Circle of Tall Trees

Tag: coercive control (Page 1 of 3)

The Tree of Death

September 19, 2026 / / 0 Comments

From the Wild Collective Heart series. Part 43

Content Warning: Dissociation/DID, coercive power dynamics, psychological and spiritual abuse, spiritual manipulation, trauma, and intense spiritual themes involving occult practices and the Qliphoth/Tree of Death.

We went on to heal as wounds came up instead of hunting them out inside of us. After the fact, we learned the way we were operating under our ex Dom was something called the left-hand path, the methods employed being the Tree of Death (Qliphoth). Us human beings are very prone to going insane and becoming spiritually compromised from such practice. I’d even go as far as to say its alchemy is really not something to talk about or tempt others into.

It’s with sadness and a heavy heart that I bear those marks in me. I do not feel pride for it. I feel deep grief and sorrow. I feel like it’s not something to boast about, and I’m not okay with even saying it’s something we humans should be engaged in. There is such a thing as too much light and too much darkness.

I understand the ego it takes to be a practitioner these days. I understand it is a survival technique, and I’m not knocking that. Having my insides scorched out alive was like a spiritual lobotomy that I would not have recovered from had I not had DID. Multiple parts of self able to compartmentalize.

I am not powerful because of my scars. I stand in my power because I am sovereign, and I worked for that and continue to work for that in my life. I work to open choice for myself and others in the ways that I feel safe doing so, whether it is an idea or influence that helps untangle a knot of grief inside. I don’t know its effect. I can’t. But I can hold my intentions with it as true to my experience and aligned with my heart.

Our ex Dom had put us through the Tree of Death repeatedly. No break, really, not until he needed a break himself. He had no remorse for doing that to us without our full awareness in it. Then he drained me of my energy for himself and his friends, repeatedly using what I was alchemizing for his own spellwork and spellwork on me to keep me fueling things.

My heart is broken for who I thought he was and who he actually is.

I told him so many times, your friends aren’t your friends. They don’t even care for you. You aren’t in balance. You are around the wrong people. He seemed to hear me sometimes, but ultimately chose his path, and I have to honor that it is his right to choose.

I cannot help him, and that was my biggest lesson. Helping him dragged us under a million times too many, and it never should have happened. But I thought I could help him, and therein lies my hubris.

-Star

Dom My Butt!

September 18, 2026 / / 0 Comments

From the Wild Collective Heart series: Part 41

Content Warning: Dissociation/DID, coercive power dynamics, sexual manipulation, abandonment within a D/s dynamic, emotional abuse, difficulty accessing mental health care, and spiritual themes involving magic, spirits, psychic attack, and spiritual protection.

Yeah, one day, I cropped up for an hour or so, not really with it, to be honest, and messed around with our Dom a bit. Then he just blew it for me because he told me I was so easy and the rest of us were so difficult, and he was complaining to me about it. I started thinking, well, if they are all being difficult for you, then I need to also be because I’m not going to be the odd one out, and fuck you for telling me I’m fucking easy. Dom my butt! But you know, I was just messing around, and I wasn’t looking to get back into a D/s with him full time. Later, I was promptly informed it was a never-again situation, and well, that made sense.

-Rogue

Oh fuck me, it was a never ever ever again for me for a very long time, and I just had to wait until we all got into alignment about it. I had thought I was patient, but this tested that patience by a shit ton.

-Raven

I sincerely hated him. He’d conned me into giving it up and then completely ignored me for weeks. Then I realized that he was ignoring me while watching me suffer and enjoying it, which was never discussed at all. There was a ton of foreplay, and then he just dropped me the moment I gave it up. Gross. So gross. Ew, I can’t even believe I fell for it.

-Stevie

I love how you and Raven are such snobs, and I’m just like, what’s up? Okay, oh… Oops!

-Rogue

Having standards isn’t snobby.

-Raven

No, but the way you two do it, it sounds a bit pretense-like.

-Rogue

Anyway, what a mess. It became abundantly clear he was messing with us in any way possible. To what? Garner our disgust, I guess.

-Raven

We told him we sent his monitoring spirits away and he’d never find them again because fuck him for abusing elementals.

-Stephanie

To which he just said he was wondering where they were. Disgusting. So, we learned he wanted us to know he’d been behind magical and psychic attacks and also abusing beings, not just we human beings.

-Bear

I was trying to get us back into therapy, to which every single professional I approached said no. So, we were left to stabilize ourselves and keep away from him through working together.

-Raven

It’s a thing with DID. Not everyone can treat it, and not everyone is willing, and it’s a whole thing. We’d been lucky to receive nearly a decade with our psychologist. That was grace. And yeah, it just turned out we had to work this out for ourselves at the time. It was very disheartening because in therapy they say ask for help, and we had asked many people for help for a second time and none were willing to help. Like, don’t teach me it’s safe to do that and have no idea of the reality for a people like me. The circle-jerk is so not necessary.

-Rogue

It was spiritual warfare. Therapy could only help us stabilize at that point, and it was unfortunate to have been met with rejection when we already felt rejected by our ex Dom.

-Lilith

Lilith is right. Therapy does not address the spiritual aspects of trauma, and so it would have been nice to have the stabilizing help, but ultimately, we were set on our course and needed to free ourselves.

-Star

Let It All Burn

September 17, 2026 / / 0 Comments

From the Wild Collective Heart series: Part 40

Content Warning: Dissociation/DID, childhood trauma, coercive power dynamics, spiritual and religious abuse, abusive relationship dynamics, sexual coercion, nonconsensual sexual experiences, degrading sexual dynamics, and spiritual themes involving spirits, magic, energy work, possession, energetic attack, and spiritual bindings.

He didn’t ever love me. He didn’t like me, so it wasn’t as devastating to me to know as it was for Star that our ex Dom didn’t hold any reciprocity towards us and at best we were property to him. She had realized all together that he’d learned her childhood scars and then became like her abuser, grooming her to open to him. It made it personal to me. I really can’t be having anyone hurt my Star. My Star of hope. Even in the darkest dark, and even when that hope was crazy and illogical, it was what we needed at the time for us to survive, and that hope did help us survive still, even if it wasn’t an accurate or completely healthy hope. My Star saved us countless times.

We gave up our Etsy shop. We purged any belongings, and there were a lot, that had a connection to him. Then we purged again, the clothing and jewelry and things that we couldn’t let go of in the first wave. One of the worst things about the trauma is losing our old identity and having that grounding completely crumble, but we’d been through it so many times by then our anger said, let it all burn. We were kind of shocked by how ready we were to let anything we had go. I had a beautiful wardrobe I had painstakingly built over years, and I just donated it all. It left me in shock mentally a bit, but spiritually I knew it was the thing that must be done to start unraveling him from our life and finding his fucking hooks left in us.

Sure, I’ll cop to really wanting to be a bit evil. I had every right to be. I fucking thought about it at times. I really wanted to do a lot toward him, all that shit he claimed we were already doing to him. But no. That is not our way or path. Fuck, I wish it were sometimes, but that is just my teeth poking through. I can say fuck you with fangs but never taste blood. That kind of thing. I did learn protection things and have created my own from a basic knowledge because the trouble is, with it all being out there published to protect yourself with the well-known ways? Pretty easy to guess each other’s ways, and it’s a good idea at some point to make them personal and not known as much to the masses. Books teach a basic layout, and then teachers or Spirit or both teach you to personalize with your specific gifts, and that is fun. We love that, but we do not share about it unless something has been retired for us and we are led to.

All his fears that we were doing magic on him were really his telling us he was doing magic on us, and I’m sure he did piss off Spirit a bunch and pay for it, and I kind of think that’s why he was blaming me. He wouldn’t tell me, though. Instead, he said to me that if he told me the things happening in his life, then I could make it worse on him, which I should have heard as him collecting information to make my life worse with. Fucking hindsight, you know?

I unfortunately didn’t know I had beings holding me against my will until they came calling and held me under, doing something I did not have in my will to do for him any longer. Once it was over, I cursed and spat at him that I did not consent to it. He just laughed at me.

Ugh, that movie, the new Crow remake, shows pretty much what that experience was like. I wanted as far away from it as possible. Never ever again. It is the worst to have sovereignty taken like that. It is like a vortex that tries trapping you. I realized as it was happening, these aren’t my beings and they belong to him. He’d tricked me for a long time into believing they all came from my family lines and my traumas, but his beings were the ones holding me to hurt myself. So then I could see how I let them in and how not to. By even speaking to him again, I had opened the door a little and went into dissociating, and then he sent them through me. They could not possess me. They could only hold me down under until I panicked and did the thing I knew would get me out of it. In this case, forcing myself to orgasm, giving him my sexual energy, which creates a strong tether and cord, exactly what he was after.

-Lilith

A Path of Love

September 17, 2026 / / 0 Comments

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

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

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

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