Circle of Tall Trees

Tag: BDSM (Page 1 of 2)

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

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

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

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

Sketch

September 6, 2026 / / 0 Comments

From the Wild Collective Heart series: Part 17

Content Warning: Psychological abuse, coercive sexual dynamics, food restriction, sleep deprivation, dissociation, and family abandonment.

He’d called me a pig and told me to snort for him. I laughed my ass off and left. I didn’t know yet who he was or the damage that had been done. I just knew my Rogue was into something, and it was time to get her out of it.

After some investigating, I learned this guy was our support person from a website promoting trained mental health support with kind and compassionate listeners available to chat.

So… why was he in our email? He was acting as our support person and our Dom?

Sketch.

I started watching and reading, desperate to get a grasp on the reality of our current events. I looked at anything and everything around us. Books, rooms, emails, pictures, whatever was in front of me, trying to piece it all together. I had parts of myself I never knew of and traumas I had never been exposed to coming out through the seams of our skull rapidly.

I watched our body collapsing along with our mind. I had skin rashes, my hair was falling out, I’d lost 55 pounds. We weren’t eating. We weren’t sleeping.

He’d supported all this by telling us we were a pig and needed to put down the fork. Giving us an article about how eight hours of sleep wasn’t necessary. Broken-up sleep patterns were superior time management.

I looked like a ghost, a zombie in the mirror. I felt terror. My family was in tatters, and it all hit at once. The past abuse coming up in us. My family turning away and choosing to side with my father.

I begged for help. I told my mother, “I am not okay and I need help.”

My mother spoke to me as if I was dead, as if I wasn’t speaking to her.

She said, “It’s like she died and I don’t have a daughter anymore.”

And I knew I was on my own.

-Raven

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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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