I am the marker of his violence,
a placeholder.
His greed to be endless
and clean.
I am the clay tossed out,
holding his imperfections.
I am the sky-cloud,
lacking permanence.
Tag: survival (Page 1 of 3)
stars take on his shape
I am caught in fragments of light
beneath the violence that wore him
kissed by his mask
I dream of sleep
A Lokean Devotional Vignette
“I went through hell and have nothing to show for it.”
“Your sovereignty. You have your freedom to show for it.” He says softly.
Loki turns my perspective righted.
I fell down
like ground could remain soft
and the soil wouldn’t keep
me long
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
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
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
From the Wild Collective Heart series: Part 20
Content Warning: Trauma, dissociation/DID, coercive control, trauma bonds, psychological manipulation, disrupted therapy, and references to COVID-19 illness and distress.
I brought us back to him. I had to. I had a dream that he was dying and wrapped in bandages from head to toe, and he was asking for some solace only. I sat across from him at a cafeteria table, and I felt intense terror in losing him. I remembered his email and contacted him. He wrote me back immediately, telling me how loving and kind I am. That was who I remembered. Not how they talked about him in therapy.
-Essie
The world had changed in the COVID crisis, and my system was deeply activated during that time. We excel at surviving, but it takes a toll, and parts of us searched for the last known handler to feel safe again and be told what to do. It didn’t matter that I had all my know-how for emergency times from my upbringing. We were still lacking the comfort and the love we needed to feel safe in our foundations.
The contrast was a tug-of-war inside us that would not end. And finally, I was worn down from lack of sleep and fear and having gotten sick with COVID, and my system took executive control and did the unthinkable after so many years of therapy under our belt by then.
I don’t blame us. I understand it painfully.
-Robin
We were also in the middle of trauma processing in therapy. After years of stabilization and learning how to stabilize and function in our life together, we’d chosen to begin processing the trauma that created our internal structuring to begin with. That meant somewhat reexperiencing the trauma for the first time together, as parts of us began encountering trauma that hadn’t previously been known across our system.
Between that and COVID and our regular in-person therapy being disrupted, it was too much for the world to deal with, let alone us. So it makes perfect sense to me why we’d trigger back to where we had last felt some kind of safety.
-Raven
Essie’s not going to, so we should explain. She’s a part of us that split off when we’d met our ex-Dom, and her primary function was to be somewhat of an introject of him and bring us back to him. We had just learned of her months before COVID even happened, and it may have been likely she was always going to try reaching out to him again and COVID just gave the opportunity for her to.
-Rogue
Great observation and point. This was going to happen as long as we didn’t connect with Essie and all align, and typically these things do happen at the height of stress. It’s not surprising or shameful. We were in the process of healing, after all.
We found ourselves back with the man so willing to be there for us when we found out we had DID, our listener/Dom, again. He was all too happy to have had us come back into hand, too.
-Raven
From the Wild Collective Heart series: Part 19
Content Warning: Trauma, dissociation/DID, spiritual possession narratives, family invalidation, psychological distress, and references to mental health treatment.
I excelled at therapy. I treated it like high school and really worked at it. The alternative was to sit in the trauma with no relief, and so the incentive to help myself and be supported was high. Also, I had that whole pesky narrative to disprove for all parts of me, the one trying to strip us of our humanity and frame a well-known mental health condition as spiritual possession or not even real.
Our mind was broken. Our body was broken. Our spirit was seriously questioning everything we’d known to be true. That person online had joined the wagon that I was possessed, along with my family, before he blocked communication with us. From all sides, my world collapsed. The only way out was straight through that bullshit and into understanding myself and listening to my inner parts. Supporting myself.
-Raven
I was there in therapy, but mainly just checking out the psychologist to make sure they were safe for us. I didn’t really feel hopeful much could change and get better. My whole life was a trauma loop just waiting to come back around. If not for Raven, we wouldn’t have chosen therapy for ourselves at all. We would have kept in the loop, in the shame, and in the crazy-making for the rest of our life. I love her more for making us do the hardest things and acting as whatever we needed to heal. A parent, a friend, a sister, and a guide.
-Rogue
And they entrusted me enough to make solid changes in our quality of life as a DID system and as a people. That’s so difficult for many internal people to do.
-Raven
Yeah, but it took an enormous amount of patience from you to get us aligned with similar goals and safe enough to need at all.
-Rogue
Thank you.
-Raven
From the Wild Collective Heart series: Part 18
Content Warning: Childhood exploitation and trafficking, psychological abuse, coercive sexual dynamics, dissociation, trauma reenactment, family abandonment, and threats of institutionalization.
I ran like hell from everything leaking inside of me and from those people back there I’d thought I’d known.
Our “Listener/Dom” broke it off with us, which was intensely cruel, as there were parts of me who saw him as their protector, their lover, their handler, and so on. Even though it was ultimately for our best outcome, it was still a nightmare. I learned there were parts inside of me that could not stop themselves from following the patterns he’d set for them each day. They were stuck in a trauma loop, reenacting over and over, making sexually explicit videos and pictures as though they still had to perform for him. It took months for our nervous system to calm enough for it to stop. We had these parts hand the videos and pictures over to us each day instead of sending him anything. For a time, I kept us without a computer to ensure all parts of self were safe.
He’d had parts of me who were trafficked as a child performing for him, and they were so overwhelmed by the loss of who would take care of them that I became who would.
I got us in therapy. A few duds, and then the psychologist I was on a waitlist to get in with finally had a patient opening. I knew that it was safest for my entire system that we be in therapy and working on healing.
My father had turned my family of origin against me and wanted me committed to a mental institution, where he happened to work. He told my family, and even extended family, that I was spiritually possessed. I knew that I could not be safe again, and I felt my life might be in danger, so I got help, which posed its own complications. My system was told never to speak about anything in our past or the most severe punishments would find them.
Well, we clearly did the work needed to find freedom.
-Raven & Rogue