Should you write your story of abuse?

 

There are may ways of healing and we have to find our own way, find our own choices when it comes to that. What may work for our friends may not work for us. 

I am an advocate for writing your story of abuse either as an adult or a child, mainly because it has helped me so much. When I found myself in a space where I had lost everything I started to write about it and it was painful. I wondered some days why I was doing it. 

Wasn't it self punishment? 

Why was I putting myself through it?

I originally wanted to help and inform others by writing but as a sideline I actually found it helped me as much.

When I had finished writing I found a strange thing happened in that having had to go over and over editing these books I got so fed up with my own stories of childhood abuse, that they started to lose their fascination for me. The emotions that I had when first writing them disappeared and I was able to look at them as an observer. It healed a lot of my childhood hurts.

But then having wrote them I thought I had finished with writing, but writing hadn't finished with me. Another trauma arrived in the form of my ex dying and all the things I thought had been healed came back in force for me to look at. So I once more started to write. 

What I found in writing about him was the huge lies I had told myself about our time together. The guilt and shame of many things. But in writing it more and more I started to see his abuse was in everything he did or said. I started to have compassion for myself. I saw clearly what a terrible situation I had been in and how damaged I was by it. And I stopped deifying him and excusing his abuse. I saw him as not someone who had a nice side but someone who had completely used me and did anything he needed to use me. Before I started to write about this I was still in denial, but I didn't know it. 

I wrote a book on narcissistic abuse but it is not a book about my story but more a general look at NA. But even so it is about him because everything in there describes him and his behaviour.

But I write about him in detail for my own benefit. I may never publish it due to it being a story that would indicate who I was. I write it to face my truths. I am willing to face this pain in order to erase the emotions from my mind of times spent with him. Because until he died recently I thought I was over him. So decades later I am faced with healing from that which I had not done at the time. Because I had thought it was my fault. It was an unexpected trauma, his dying. As I write my story of the time I was with him it brings back the feelings and the atmosphere of that time. It makes me shudder. Times I thought were good but in fact were dreadful. In order to cope with abuse we have to hide things in the recesses of our minds because the truth at the time is too much to bear. Getting in touch with those hidden things can often help us to become whole. we lose parts of ourselves by being with such people. We split off and become fragmented. I want to be whole, so I write. It works for me.

You don't have to publish your story you can just do it for yourself. You can read it to a chosen friend. Or you can not write at all. You can find another medium for healing. Singing, dancing, art, speaking, however you choose is your way. Writing, as in any other means of healing, will bring up emotions and trigger you but not all triggering is bad, some can help you to transform your suffering. There is no nice way to heal even though we would long for it. At some point it has to be faced, if we are to heal deeply. Writing your story may help you. But it always has to be your choice. When you are ready.