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: trauma (Page 1 of 2)
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
Star talks about PTSD, triggers, therapy, toxic family dynamics, spirituality, gratitude, self-worth, and the pressure to heal the “right” way. A conversation about making your world safer, creating your own touchstones of light, and allowing your inner world to become part of how you heal.
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 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
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
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
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 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 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
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