Circle of Tall Trees

Category: Wild Collective Heart (Page 1 of 4)

A collection of stories from our lived experience with dissociative identity disorder. We share this life and tell its stories together, in our individual voices.

Come Back Different

September 12, 2026 / / 0 Comments

From the Wild Collective Heart series: Part 30

Content Warning: Disordered eating, body-image distress, coercive control, psychological manipulation, dissociation, references to childhood abuse, and spiritual themes.

I wanted to live. I wanted to feel alive. I spent a lot of time numb, and I wanted to feel good. I didn’t want to be stuck as me. I wanted to transform.

I learned to for him.

Our weight went up and down over and over for him. We’d reach our goal, and he’d do something to trigger us and then abandon us to manage everything ourselves. But he’d be watching, and we knew that we were expected to continue writing him, offering our body to him, keeping open to him. We didn’t want to fail and be deemed unfit to serve or to manage our own life. Have to admit we couldn’t do it, we couldn’t keep functional.

The stakes were high.

Looking back on it now from a safe distance, I had struggled with food prior to him and became more disordered while with him. It was like we threw gasoline on ourselves and he lit the match over and over, and we’d die for him and come back different.

If it were sane and consensual, such a symbolic ritual would be beautiful.

That was not beautiful.

That was a way to die without dying. To show our insides. To see with our own eyes how much pain we’d been living with and not acknowledging.

I can recognize now that even though my looks and form did improve from extreme ways, it wasn’t enough for him, and eventually I accepted it never would be. He was disgusted with me and my body.

I remembered that disgust.

My father threw his disgust at me too.

He would never grow to accept me, love me for me, or even look past what he didn’t like.

I collapsed and did not take the front in our day-to-day lives or with him for years. I kept away. I tried to heal or preserve myself.

Me, the person I had wanted to transform, had become pretty fucking grateful to be alive at all.

-Rogue

How Much It Would Cost Me

September 12, 2026 / / 0 Comments

From the Wild Collective Heart series: Part 29

Content Warning: Trauma, dissociation/DID, coercive control, trauma bonds, psychological manipulation, and coercive power-exchange dynamics.

He said that he wanted me to wear his collar and asked me to show him the necklaces I owned that I thought he’d like to see me in.

I chose a protective stone that was a large obsidian disk on black leather. I liked how it felt protective and had some weight. It highlighted my pale skin.

I also chose a copper necklace that I could adjust the chain length on with my jewelry-crafting supplies to make it more of a choker. It had a hammered O-type ring that was dainty and delicate. It belonged to Lilith, whereas the other necklace belonged to all of us.

I tried them both on for him, and he said he knew I wanted him to choose the black disk, but that he’d always had a thing for copper. So it was settled then, and he allowed me to wear the copper necklace as the collar he gave me.

I ended up liking how it moved on my neck, flipping and shining red bare copper in the light.

I could ask to wear it.

-Star

He told me to put it out on display where I could always see it, to meditate each night on the collar, and to make a ritual oil for its care.

I did.

He never let me wear it, though, and it became ugly to me. I had wanted his collar once but didn’t know how much it would cost me.

I realized in a moment of clarity that he’d taken my necklace, something I had gotten for myself to protect me and my system within a circle, and claimed it as his. It really sums up our exchanges with him overall.

-Lilith

My Sweetheart Head

September 11, 2026 / / 0 Comments

From the Wild Collective Heart series: Part 28

Content Warning: Trauma, dissociation/DID, coercive control, sexual coercion, psychological manipulation, trauma bonds, and emotional abuse.

I didn’t really have the capacity to take our ex Dom seriously at the time. I tried, but I could see he wasn’t really taking things seriously himself. He was just using us and getting away with what he could.

Sometimes I think all the tricks he pulled on us were what made him feel powerful. Not “owning” me in any devotional sense or caretaking sense, but deceiving me. Kind of weird to me that he’d pick someone easy to deceive and then play that fantasy out hardcore. But we all have our fantasies.

We’d bounce back, which we found incredible. We had no idea of our own resilience because we’d never seen ourselves, our gifts and talents, our anything. We lived a life of survival.

The drawback is that sometimes it looks like resilience when it’s actually hypervigilance or a crash waiting to happen. But when our nervous system is regulated and our basic foundational needs are met, we can really succeed. Especially when we feel reciprocally loved back in a stable way.

For a time, we thought he did love us. He said as much and acted like he was struggling with not having us come to him, acting like he wanted us to be there with him in person at some point, even if it was years down the road.

It’s pretty painful to me because I have a lot of sweetness to give, and I gave it to the wrong person. I hate that. I really don’t like that he messed with my gut, my intuition, and my sweetheart head like that.

Oh sure, he wanted the sex, the adoration and worship, the devotion and unconditional love.

He just never wanted to reciprocate.

He called us fake a few times, and it pushed us to show up for him more and try to cure his loneliness with more.

I hate that he messed with our innocence, our naïveté, and our hope like that. Those things ain’t flaws. They are beautiful and deserved protection.

Just my two cents.

I didn’t much like him pretty quickly.

He wouldn’t let me orgasm for too long, until everything hurt and all the darkness swallowed me up, and when I begged until exhausted, then he’d act like he was saving me. My body responded to him and I couldn’t help it.

I’m real quiet usually.

But on this thing, I’m glad we’re speaking about it.

-Lily

We Did Our Job

September 11, 2026 / / 0 Comments

From the Wild Collective Heart series: Part 27

Content Warning: Trauma, dissociation/DID, coercive control, sexual exploitation, psychological manipulation, and spiritual threats.

He knew how to direct our filming and photo’ing ourselves for him. Had us upload to a password-protected service that allowed anyone with the password to view the files. He knew not to “fuck with the littles” in a DID system or everything goes poorly and non-operational. He had done this before to other disabled women and once, he alluded to men also.

My point is, he knew things that let us know he was a handler. He tried to tell us we were wrong about that, but we know we weren’t wrong. That’s our trigger. A specific type of handler associated with sex work.

Since we were tied up to him, we did our job in that specific situation. We weren’t mad about it. It’s just how it is to us. He treated it like his job too, another clue.

He’d told us once he wanted us for the internet clout. That was concerning, as we’d never heard anything like that before. Clout was such a hollow word it didn’t fit with our understanding that we were safe with him as long as we served him. He wouldn’t spiritually or magically retaliate against us as long as we kept under him, came back to him, and served him. Otherwise he’d protect himself, he told us.

We heard we’d get in trouble and be punished by larger forces than he that he commanded.

He said he was a magician, and he gave us a book to read. To prove we were reading it, we recorded ourselves reading it out loud to him. It was called The Universal Master Key, and he said it was very good, actually. To us we heard, it got him something. He never told us what, and it wasn’t something we could safely ask.

He told us to report to him. We did. We did our job. We had it set up that we’d journal every evening and send him that to read so he could know our well-being or not. He liked that a lot and wouldn’t let us skip it.

We felt cared for in what we understood and knew.

-Bear

I Fell Into Grace

September 10, 2026 / / 0 Comments

From the Wild Collective Heart series: Part 26

Content Warning: BDSM and coercive power dynamics, psychological manipulation, grandiosity, dissociation, references to childhood abuse, and spiritual themes.

It was very disturbing to watch the Raven fall into submissive territory. I perked up to take her place… naturally. Demons demon.

I started misbehaving for our Dom in small, ridiculous ways, chipping at his very thin-shelled exterior. I thought to myself, if he is who he says he is, great! He’ll love the self-reflection and awareness. If not… okay, then it’s working.

I have this twisted pride. No one has anything on my father. I didn’t want him to be worse. I needed my father to maintain that position because worse is unimaginable to me, and fuck anyone trying to knock that fantastic pedestal my father built for himself and placed me beneath.

He’d called me good, and I really took it personally. Oh, now I have to learn to what? Behave saintly? No thank you. We have parts for that.

I lazed around flicking my tail at him and shining my claws. I happen to love madness. A little bit.

His was truly unrepentant. He’d crafted a whole spaceship around himself that zipped around and through us with noxious fumes, and I fell into grace after a while, aware he wasn’t really allowing me to demon. He was just taking my spot inside my system that I had rightfully earned by knocking the Raven a peg down.

I found the Gods and began to pray. In particular to the Goddesses, because my experiences with men weren’t so good.

-Lilith

Every Good Mutiny

September 10, 2026 / / 0 Comments

From the Wild Collective Heart series: Part 25

Content Warning: Trauma, dissociation/DID, coercive control, trauma bonds, psychological manipulation, abusive power-exchange dynamics, and references to mental health destabilization.

Leaving therapy sucked so much for me. I’d been using it to run away from my system, as it turns out. It was my safety net, me and my psychologist “against” my system. It was never going to work like that, but I couldn’t have that awareness until we left therapy.

In retrospect, it really was time to leave. We were making our choices and being responsible for them. We were functioning well for us. We were living the life we wanted to live.

But fuck if there wasn’t that ex Dom there reminding us we can be out of our mind if not vigilant.

I threw down and joined my system in all the reindeer games. What else was there to do? They had the majority, and system law says the majority gives no fucks about my sensibilities, logic, and care to live a respectable life.

I’m not at all spiritual, and what transpires next is both my deepest shame and my freedom to create exactly a shit pile of shit if I want to.

I let myself fall for that jackwagon. It’s so disappointing to me and so “not me.” I mean, I actually started to see the beauty in the intentional triggers he was pulling off on us and what I could learn from them.

My own curious nature got out of hand. I no longer had therapy to throw myself into, so I threw myself into… whatever it can be called. An incredibly abusive, toxic D/s? He called it biology, but that was dumb. That places me as an animal, a pig if you will, and I never consented to being a pig.

I can also be controlling in that I figured if I threw myself in, I could somehow gain back some kind of control in the situation, even if it was gradual over time.

I found the situation and circumstance hilarious. I went mad, full-steam-ahead mad.

Every good mutiny deserves a part like me, and I showed up to play my role.

-Raven

Our Brain Survived Itself

September 9, 2026 / / 2 Comments

From the Wild Collective Heart series: Part 24

Content Warning: Childhood trauma, dissociation/DID, survival responses, clinical mental health language, coercive power dynamics, and references to perceived threat of death.

He didn’t like that we were in therapy. I didn’t like it either. Raven said that was the condition we’d laid out for entering into a power exchange relationship with him. We had to remain in therapy.

He framed it as therapy will change us, and he loves us exactly how we are. I agreed.

I hated that I had to learn a whole new language meant for scientists to dissect my brain and signal to one another what they’d found. I still hate it. It’s a lonely language that doesn’t account for the lived experiences and the gravity of chronically labeling ourselves victims and survivors and making that the identity for a person who already has enough identity. Just my take.

I am grateful for the time we had in therapy. I am grateful for the knowledge it gave us to stabilize and process. Those skills are non-negotiable. I’m just saying, I hate the language and how clinical it is. I understand that it is a boundary, a legal language. That’s also why it’s so lonely and feels dehumanizing, like we’re the issue being herded and marginalized or isolated from others. There’s a whole fucking language developed to word that experience that doesn’t account for my heart. My humanity. My sincerity. My devotion.

I’m not heavily spiritual, still I like this logic: if the Gods allowed it, then they also prepared a way out of it. That’s made sense to me.

I also don’t need the “DID is a brilliant survival mechanism” trope. Anyone faced with dying, which is what our brain told us was happening every time we split into a new alt. person, would be mentally and physically propelled toward whatever means of survival was available to them. There isn’t a choice in it. There isn’t time to decide whether it’s brilliant or healthy or anything else. There’s just what happens because life’s whole goal is to stay alive. It’s like when our blood clots to save us. It just does, and that’s a miracle, but it’s not an identity or a purpose.

Then, after surviving, there are the results we learn to live with. The danger in making those results an identity comes when fixing the self becomes the purpose, and surviving becomes the thing we’re best at. That leaves a little too much wiggle room to start liking survival as a thing to do, in my opinion.

I like being alternative. It suits me.

Our brain survived itself. I’ll never be ungrateful for that. I’ll never be angry about it or look that gift in the face and say fuck off. I’m here, all of me is here, because a way was available to me to survive impossible situations and circumstances as a vulnerable, dependent child.

It inspires some kind of faith in me. I haven’t wanted words for it yet, really, because just sitting in that miracle is all I’ve needed to feel my gratitude and devotion.

I ranted. Fuck it. That’s all I have for my part.

I canceled therapy with our psychologist, and it just so happened that she was retiring at the same time. We could both agree our system was taking responsibility for our life and could manage it. There is no doubt in my mind the Gods were there the whole time.

-Stevie

It Wasn’t All Bad.

September 9, 2026 / / 0 Comments

From the Wild Collective Heart series: Part 23

Content warning: BDSM and coercive power dynamics, dissociation, trauma reenactment, psychological manipulation, and references to childhood trauma.

“It wasn’t all bad.”

My father told me that in the middle of my mental health crisis. He was referring to my childhood years. “It wasn’t all bad” would follow me into this second uniting with my ex Dom.

I told myself, it’s not all bad. Which became, the good outweighs the bad. The benefits outweigh my fears and doubts.

He told me he didn’t know all that was going on when we met. He didn’t know I wasn’t sleeping or eating or that I’d had a mental breakdown. And I wanted to believe him so badly because the alternative was that I was talking to someone extremely calculated and someone dangerous to me and my system.

I wanted a good story, and I got exactly that. Just… it wasn’t the story I meant or set out to create and live.

I wanted the BDSM dynamic, the devotion, the intensive care, and even love, potentially. I wanted what I never had. The allowance to be myself and… not abused for it. Not exploited for it.

I needed it to have been a misunderstanding because the alternative was that this person I’d trusted with my mind and body, my sacral energy, was another reenactment of a time when I was truly vulnerable and at the mercy of others.

It feels extremely humiliating and painful to realize I’ve reenacted something from my past. The deep shame is unbearable. I could logically recognize that I was reenacting something and still not be able to see what was happening while my brain was overwhelmed. I was misfiring, overcompensating, burning out, and going numb. They were all warnings I couldn’t see because dissociation was my blind spot.

Then add to that the chemical fire of a BDSM dynamic and my brain is mud, ripe for conditioning.

I started to notice he’d say things while I was in subspace, tranced, sometimes heavily dissociated, flooded with happy chemicals, endorphins and things. He’d tell me he owns me, not just as his submissive, but all of me, soul included. He would tell me it’s his destiny to own me. He’d tell me afterward he was just following the flow of the moment and encourage me to do the same.

Over time, I looked for how this was mirroring my past. My father had a hypnotic way of speaking to me. A confusing and deliberate tone, spacing of words, and intense stare. He’d only talk to me like this alone in his bedroom.

Instead of reacting in terror that my ex Dom was mimicking this with me, I felt grateful for the clear processing of a past puzzle piece and fell into further devotion to him.

I gave him the credit for the work I did with my selves because he led me into that space where I could look, notice, and see. Where the truth could break free from the stubborn dissociative walls and, for a moment, I could piece it together and be free.

I gave him way too much credit.

-Raven & Rogue

Plainly and Unabashedly

September 8, 2026 / / 0 Comments

From the Wild Collective Heart series: Part 22

Content Warning: Psychological abuse, coercive D/s dynamics, dissociation, BDSM, religious conditioning, and complicated spiritual and sexual dynamics.

We’ve really had to discuss how to speak about this, the spiritual side of what happened to us with our first-ever Dom, who wasn’t a Dom at all, nor were we looking for a Dom. It’s very, well, chaotic, as you can tell by now. He was the person to introduce us to BDSM at all.

Our upbringing introduced us to a very classic dynamic within couples that made it feel natural to us. My mother and her mother and her mother were all submissive to their husbands. It was not only the spirituality we lived at the time, but also the dynamic in the home of our upbringing.

I remember my oldest brother asking me to cook for him on occasion. Like, literally, he asked me to make him a sandwich and another time a pie for his girlfriend. I did it with pride for having a skill that he needed. I was useful.

So, with this Dominant person, it was entirely natural to me that it would be the same. I was useful.

The issue is, my worldview was very cut off from the world at large. I only had a tiny perspective to go by and nothing else to gauge reality from. I still kind of prefer it that way, to be true. We’re already complicated, and humans are, and so I do actually prefer my world to be simple, while I also really love the complexity of reality, much like I enjoy a good story.

-Lilith

It is complicated to not sound completely off our rocker talking about the spiritual aspects. Well, but the D/s was always spiritual to us. That is right there to see within our upbringing. We treated it as holy. A communion between souls and God/s. It’s how we learned to open to our devotion and ekstasis at all. It is agape.

-Star

I rather like the plain texts on such things. Plainly and unabashedly is best.

-Lilith

Of course.

-Star

True. So Boring Though.

September 8, 2026 / / 0 Comments

From the Wild Collective Heart series: Part 21

Content Warning: Psychological abuse, coercive sexual dynamics, BDSM/D/s dynamics, trauma reenactment, dissociation/DID, manipulation, sexual language, and references to childhood trauma.

He called himself our pimp when we came back to him. He was beyond happy about it. I was not celebrating, as I understood this to be reenacting on our part, and his part? Well, the truth reveals itself in “pimp” from the get-go. I mean, I can’t put it any more succinctly than that.

I was not as cohesive as we are now, nor was I at the helm of our life any longer when this happened. I came out fighting and furious.

I told him and my selves this was only reenacting and soon it would be done with, to which he mocked me, telling me, “You just need a little reenacting and all good to go.”

I guess this is when it became sincerely personal for me. He knew I was not in executive control of my system. He started in on calling me a bitch and telling all parts of me I am just a bitch he needs to submit. I tried to keep front. I tried to handle it, but Rogue was better equipped.

-Raven

Yeah, the trouble is I liked the psychological fuckery. I still do, but of course now, I understand that he in particular did not have our best interest in mind, and it could not be a real D/s without the key elements of negotiation, sanity, and boundaries, along with discipline and, foremostly, consent.

I kind of chalked it up to, well, at least we’re alive! We’re living and making choices, and that’s better than dying from COVID! I needed the structure and the attention. I needed to be allowed my sexual-ness without the constant shame of that expression from various parts of self. No shade intended. This is all hindsight stuff, anyway.

I fell head/vagina long into a D/s arranged around my trauma and his narcissism. I had fun too. Hence why I reiterate, I thought I was also a psychopath like my father, like him. I fucking found him so relatable it was intense. Like, we were made for each other.

AND we were, sort of.

It’s that whole empath and hunter-prey dynamic. Oh fuck me, I had lived for that shit. Not only was it home, right? It was intoxicating. It was enthralling, finally the vampire I could be fucked by. Chills.

But I do solemnly recognize he fed off my ability to imagine and create enough for me to make him a prince of darkness to begin with. He really had to do very little, actually. I filled in the blanks of him with my fantasies, and he willingly accepted.

Gods, if only we’d met in a mental institution.

-Me playing. Sort of.

-Rogue

Yeah, well, while I was living the horror of being aware we were being conned and abused, catfished even, I’m glad you enjoyed it.

-Raven

Don’t get pissy. You enjoyed it too.

-Rogue

No comment.

-Raven

Omfg, this is your time to shine. No shame, babe.

-Rogue

Alright, I fell for him too. For a moment I understood the dynamic and believed we’re fucked and crazy, and what else is there to do but join them and see what this is all about? BUT I read and learned about true BDSM dynamics on the side, and yeah, I knew this was not going good places.

-Raven

You liked it.

-Rogue

Oh, I loved it. I have no shame about that. But he was not a Dom. Not at all.

-Raven

True. So boring though, but true.

-Rogue

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Audience: Adults (18+).
Rating: Comparable to an R-rated film. Contains mature themes, sexual and sensual material, trauma, and spiritual content.

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