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
