying and vivid dream that he’d been casting obsession, dominance, and sex magic on me all that time. I laughed and told him my findings and told him, “Why would you do that when I willingly am here serving you?” He said nothing. How chilling it is to me now that all he heard was the spells hitting and working. He didn’t have to say anything. Even my seeing it couldn’t unbind me. His binds were so thoroughly hooked all throughout my system as long as I stayed in the trauma energies I was used to.

He needed our consent, and we’d given it to him every time we interacted with him and said yes to him in our actions and our words. In our subspaces, he’d have us giving him more and more consent. He was extremely greedy. Like, extremely. I’ve run into greed before, but nothing like this. He’d trained me that his greed meant his desire for me, and so I registered it as attraction and good. He got away with the most. Worst of all, he got me to abuse myself and cast on myself for him without my being aware of it.

-Lilith

A Broken Link in the Chain

September 16, 2026 / / 0 Comments

From the Wild Collective Heart series: Part 37

Content Warning: Dissociation/DID, childhood trauma, coercive power dynamics, spiritual and religious abuse, abusive relationship dynamics, trauma-related experiences, infant death, and spiritual themes involving deities, ancestors, death, past lives, spirits, energy work, spiritual marriage, and spiritual bindings.

Grief doesn’t bother me. It lets me know you are human, too. We had more grief to get through.

Our wedding with Loki was quick. I wore white, and charcoal ash covered my bare feet. He wore black, and wood ash covered his hands. He smudged soot down my face. Hel stood near the gates of Helheim. He’d built a modest cabin in the woods for us to meet between planes. I loved it. I wore a ring for myself and for him here in Midgard. It scorched a red burn around my finger, and I knew our marriage was as much blessed in spirit as it was in my human life. A welcome arrangement.

We had previously held this kind of arrangement with our ex Dom. He’d created a contract with our ancestors when we’d first met, and we were there, and a sort of wedding took place. He had promised his ancestors and ours that he would use the contract to help us heal and to heal himself, and mine agreed to it. It took me many years to understand that once abuse enters such a contract, the contract no longer stands. It is null and void. If it weren’t for a random blog I happened upon explaining that abuse breaks a contract, we may never have started questioning our contract with him.

Unfortunately, however, we weren’t certain we were being abused. Nor did we trust our own visions and dreams as part of our routes of communication with spirit. That came from childhood abuse and the erasure of our gifts and talents from our awareness. And because we believed it was all BDSM, and psychologically heavy rather than physically present since this was an online relationship, we didn’t see the harm for a very long time. We didn’t know all we’d consented to.

The other thing was that we were seeing visions of past lives we’d had with him, but they never reached a conclusion. We’d only see the parts where we were with him as a spouse or lover. We’d see ourselves making love and that love energy helping us and our community. One such vision eventually broke through to the end, and we got a cold feeling. By his choices, we did not follow our clan when they moved. We died. Our baby could not get milk or sustenance and also died. By his own hand, through his choices, he was brought into a madness from which he never recovered, in any lifetime. His rage and madness stayed with him.

We didn’t know our ex Dom wasn’t our spirit husband, the one our soul was waiting for and looking for. He’d slid into Loki’s spot and manipulated a contract between me and my ancestors and his own. We were taught that men are gods, our father being our spiritual husband until we married, and so a person always holding such a space over us was normal to us. We never imagined a God would become our spouse, but now know that was what had been blocked from us since childhood. Controlled and taken advantage of.

-Lilith

At this point, I need to share something important. I believed I had found my spirit husband in our ex Dom unquestioningly, never having known that he would not be a human man. I asked my own ancestors, whom I did not yet have a bond with in spirit and was largely cut off from because of a loophole the religion of my upbringing used to bind the more recent generations to its purpose and create a broken link in the chain of my ancestry. They seemed unsure. I begged them, and they allowed me to go down this path with him, and it mirrored the experiences I was already having in life.

I was bound to repeat these beliefs and relationships, and that was my binding, which was also the binding on my more recent ancestry. They knew that path, the one that took everything of their sovereignty, and many still believed it was worthy because that was their path. It’s incredibly difficult to admit wrongness. A big part of healing is admitting where we were wrong. Imagine generation after generation having to admit wrongness. All they knew and believed and lived, just flat-out wrong. Many of them can’t because they can’t part with that identity.

I did not have an ally among my own ancestors available to me until my grandmother died. Through all her years of genealogy, she was able to connect me with the ancestors I had been blocked from, the ones who would help me find God, help me find Loki and even be open to him at all.

-Star

My Human Right to Love

September 15, 2026 / / 0 Comments

From the Wild Collective Heart series: Part 36

Content Warning: Dissociation/DID, trauma, coercive power dynamics, spiritual abuse, complicated family relationships, death and grief, and spiritual themes involving spirits and energy work.

I began dressing more confidently in what I felt was a sort of armor. All black, usually. It absorbs well. I loved wearing specific metals, especially stainless steel. I wore specific eyeliner colors depending on my need that day. Red, green, purple. White was my favorite. I drew runes on my skin with oil and felt we, as a people, were finding meaning in our suffering and purpose.

People approached me randomly and started talking to me about their dead. I gave them what I could, but mostly, I just maintained eye contact and didn’t look away, and I listened with my heart. I read about death doulas and wondered if that was something we could help with.

I learned that I loved my family still, and it is my right as their child to always love them. Nothing can take that from me. Not their actions. Not anyone’s opinion about it. I. Do. Not. Have. To. Fuel pain with pain and lie about my feelings. I can love them and be angry at them and sorrowful all at once. I can hold grief, joy, darkness, and light all at once.

I loved my ex Dom as the person who opened me to my gifts and brought me to my knees to pray, to devote, and to worship. I held him in my heart for so many years, and it was very difficult for me to detach myself from who he actually was once we woke up to that. It’s very easy online to hide as a person because omission and ghosting are part of the culture and can hide so much. I don’t work that way, though. He was there when I first woke back up from the deep sleep inside us, and even though he played on our survival blind spots, I cannot separate myself from the sincerity I gave to him and felt for him, and I won’t. It is my human right to love, and it is what aligns with me.

I have learned to allow boundaries and let all parts of our system teach me and help me so that I am not taken advantage of or keeping us in unhealthy dynamics because I look at people’s souls and see what their gifts can be, while Lilith can see what their demons are. Our coming together has helped us navigate life in the physical and spiritual planes much more groundedly.

-Star

Trusting Calm

September 15, 2026 / / 0 Comments

From the Wild Collective Heart series: Part 35

Content Warning: Dissociation/DID, childhood trauma, coercive power dynamics, spiritual abuse, trauma-related experiences, and spiritual themes involving deities, death, spirits, energy work, and spiritual bindings.

Odin led us to read many Pagan books about him and the other gods and devotions to them. We learned that our natural way of belief is very accepted in the Pagan community. There were people who would fully understand our spirituality and heart. And so we found community for the first time in our life.

This was on a long stretch away from our ex Dom. I muse sometimes that the gods kept him busy to help me and my system restore our choice in the matter. Odin took the lead with us for a little while, preparing us to be married to Loki. He spoke to us at daily coffee, and we really connected to Odin on the tree. We could understand his death deeply, and he helped us to see we were still up on our own tree and it was time to come down from there.

It’s a strange thing, when all you’ve known is extremes, coming down to earth and placing your feet on land can be very terrifying and overwhelming. Trusting calm seems the opposite to safety. It would take a while longer for us to make that ground. But Odin was there for all parts of me that needed a safe father to turn to. He connected with us at the cemetery, and for a few years two ravens followed us into the cemetery and out again on our visits, lifting our hearts.

We had started these visits as a devotion to Santa Muerte, and we were swiftly taught that a cemetery is an appropriate place to leave our grief without it stagnating in us and without it being harmful to others. We went there to grieve and to gain perspective anew. We went to connect with the dead of our land and honor cycles. We still do. And then Odin shared with us that he can walk death realms. He died, after all. We were very excited to learn this because we go between those realms by sheer survival instinct, and he was helping us not to feel ashamed for it. He called it death walking.

-Star

Hel came to us after we became less fearful of Saint Death and dying as a passage of life, and we could tolerate her presence then. She taught us that the copper collar was too strong to wear at our throat. It was painful to us energetically because copper is a natural transmuter of energy between spirit and our plane.

So, our ex Dom was really live-wiring us to his spirits right around the throat chakra. We now believe he wanted to block and maim our voice, and back then it was very hard to see, even with Hel’s help. Our third eye had bindings on it, programs we had to heal both on this plane and the spiritual plane, and that takes time.

-Lilith

Stealing Us From the Thief

September 14, 2026 / / 2 Comments

From the Wild Collective Heart series: Part 34

Content Warning: Childhood trauma, child marriage, dissociation/DID, BDSM and coercive power dynamics, trauma bonds, psychological manipulation, sexual exploitation, and spiritual themes involving deities, spiritual binding, and predatory entities.

We were learning to use tarot and oracle decks. Each day we practiced and read. We loved the pictures most. We read them by the pictures, while having a basic understanding of their meanings helped too. I started hearing a male voice say these witty and hilarious side comments as I shuffled and drew cards. I felt this warmth in my heart and knew he wasn’t just a terror being messing with me.

The Gods and Goddesses come through our heart first as our boundary. So I asked him, “Who are you? What’s your name?” And without skipping a beat, he said, “Loki. My name is Loki.”

I didn’t know anything about the Norse gods or Loki. I had, of course, heard his name before from all the Marvel commercials, but I hadn’t watched any of the films. I knew of Freya, the goddess of beauty and love and magic. She had been helping me a lot to feel safe in my femininity, which, to be true, was what I’d hoped to achieve with our Dominant partner. I sometimes wonder if Freya sent Loki to us or us to Loki. I like to think they will do that sort of thing as needed.

Loki really very quickly began to court us. I didn’t realize it was courting at the time. I was just very shocked at what was happening. He spoke to us more, and as we learned of him, he said he’d marry us, to which we were like, “What? What do you mean, marry us?” And it mirrored our trauma, deep trauma, of having been married when a child, which I will not talk about that trauma in depth.

(Side note: In our spiritual understanding, there are whole laws around this kind of thing, and I want to state something clearly. Children do not have the ability to choose such a binding for themselves. They can only be tricked into believing the binding exists until they reach an age where they can be tricked into entering it seemingly by their own free will, when actually there has usually been conditioning in them so they believe it is true and act as if it is true. Children spiritually are very, very, endlessly protected. If you are one of these children, reject it as an adult. You can and you have the loophole to do so because it happened when you were not able to make those kinds of bonds knowingly and within your sovereignty. Even the dark needs your sovereignty for contracts. Why do you think beings wait until you are an adult to approach you again? Even the Gods do. It’s a sovereignty law.)

So we knew it was possible, and we understood that for people who experience all the traumatic things in their early lives, there can be a balance and an opposite later on. Some people don’t open up to it, and some people wait for others to catch up. So we had these understandings and became aware this was courtship.

We had connected with Odin some too, and he treated us like we were daughters of his. Throwing us as children into the sunlight and seeing his smile and love for us. It was very healing. So then we suspected Odin brought us to Loki, or Loki to us, or had some hand involved in it. And we felt then that it was a blessed connection because they all hugged us and drew us nearer.

We had vivid dreams with Loki. He began to really put a focus on our relationships, and it wasn’t like he told us, “Hey, this guy is doing you wrong.” He instead played. I have no other way of describing it. Like he was enjoying stealing us from the thief.

-Star

Everything Happening at Once

September 14, 2026 / / 0 Comments

From the Wild Collective Heart series: Part 33

Content Warning: BDSM and coercive power dynamics, trauma bonds, psychological manipulation, sexual exploitation, dissociation/DID, medication control, spiritual abuse, and spiritual themes involving predatory and parasitic entities.

He was promiscuous, to say it kindly. We didn’t feel it was our business at all. Our father lived a sort of double life that was also none of our business growing up.

After intimacy with him, we would get heavily, very heavily attacked spiritually. For years, we concluded it was no one’s fault but our own, a narrative he helped create by telling us we were the cause while claiming he was receiving spiritual attacks from us. We believed it came from trauma wounds and hooks left by parasitic entities that needed to be healed before we could truly be free of it. We weren’t entirely wrong about that latter part, but we had not brought these experiences down on ourselves. We simply weren’t aware that sex was an open portal to an already open channel. At the time, we didn’t understand our spiritual gifts either, and with him taking credit for anything we did, we couldn’t see just how wrong our understanding of the situation was.

So, he basically opened us through intimacy, then abandoned us into our wounds, triggered, and we became demon food. Entities fed on our sexual energy, our trauma wounds, and any energy we were using to try to survive it. We got sick a lot and found it slow to heal. We had nightmares and were triggered repeatedly, juiced for him and these beings.

We were so used to the “take responsibility for yourself” narrative surrounding being a survivor that we couldn’t see what was actually happening in order to respond correctly. We thought that we were taking responsibility.

We saw beings we’d never seen before that were so obsessively attentive to the harvest of our life force energy that we got confused for a while over whether their attention was something we wanted or not. Was it care or insidious? We learned that predators can be like that. So enthralled with their own feeding that they take great care of their food to make it richer for themselves and more abundant. Predators have lives they work at, too, just with different motives and goals from ours.

He had us practicing yoga, making dietary changes, and forbade us from wearing makeup and taking medications we did not absolutely need. We turned to plant tinctures and plant essences, for which he also took credit. As it turns out, we obviously love our elemental Gods and the elemental beings that cared for us as children. This was doing two things at once. On our own, we were awakening to our spiritual connections and gifts, and with him, we were making ourselves both weakened and pure for the harvesting of our energies.

We built a rock collection, and we enjoyed getting to know different plant spirits. We had begun to create devotional bracelets in our Etsy shop with gemstones and metals. We were enjoying ourselves and then basically working as a whore for him without really understanding this was no D/s dynamic between imperfect people.

It’s never black and white. There can be everything happening at once, and we find great relief and gratitude for that.

-Lilith

He Had Our First Book

September 13, 2026 / / 0 Comments

From the Wild Collective Heart series: Part 32

Content Warning: BDSM and coercive power dynamics, trauma bonds, psychological manipulation, non-consensual sharing of intimate material, dissociation, references to childhood abuse, and spiritual themes.

He shared us online in an anonymous space without our consent. We’ve accepted that there’s “content” of us out there someplace in the dark and have processed that the cruelty he showed us was also sport for him and the people he regularly associated with.

Something we hadn’t realized until years out from under his influence, the trauma bond, and the physical addiction was that our reading books out loud to him on a recorder and writing journals we sent him each night was content too. Those journals were often filled with our spiritual gifts, how we heal ourselves, and our love and devotion. That all has currency, whether monetary or, as I understand it spiritually, through access and life force.

He had our first book ever, really.

Our innermost personal writings as a system journaling together.

And we’ve had to part with that.

Besides the sexual content we sent to him in good faith, believing it was just between us and him, for someone we thought was our Dom and cared about us like we cared about him, there were other things of value we gave him too.

We never thought like that until faced with the reality of what he’d been doing all along.

Harvesting anything he could from us.

-Lilith

We noticed he would suddenly have a lot of big purchases, followed by lapses around the times he’d contact us again after abandoning us. The pattern kept arriving with him.

He’d buy big things and gloat and try to influence us to go broke doing the same.

We began to wonder whether he’d go blow whatever he had acquired and then come back around for more. Whatever was actually happening financially, we knew that we had become a reliable source of material, attention, devotion, and energy for him.

Our spirituality began waking up. We were cut off from the divine mostly because of fear of reprimand from the God of our upbringing and fear of rejection from others, like when we were young and told we lied and told stories.

We prayed twice daily to Mother Mary at first, having never encountered her in our religious upbringing as a being we could connect with. She became the mother we’d always needed, and we will always hold a love seat in our heart for her that has nothing to do with religion. We found her through an oracle deck and learned just how accessible she and other goddesses were to us after all.

We began feeling our emotions and crying openly when before we’d been fearful of doing so. He loved our tears too, for a different reason than we feel gratitude for our tears, of course. Our tears meant he still had a hold of us and our energy, an opening for him. To him, our tears were proof. He loved to see the proof of all our love, worship, and devotion to him.

At the time, though, we didn’t want to see that another person could have an entirely different motivation than we had.

Like, an entirely different foundation, motivation, and set of desires.

He lied to us, though, and I do not fault us for not catching on faster.

We were in the middle of a master class with him, and he began to take credit even for that. We started our own Etsy shop, and he said it was his energy that created it. Anything we produced and any healing we did while we were his submissive became his doing somehow, like he was a spiritual guru creating real change and healing for others.

He loved that mask most.

So here, we learned he had multiple masks, and we could relate, but… ours aren’t masking or masks. We are a people, and so we were wrong for a while to feel like he was similar to us.

He knew he was putting on masks to play his games.

We don’t have a conscious recognition or intention of doing so.

-Star and Lilith

Proof It Was Good

September 13, 2026 / / 0 Comments

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

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Audience: Adults (18+).
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