In this episode of Crow Radio, Lilith talks about our day, different healing modalities, starting small, rediscovering spirituality, choosing to heal, and finding ways to face life’s difficult experiences.
Disclaimer: This podcast shares personal experiences and spiritual perspectives. It is not medical or mental health advice or a substitute for professional care.
In this episode of Crow Radio, Star talks candidly about processing trauma and moving forward, working through some trauma in real time, and reflecting on a past relationship involving deception and manipulation.
A little storytime with Star about why being deceived doesn’t make someone a fool, the impossibility of knowing another person’s true intentions, recognizing warning signs of abuse, and why walking away can require careful untangling.
We also explore honoring free will, leaving abusive relationships cleanly, retaining joy, and remembering that joy, love, and hope are innate.
Disclaimer: I speak from my own lived experiences, perspectives, and what I’ve learned along the way. I may share thoughts, suggestions, or things that have helped me, but I am not a mental health or medical professional. This podcast is not a replacement for therapy, medical care, or professional mental health support. Please take what is useful to you and seek appropriate professional support when you need it.
From the Wild Collective Heart series: Part 42
Content Warning: Dissociation/DID, BDSM and power-exchange dynamics, coercive control, psychological manipulation, trauma bonds, sexual themes, spiritual abuse, and spiritual themes involving deities and energy work.
Loki came back exactly one year later, and he burst in with all the fiery heat of his godhood. He was quick-witted, sharp-tongued, and completely serious in telling us, okay, time’s up, and we will be resuming where we left off together.
We could not believe it. That he came back. He agreed he should be our dominant partner and help us learn what that even looks like, to have a place of reference. I have no words for it. It was strange, wild, chaotic, and fun while also terrifying, but in a good way. Like, I was learning the difference between actual dominant energy and what our ex Dom was.
And Dear Gods, I also was having to admit I had some wildly unethical fantasies, you know, that I had wanted to engage in for my own self. My not knowing that or admitting so allowed even the tiniest smidge of our ex Dom into our landscapes, which he was actually well versed in. We told him everything. He read our journals. He had the upper hand on our psyche, not we. And he didn’t dissociate like we did. So, he wasn’t piecing fragments together like we were to try and understand what was happening.
Here is where I learn: never ever ever tell another human being everything. Never. Human beings are not perfect and cannot hold that kind of trust without even subconsciously abusing it or, worse, just forgetting it and not using it deliciously. Anyway, so, there are certain degrees of things that we only give the Gods, and that was what I was learning. Loki can hold and know everything about me and my system. That is actually wise in working with him at all, but a sexual partner? He didn’t even need to know fricking any of what we told him, and of course he was tempted to go use it or, like, make himself some weird ringmaster of people and all sorts of falsities disguised as deep inner wisdom and healing.
Oh yeah, and we had to realize where our own greed to heal ourselves became muddled, not helpful, and hubristic. Luckily, we were a bit deranged from being in his energy, and so what he gained from us was a bit of his own derangement and not actually my ancestral dowry. And oh yeah, we are sponges for other people’s energies and gifts and things. We retained that gift from childhood, and anyway, so we were sponging up his poison, and he was using his own poison through us to sound like an anything. A wizard, Harry, you know?
That’s not to say we don’t have our own gifts, but that is to say how we see all the gifts and talents others have and their demons. We just weren’t aware that’s what we were doing. We’re like children, you know, in that sense. We haven’t had the words to describe it until, well, we do have the words.
If you are a child, inner-child-like this, please, please learn to shield and guard your sweetheart head and body like it’s life or death because you don’t want to be accidentally drinking poison and/or be amplifying things for others that it is not their path to have amplified.
So we had to, in a sense, take accountability for our thinking we knew anything and actually not. Which is why we tell stories now because, hey, I don’t know anything here, bub. Take what you need and move along, you know? Stories really are the safest way of things for me and my own. I did not think it would be true stories, but fuck if that ain’t where we are, you know?
-Lilith
We had to change. That’s what it came down to. We had to significantly change to unbind ourselves entirely from our ex Dom. Deep change. Frightening change. Change that propelled us to even write this story down at all. We had to step firmly into our authenticity.
-Star
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
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
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
From the Wild Collective Heart series: Part 37
Content Warning: Dissociation/DID, childhood trauma, coercive power dynamics, spiritual and religious abuse, abusive relationship dynamics, trauma-related experiences, infant death, and spiritual themes involving deities, ancestors, death, past lives, spirits, energy work, spiritual marriage, and spiritual bindings.
Grief doesn’t bother me. It lets me know you are human, too. We had more grief to get through.
Our wedding with Loki was quick. I wore white, and charcoal ash covered my bare feet. He wore black, and wood ash covered his hands. He smudged soot down my face. Hel stood near the gates of Helheim. He’d built a modest cabin in the woods for us to meet between planes. I loved it. I wore a ring for myself and for him here in Midgard. It scorched a red burn around my finger, and I knew our marriage was as much blessed in spirit as it was in my human life. A welcome arrangement.
We had previously held this kind of arrangement with our ex Dom. He’d created a contract with our ancestors when we’d first met, and we were there, and a sort of wedding took place. He had promised his ancestors and ours that he would use the contract to help us heal and to heal himself, and mine agreed to it. It took me many years to understand that once abuse enters such a contract, the contract no longer stands. It is null and void. If it weren’t for a random blog I happened upon explaining that abuse breaks a contract, we may never have started questioning our contract with him.
Unfortunately, however, we weren’t certain we were being abused. Nor did we trust our own visions and dreams as part of our routes of communication with spirit. That came from childhood abuse and the erasure of our gifts and talents from our awareness. And because we believed it was all BDSM, and psychologically heavy rather than physically present since this was an online relationship, we didn’t see the harm for a very long time. We didn’t know all we’d consented to.
The other thing was that we were seeing visions of past lives we’d had with him, but they never reached a conclusion. We’d only see the parts where we were with him as a spouse or lover. We’d see ourselves making love and that love energy helping us and our community. One such vision eventually broke through to the end, and we got a cold feeling. By his choices, we did not follow our clan when they moved. We died. Our baby could not get milk or sustenance and also died. By his own hand, through his choices, he was brought into a madness from which he never recovered, in any lifetime. His rage and madness stayed with him.
We didn’t know our ex Dom wasn’t our spirit husband, the one our soul was waiting for and looking for. He’d slid into Loki’s spot and manipulated a contract between me and my ancestors and his own. We were taught that men are gods, our father being our spiritual husband until we married, and so a person always holding such a space over us was normal to us. We never imagined a God would become our spouse, but now know that was what had been blocked from us since childhood. Controlled and taken advantage of.
-Lilith
At this point, I need to share something important. I believed I had found my spirit husband in our ex Dom unquestioningly, never having known that he would not be a human man. I asked my own ancestors, whom I did not yet have a bond with in spirit and was largely cut off from because of a loophole the religion of my upbringing used to bind the more recent generations to its purpose and create a broken link in the chain of my ancestry. They seemed unsure. I begged them, and they allowed me to go down this path with him, and it mirrored the experiences I was already having in life.
I was bound to repeat these beliefs and relationships, and that was my binding, which was also the binding on my more recent ancestry. They knew that path, the one that took everything of their sovereignty, and many still believed it was worthy because that was their path. It’s incredibly difficult to admit wrongness. A big part of healing is admitting where we were wrong. Imagine generation after generation having to admit wrongness. All they knew and believed and lived, just flat-out wrong. Many of them can’t because they can’t part with that identity.
I did not have an ally among my own ancestors available to me until my grandmother died. Through all her years of genealogy, she was able to connect me with the ancestors I had been blocked from, the ones who would help me find God, help me find Loki and even be open to him at all.
-Star
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
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
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
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