Why do we share our stories?

Why do we NEED to share our stories?

For me, I think the key is that these stories are sources of pain.

We need to tell the stories to work through the pain and process the emotions.

If we ignore it, it stays.

If we address it, talk about it, it lessens.

Anything that causes us pain needs to be expressed in some way.

“Verbal ventilation is the penultimate grieving practice. It is speaking from your feelings in a way that releases and resolves your emotional distress.”

Pete Walker in Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving

Some of us write stories, songs or poetry.

Some of us vlog or blog about it.

Some of us have been fortunate to find a good trauma therapist that we can trust.

Some of us have a good friend to talk to that gets us through.

I am finding the stories that I feel compelled to tell are sources of tremendous pain for me. Pain that has been there since that first time my mother, the one person that is supposed to be there to protect me from all harm, inflicted intentional, confusing, blistering emotional harm upon me.

Each time it occurred I went through a trauma.

Ongoing emotional abuse.

Ongoing lack of empathy.

Ongoing lack of unconditional love from the one person that should hold the market on such a valuable resource.

My struggle is that I keep going into freeze response.

I keep saying that I need to snap out of this and get moving, but it’s not a matter of will power or laziness, or lack of motivation to change my circumstances.

I get triggered and my brain literally goes into freeze mode.

When that happens the frontal lobe, the part of the brain responsible for controlling important cognitive skills, such as emotional expression, problem solving, memory, language, judgment, and sexual behaviour, is basically non-functional.

I am functioning on the monkey brain.

All the monkey brain cares about is survival.

Physical survival.

Mental survival.

That’s it.

I can go days like this.

It is days like this that I watch and listen to other survivors’ videos.

I think their stories help me to pull myself out of my frozen state.

The commonalities that I find in other survivors’ stories are like a life line to me.

I hear my story in other survivors’ stories.

It is as though we are telling each others’ stories.

This tells me that if I tell my story, maybe just maybe, somebody out there is experiencing the same confusion and pain in their lives due to narcissistic abuse, and they will hear my story and realize that they are being abused and they will realize they need to get out of there.

At the very least, I hope it helps them feel validated and less alone.

People like me, the lost children, don’t usually do things like this.

We stay back in the shadows. We watch, but don’t usually participate, if we can help it.

Sometimes, when we’ve felt particularly comfortable we might let our guard down and write out a comment only to later go back and delete it, because we’d rather not get involved, or we feel threatened by our own vulnerability.

Sharing such buried parts of ourselves is scary.

We long to, but at the same time, it is terrifying.

If I could not hide my identity I would not be doing this.

If I recognize myself on video I apply another filter to conceal my identity further.

Some of us feel compelled to share online because we have experienced what it is like to be in the dark and then to be awakened.

We know the pain of the awakening, but also the necessity of it to heal. Being awakened feels like you have literally been asleep. My whole life feels like it’s been a lie. Like, the opposite of what I believed to be true actually is true.

It is from this place of feeling cheated, feeling like “why didn’t anybody tell me?” that I come to you.I want to help, warn, encourage, validate, and do whatever I can to help you because I understand, and I know that understanding means something.

It means I am not alone. It means you are not alone. It means we are not alone.

It means somebody else out there might actually get me. It means somebody out there might awaken sooner and can begin their journey of self discovery sooner.

I’m not mad it took me so long to awaken. I’m just glad I did.

Thank you for letting me share my story with you all.

Thank you for sharing your stories with me.

Your stories have saved my life.

 

https://youtu.be/b2MLuP1oBMg