Tag: trauma (Page 1 of 2)

We Did Our Job

September 11, 2026 / Raven / 0 Comments

From the Wild Collective Heart series: Part 27

Content Warning: Trauma, dissociation/DID, coercive control, sexual exploitation, psychological manipulation, and spiritual threats.

He knew how to direct our filming and photo’ing ourselves for him. Had us upload to a password-protected service that allowed anyone with the password to view the files. He knew not to “fuck with the littles” in a DID system or everything goes poorly and non-operational. He had done this before to other disabled women and once, he alluded to men also.

My point is, he knew things that let us know he was a handler. He tried to tell us we were wrong about that, but we know we weren’t wrong. That’s our trigger. A specific type of handler associated with sex work.

Since we were tied up to him, we did our job in that specific situation. We weren’t mad about it. It’s just how it is to us. He treated it like his job too, another clue.

He’d told us once he wanted us for the internet clout. That was concerning, as we’d never heard anything like that before. Clout was such a hollow word it didn’t fit with our understanding that we were safe with him as long as we served him. He wouldn’t spiritually or magically retaliate against us as long as we kept under him, came back to him, and served him. Otherwise he’d protect himself, he told us.

We heard we’d get in trouble and be punished by larger forces than he that he commanded.

He said he was a magician, and he gave us a book to read. To prove we were reading it, we recorded ourselves reading it out loud to him. It was called The Universal Master Key, and he said it was very good, actually. To us we heard, it got him something. He never told us what, and it wasn’t something we could safely ask.

He told us to report to him. We did. We did our job. We had it set up that we’d journal every evening and send him that to read so he could know our well-being or not. He liked that a lot and wouldn’t let us skip it.

We felt cared for in what we understood and knew.

-Bear

I Fell Into Grace

September 10, 2026 / Raven / 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

Our Brain Survived Itself

September 9, 2026 / Raven / 2 Comments

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

Back Into Hand

September 7, 2026 / Raven / 0 Comments

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

Sketch

September 6, 2026 / Raven / 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

I’m No Victim. I Clap Back.

September 5, 2026 / Raven / 0 Comments

From the Wild Collective Heart series: Part 16

Content Warning: References to childhood physical abuse, choking, coercive control, dissociation, BDSM, emotional manipulation, and abandonment trauma.

I liked him well enough. He was a bit crazed like me. I found him relatable in that he could be incredibly psychopathic, and at the time I was viewing myself as potentially fucked up enough to be so myself.

Turns out numbness and a purely evil tongue when triggered does not make a psychopath, just a hurt girl dealing with her own complex trauma responses. I have tons of empathy and go numb and into survival fighting when triggered.

It had been how I coped, trying to put myself in other people’s places to understand them and relate so that I didn’t have to carry more pain over how willfully and diligently they chose to hurt the shit out of me.

But I’m no victim. I clap back.

The last time I clapped back at my father when I was younger, his rage pinned me to the wall, his forearm choking me as he screamed red an inch from my face. He apparently was teaching me never to stand up for myself against his authority.

I blacked out. I still wonder if I was choked out or had I just dissociated. Probably both.

Clapping back at my ex Dom meant he’d punish me until I was exhausted and just wanted it to stop. Assailing me with criticism. Threatening me he’d leave, which was my biggest trigger. Abandonment wounds for the win.

He’d actually leave too, which was a pain I cannot yet put to words. I fought and kept fighting it and then submitted. At least I fought. That’s what I held onto to comfort myself after.

Otherwise though, I loved the BDSM.

-Rogue

I Liked to Read

September 5, 2026 / Raven / 0 Comments

From the Wild Collective Heart series: Part 15

Content Warning: References to childhood sexual abuse, coercive control, sexual conditioning, dissociation, and punishment.

I looked for peanut butter when I woke back up. Carried it with me, licking my fingers from the dip. Where I found myself was nice. Clean and warm. The windows let light in and weren’t covered up. No terrifying dogs to navigate around. No Auntie though, no one to tell me where I was and for what.

I started talking to him and realized, oh, this is a handler. Okay, so there was someone to tell me what was up.

He was very kind. Usually handlers get to business faster, and I pushed him for it a bit because the waiting made me nervous, like I couldn’t be done with the job, and I sure wanted done with it.

It was very hard to figure out what he wanted me to do, too. I had to tell him I didn’t know a lot of things he’d been talking about, which was a scary admittance because I was unsure if he’d punish me for it.

He recommended some books about sexual chemistry, and I glanced through them. I liked to read. They were interesting, I guess, like how to read sexual energy between partners and how to respond to it.

So then I wondered, was he a client of ours and I’d misread the whole thing? Still wasn’t sure, but was leaning toward that due to the books he’d given me.

Then I learned he was training me.

Definitely handler.

Those first weeks I got my footing and learned how to make him content. He’d leave afterwards or punish us with accusations. I got worn out real fast and couldn’t keep front long enough to gather what he was up to.

-Bear

It Took Surprisingly Little

September 4, 2026 / Raven / 0 Comments

From the Wild Collective Heart series

Content Warning: Candid reflections on trauma, grooming, coercive control, dissociation, and spiritual manipulation.

He knew me intimately. We’d met on a chat site where people listened to others to support them. Something about his attention broke me from my sleep on the inside, and I began trying to speak with him. I had no understanding of current events. My age. My circumstances. He really valued my spiritual and divine nature, and this flooded me with good feelings I wasn’t prepared to manage at all. I could barely form sentences, not used to communicating. I stuck to single words and built up to three words and then eventually sentences. It was difficult because I could see what I wanted to communicate in visions, and I had no words to speak it.

I was dreaming of him each night and felt it meant our meeting was by divine design. My spiritual framework from childhood in full effect, guiding me safely and securely into his hands. All he needed to do was be there, and I practically handed myself over to him. The overwhelm was so much. He loved my name. He saw value in my spiritual visions. I needed a replacement for the man who had been my god, my first husband, my whole world. Without him, I felt very lost, and the sadness made me tired.

He understood me. When he told me I was not as important a part of us inside, I went back to sleep for him and would not hear from him again until four years later.

Four years later, I woke up and we were with him again. I knew him immediately. He had laid enough familiarity and groundwork of his own that first time we’d met for me to do so. It took surprisingly little.

-Star

Who Would Take Care of Me?

September 4, 2026 / Raven / 0 Comments

From the Wild Collective Heart series: Part 13

Content Warning: Grooming, coercive control, power exchange, and references to trauma and dissociation.

He told me he knew that I was good and not bad, not a demon. I’d never heard such a thing before. No, no, I am demon. I do demon things and host my little demons inside. What the fuck is this about being good and not bad and not a demon? It felt like Pop Rocks on the tongue as I repeated after him out loud.

Curiosity lined my insides and I buzzed with the desire to learn more. So he had thought I was bad, but I proved otherwise? How? Is it my nature to now prove him wrong? Maybe. Depends on what this is.

He knew my Star, which is improbable. Only I know of her and one other external person. Handlers sometimes trade us around, I guessed. We didn’t have one to turn to at all, it seemed. Who would take care of me? He said he would.

He gave advice and instruction. He gave time and attention. He listened. And so a contract constructed itself between us that seemed feasible. I learned I needed to heal and that was why I was in therapy. So the energy between him and me would serve that purpose, to heal by.

My Star trusted him, and I wanted to trust him, but handlers usually do have their scary sides. I knew to be aware of that. And sure enough, some months into the power exchange dynamic, he let slip a bit of his scary side.

-Lilith

I’m Also Strange

September 2, 2026 / Raven / 0 Comments

From the Wild Collective Heart series: Part 10

Content Warning: Candid reflections on self-harm, trauma, sexual control, coercive dynamics, and mature themes.

He was strange, but I’m also strange. We had an agreement I could bite myself when he allowed me to. It helped me feel safe, like punishment had come and gone. He wanted me to belong to him. No one has ever wanted me. My heart still hurts about it, but it goes deeper than him.

Somehow he’d hit that sweet spot that triggered me out. I know now… that wasn’t a good thing. At the time, that was a warning, but home feels like home, and unbeknownst to me, we were running thin on protectors he hadn’t burned through. So there I was, biting the hell out of my arm and showing him the marks I’d left. Seemed fine enough.

As far as I knew up front, he just wanted to control my orgasms, and hey, I didn’t know what the fuck to do with that, but why not. He liked my old-fashioned name. Thanks, it’s from the Bible. I’m our jailer, though, not a saint.

I was completely overwhelmed by his attention, desire, and need for me to submit to him. I thought I couldn’t be broken, and I was. Just like they were before me.

-Judith