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