Hello,
I see you have gone through some terrible experiences in your life. I understand how you feel because I have been there myself . What happened to you? Would you like to tell your story?
“A memory without the emotional charge is called wisdom.”
Dr. Joe Dispenza
Want to write your story but have some apprehension about writing? Need some advice on how to start writing your story?
Have you ever had someone tell you to NOT tell YOUR story? Or have you ever been told to JUST FORGET IT or GET OVER IT without understanding what happened to you?
When we have a physical pain, like a broken leg, we would tell someone about it and go see a doctor to get the leg heal. People would ask us questions such as “What happened? How did this happen? Does it hurt?”
However, when it comes to mental pain, we often try to bear it alone and hide it. Then, when it felt so uncomfortable or unbearable that we couldn’t hold it inside any longer, we decided to tell someone about it. So often what happen next is that instead of asking what happened or acknowledging our pain, we’re often told to NOT talk about what happened to us and that NO ONE ELSE NEED TO KNOW and to JUST FORGET IT or GET OVER IT or THE PAIN IS JUST IN YOUR HEAD –And all this does is keep us feeling “broken/unhealed”.
Well MY DEAR, we no longer have to bear it inside and not have our stories be heard. We can now share our stories and have them be heard and acknowledge by other caring souls–and in doing so–free ourselves from feeling stuck in the past and start on our healing journey.
Based on the research done by Richard Tedeschi and Lawrence Calhoun, there’s evidence of positive growth from traumatic experiences. Furthermore, by disclosing the thoughts and emotions to empathetic others, this may provide therapeutic effects and play an important role in developing post-traumatic growth.
Here are some points to help write your story:
1) The purpose of writing your story is to put the past experiences outside of you so as to release the agony of bearing an untold story inside you. By sharing your story, not only will it help you, but may also help someone else and may save them. So, think of it as a “teaching” moment. Put your “wise teacher” hat on and share your wisdom from your experiences.
2) Old feelings and emotions from difficult or traumatic experiences may not be completely dissolved and so may trigger strong negative emotions and feelings while writing your story. Therefore, before writing your story, keep in mind of the ground rules as suggested by Linda Graham in her book Bouncing Back – Rewiring Your Brain for Maximum Resilience and Well-Being:
- Find a time and place to sit [peacefully] without interruption. Call to mind a particular moment of ease and well-being, a particular sense of your own goodness, or a moment when you felt safe, loved, connected, and cherishes. Or think of a moment when you were with someone who loves and believes in you. Remember this moment in as much detail as you can, in as many levels of your body and brain as you can: a visual image, the feelings in your body that the memory evokes, any thoughts you have about yourself now as you remember the sweetness of that moment. Let yourself savor this moment in a mindful and compassionate “holding” of the memory. [The purpose is to put yourself in positive mood first before you start writing. Turn on good music that you really enjoy and start thinking about all the positive feelings and emotions you’ve experienced in your life: the love from your friends/family/pet; the joy and laughter moments you’ve had in the past; the peaceful feeling such as sitting in the park on a nice warm spring day, or sitting by the lake or on a beach on a beautiful sunny day, or listening to soothing music, or being in church, or sitting and meditating. The reason to start with positive mindfulness is to seed your body with positive feelings and emotions so as to redirect the old memories and not reinforcing them]
- Then, focus your awareness on your positive resources: positive self-regard, self-acceptance. Trust your innate goodness, and evoke the wisdom of your wiser self. [Put yourself in the role of a wise teacher].
- Anchor your awareness firmly in the present moment. You are safe here and now and will still be safe even when you retrieve a troubling memory of what happened back there, back then.
- Start small! Work with a teaspoon of trouble, not a ton… [Start with a short paragraph].
3) Write out your story in third person as if you’re telling a story about someone else. Write it as if you’re writing a story about your best friend or your dearest and closest sibling or someone whom your really admire. Write your story from a heroic survivor perspective and not from a victim perspective. When writing in third person perspective, it allows you to be an empathetic observer and witness of your story, which allows for more compassion and understanding toward the heroic survivor, which is you. Because you’re telling a story from an observer perspective, this will help with not having to “reliving” the experience. Remember to start “small”. Write at several intervals. If you start to feel overwhelmed or lousy or the pain start to form, stop writing. Get up and walk away to another room and do something else to distract the yucky feelings. Go for a quick walk or call up a friend or family member or hold your pet or turn your music louder. Just do something to stop the negative feelings and emotions from building momentum. DON’T let them detestable feelings over-power you and rob you of your resilience and bravery and innate goodness in you. Remember, you are not your story.
4) Try to remain factual and non-emotional as if you’re telling the story to a child. Recall the memories of what happened by answering the child’s questions such as when did it happen; who were involved; how old were you; how old was the other person; what the other person said and did; what people said and did; what you said and did. Don’t go into specific or graphic details of the event, as the child wouldn’t need to know. No need to “rehash” the specifics so as not to “relive” the trauma. What you wish you could have said or done differently? What you wish others could have said or done differently? What impact did it have on you then? What impact it has on you now? What qualities emerged in you as you dealt with the experience? If you were to share your story with a group of adolescents, what advise would you tell them on how to deal with such experience? What you wish you could have learned on how to deal with the negative impacts so that they can learn from you and wouldn’t have to struggle through as much as you did?
5) Then, sit back and read the story out loud to yourself as if you’re sharing the story to a group of adolescents so that they can learn from the story. Next, gather up your courage and share your story to the person(s) who care – empathetic others, someone you can trust. Doesn’t have to be the people you know well. If you’re not comfortable with verbally expressing your story, then share your story on this site by posting it. By sharing your story, you’ve created positive growth for you and anyone else witnessing your story because there’s healing in sharing and witnessing an individual’s bravery and resilience.
The goal is to develop your story and learn to acknowledge and accept of what had happened had happened in the past and can’t be changed. However, disclosing your experience can help rob the trauma or abuse of its power. Even though you can’t completely erase the effects, they can be reduced and coped with in a healthier way. You can’t erase the past, but you can learn, grow, and teach from it. Be the wise teacher and pass on your wisdom.
According to John Burik, MEd, MS, “We all have mechanisms in our brain that work like the circuit breakers in our homes’ electrical system. If there’s a power surge too much for the system to handle the circuit breaker “pops” or “trips” which protects the system from harm. Similarly the brain has mechanisms that assess our experience and decide it’s too much to handle at that time.
When that happens the experience is stored in what’s called “implicit memory.” Now a key piece to know about implicit memory is that it doesn’t have everyday time coding, knowing when something’s past, present, or future. It’s as if the experience is happening NOW. So when a present day event “triggers” an old implicit memory the experience of fear, rage or helplessness is very real and very NOW — even if it makes no sense with what’s actually happening in the present.
The good news is we can begin to make sense of this old experience by approaching this past experience, sometimes slowly and always cautiously, with our adult rational mind. As we build this narrative, this story, we begin to convert it to “explicit memory,” with its proper place in the historical past.
This doesn’t make the past experience good but converts the memory into something we can handle now without overwhelm. I also stress that if you’ve been given a formal diagnosis or are in treatment you should not attempt this by yourself but in consultation with a professional. ”
When writing your story regarding trauma experiences, be aware of the following as written on the webpage of Blueknot.org (https://www.blueknot.org.au/Survivors/Telling-your-story):
- “Telling your story is different if you experienced trauma in childhood than it is for someone who didn’t. That’s because childhood trauma has biological impacts on your brain and body.
- Some survivors can become activated (either hypo- or hyper-aroused) when telling their story. Sometimes survivors can become as activated as they were at the time of the original trauma.
- Telling your story can be either be helpful or unhelpful, at different times. While it can help you make meaning of what happened it can be also be traumatising.
Some professionals feel that little is to be gained by going back over past experiences. Others believe that telling your story relieves the burden of carrying your history around, as though it is the sum total of who you are. Your childhood abuse and trauma is not your whole story. Talking helps to put those past experiences outside of you, and disconnect the issues they raise from who you are, so you are able to separate yourself from the experiences (van Loon & Kralik, 2005c). Some survivors decide that they do not need to dig too deep because the process of exploring their past may become re-traumatising (van Loon & Kralik, 2005b). Some survivors believe that it is important to acknowledge their abuse and speak about its impacts, rather than the details of what happened (van Loon & Kralik, 2005b)…
Disclosing your experiences can help rob the trauma or abuse of its power. Even though you can’t completely erase the effects, they can be reduced, and coped with in a healthier way.”
Posttraumatic Growth: Conceptual Foundations and Empirical Evidence
Richard G. Tedeschi and Lawrence G. Calhoun
Based on the research done by Richard Tedeschi and Lawrence Calhoun, there’s evidence of positive growth from traumatic experiences. Furthermore, by disclosing the thoughts and emotions to empathetic others, this may provide therapeutic effects and play an important role in developing post-traumatic growth. Below are the highlights from the researchers’ article.
– Many persons facing devastating tragedies do experience growth arising from their struggles. The events themselves, however, are not viewed as desirable – only the good that has come out of having to face them…
– The degree to which individuals engage in self-disclosure about their emotions and about their perspective on their crisis, and how others respond to that self-disclosure, may play a role in Post-traumatic Growth.
– Post-traumatic growth can be connected to significant development of wisdom and of the individual’s life narrative. It’s not the trauma itself that is responsible for growth as much as what happens in the after math of trauma.
– Supportive others can aid in post-traumatic growth by providing a way to craft narratives about the changes that have occurred, and by offering perspectives that can be integrated into schema change. The mutual support role is important because the credibility of those who have “been there” can be crucial in determining the degree of willingness trauma survivors have to incorporate new perspective or schema. Narratives of trauma and survival are always important in post-traumatic growth because the development of these narratives forces survivors to confront questions of meaning and how it can be reconstructed.
– In telling their stories to others, the emotional aspects of the events and the survivor are usually revealed, resulting in an intimacy that may be surprising. The narratives of trauma and growth may also have the effect of spreading the lessons to others through vicarious post-traumatic growth. These stories then transcend individuals and can challenge whole societies to initiate beneficial changes.
– Young adult trauma survivors tend to report greater post-traumatic growth when also reporting greater levels of cognitive processing recalled as occurring sooner after the event but not when engaged in continuing processing years after the event. (Don’t keep recalling the event years after years. Research shows that continued and extended searches for meaning of the event longer than a decade would do more harm than good.)
– The cognitive processing of trauma into growth appears to be aided in many people by self-disclosure in supportive social environments. It is unclear whether this disclosure works better if it is written or verbal because there is evidence that post-traumatic growth can be increased by specific interventions that enhance cognitive processing during journal writing. It may be that the facilitation or discouragement of cognitive processing of emotional material in trauma survivors is the key and this can happen in direct social contact or through instructions to person who write personal journals.
– Lepore and associates have shown that social constraint (i.e, blocking of self-disclosures of intrusive thoughts) produces a strong relation between these thoughts and depression.
– Social support may play a strong role in the development of post-traumatic growth when it remains stable and consistent over time.
– The potential benefits of social support experiences in facilitating post-traumatic growth through mutual support groups is that they provide a discussion of perspective, offering of beliefs, and the use of metaphor to explain experience.
– Certain kind of personalities – extraversion, openness to experience, and perhaps optimism may make growth a bit more likely. The individual social system may also play an important role particularly through the provision of new schemas related to growth and the empathetic acceptance of disclosures about the traumatic event and about growth related themes. Post-traumatic growth does not mean reduction of distress. Growth and pain may co-exist for some people.
– Active disclosure of thoughts and emotions to empathetic others may be important to the development of post-traumatic growth. Attempts on the part of people in the support networks of trauma survivors to suppress rumination are perceived by survivors as not helpful. Similarly, therapeutic interventions with trauma survivors that are focused on rapid distress relief may prevent greater long-term gains.
– The outcomes of post-traumatic growth might be best considered as iterative and the process is likely to involve a powerful combination of demand for emotional relief and cognitive clarity. Metaphorical and narrative elements are likely to serve trauma survivors well as they take on a life that has become surprisingly complicated beyond expectation, and painful trauma survivors often see themselves as either attempting to survive or trying to determine if survival is worthwhile.” Richard Tedeschi and Lawrence Calhoun
EXAMPLE OF A SHORT STORY:
When Monica was thirteen, she was sexually abused by a foster care giver’s husband. She was threatened by the husband with a shotgun if she was to tell anyone. Fearful for her and three of her older siblings lives, she didn’t tell anyone and remained a victim for seventeen years. At the age of thirty, she met someone and told him of her situation and the person convinced her to escape from the perpetrator.
For seventeen years, Monica was experiencing the feelings of fear and anger and hatred and revenge and shame and guilt. However, through the Lord’s Prayer, she was given the greatest gift…the ability to forgive. Now, she’s no longer a victim but a victor in her life. Instead of letting the traumatic event pulled her down, she become a stronger and more resilience person. Through forgiveness, Monica was able to let go of the negative past and the negative feelings that were associated with it. She no longer allow negative event to have control over her life. As Viktor Frankl stated “The one thing you cannot take away from me is the way I choose to respond to what you do to me. The last of one’s freedom is to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”
So, now Monica doesn’t just survive; she thrives and lives a life full of love and compassion and joy and peace. She feels blessed and doesn’t blame her past because it has brought her to where she’s today. Her desire is to turn the negative event into something with more positive impacts by being able to share her story and hopefully will make positive differences in people’s lives.
EXAMPLE OF A LONGER STORY:
When I was eleven years old, I came to the U.S. from a refugee camp with three of my older siblings. We were put in a long-term foster care home with a couple in a small town in Minnesota. The wife was 29 and was a teacher and the husband was 31 and was a truck driver. They’d only been married for a year when we’d come to live with them. They couldn’t have any children of their own and so decided to take in us four unaccompanied refugee minors as their foster children. It was a lot for my foster mom, who never had any experience in raising children prior to us, to take in four grown kids who didn’t speak any English. On top of that, two months after us four kids moved-in, the Lutheran Social Service asked the couple to take in another two teenage brothers since they desperately needed a home because the brothers were asked to be removed from their previous foster care home due to health reason. Bless my foster mom heart for the kind person that she is; she agreed to take in the brothers and so her family grew to six kids in two months. She did her best to help us kids get adjusted to the new environment. My two older brothers and sister and the other two brothers were teenagers and so it was harder for them to learn English and so required a lot of my foster mom attention during school time. I was the youngest and still young enough to learn another language faster and so was able to get adjusted to school faster and therefore didn’t require much of her attention. When I do need help with school related homework, it was her husband who’d spent the most time to help me. So, I became more attached to him and had become his “favorite” kid.
After two years of building trust with the husband of my foster mom, I felt comfortable going anywhere with the guy. I would go along on his trucking route alone with him whenever I had a chance. He took the boys on his trucking route as well since my foster mom made sure that he was being fair to the other kids. Whenever any of the kids got to go on the trucking route with him, he would buy us any snacks that we’d wanted. So, all the younger kids in the house would want to go with him, especially the youngest foster brother. However, I got chosen to go with him more often than the others. He treated me more “special” than the other kids in the house. Whenever we go fishing with the boys, I was the one who get to choose first what type of snacks and drinks we could bring along. He made me felt “special” that I was his favorite kid. So, on the last day of my sixth grade school year (I was thirteen then) I was offered to go on a normal trucking route that involved an overnight trip. Nothing was unusual about an overnight trip since we’d done this before.
However, that night was different. In the middle of the night, he’d pulled over to the side of the road in a remote country side and woke me up while I was sleeping in the truck sleeper, like I normally did. He told me that he was tired and sleepy and needed to rest before he could drive further and so needed to lie down for a little bit. After he laid down by my side while my back was facing him, he started to rub my back and massaging me. I didn’t think anything of it because I’d trusted him. Then, he said that he couldn’t sleep and that he was in pain. He told me that he had “blue balls” and that it was very painful and that he needed me to help relieve the pain. I didn’t know what “blue balls” pain was all about. Never heard of it before. So, I’d agreed to help. Then, he said that the only thing to relieve the blue balls pain was that he had to have sex to relieve the pain. I didn’t know what to say and just stayed quiet and motionless and let him had his way. When he got done, he told me to promise not to tell anyone or else he would get in trouble, especially with my foster mom because she would get really mad. He told me that the Lutheran Social Service would move me and my two older brothers to another foster home, just like they did with the other two foster brothers, if anyone was to find out. So, I made the promise and didn’t tell anyone.
After that incident, I stopped wanting to go on trucking trip with the perpetrator. However, occasionally when my foster mom was not around, he would go to my bedroom late at night while my two brothers were deep asleep and had his way. I kept asking him to stop but he always came up with some excuses and some sort of promises that this would be the last time, even swore as a Masonic Lodge Master that he would stop. He would bring me all kind of teddy bears to fill up my bedroom to please me since I liked them. Eventually, I just gave up asking him to stop and developed Stockholm syndrome.
Then about two years after he started, there was a girl around my age who was murdered by her father with a pick-like tool and the body was dumped in the field about 40 miles from where I’d lived. The father confessed to his daughter’s murder and that he was molesting her since she was eight and then killed her when she’d refused him. There was all kind of press coverage on the story, and it was all over the television news. So, the perpetrator had a talk with me regarding the murder. He brought out the shotgun and loaded it and lean it against the chair next to him. He had me sat down in a chair across from him and warned me not to tell anyone of what he’d done to me. He said that if I’d tell anyone, then he would have to go to jail for a long-time. He said that all the newspapers and televisions would cover the story, and everyone would know and that I would bring shame to my family and that my foster mom would lose her job as a teacher. Then, he picked up the shotgun and told me that he would not want to go to jail and that he would use the shotgun to kill himself and that everything would be my fault. I was fifteen then and was living in a very small town of about 1200 people and didn’t know anyone else or have any other relatives in the US besides my siblings. So, I was very fearful for myself and my siblings and so kept the secret and let the perpetrator continued his act.
The two main reasons why I didn’t want to expose the perpetrator and report him were because I didn’t want anything happen to my siblings and that I didn’t want my family to experience the feeling of shame because of me. I would rather bear everything inside me alone than bring harm or shame to my family. During this time, I was occasionally reminded that the perpetrator was a former C I A agent during the Vietnam war and that he had skills. So, I was constantly living in fear. The fear of someone might find out and then everything would be my fault.
When I was 30, I’d met Tom [not his real name] through work and so decided to tell him my story since I didn’t want to have any “secrets” that may negatively affect our relationship later on. Then, Tom provided me an opportunity to get away from my old environment. Before this, I didn’t know anyone else whom I could trust enough besides my family. So, I’d stayed around near my family, which stayed in contact with the perpetrator because they didn’t know about my secret. That same night that I’d told my story to Tom over the phone, I packed two suitcases of clothes and took the earliest flight out of town the next morning. Tom had convinced me to move away from my familiar environment and move-in with him in the east coast, where I’d never been. I was very emotional during that night and so made the decision to move quickly before I’d change my mind.
In the first month of living together with Tom, he kept insisting that I should report the perpetrator and put him in jail. I kept objecting to his suggestions because I still didn’t want anyone else to know. I told Tom that I didn’t want to cause my family and my foster mom to experience the feeling of shame and guilt over this. Furthermore, it would have been all over the news, and for sure I didn’t want “my secret” to be a news event. Everyone I love would feel terrible, and I didn’t want that to happen. I told Tom that through praying the Lord’s Prayer, I’d forgiven the guy. “forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us“. How could I have any hopes to be forgiven for my trespasses if I myself don’t forgive those who trespasses against me? So, because of the “forgive” line in the Lord’s Prayer, I’ve learned how to forgive and that I do understand what “forgiveness” does to the person who does the forgiving. It relieves me from the burden of experiencing the feeling of anger, hatred, and revenge and gave me a sense of inner peace.
Tom couldn’t grasp what I was telling him. He told me that it was not normal that I wasn’t angry and didn’t hate the man and didn’t want “revenge” after all that he’d done to me. How could I forgive the “monster”? Tom told me that I was still in denial and so insisted that I must go see a psychologist to see what a “professional” had to say about my situation. He thought that I’d developed Stockholm syndrome and so needed help. I didn’t know what Stockholm syndrome was then and so did some research on it. After the research, I didn’t think I had Stockholm syndrome anymore because I didn’t have any “good” feelings for the guy and definitely didn’t want to have anything to do with him. However, I agreed to Tom’s suggestion that I should go see a psychologist because I was curious myself to see what a “professional” had to say about me and whether I was “normal” or not. I did some research and found a psychologist that specialized in the area of childhood trauma and sexual abused. I went to see the psychologist and told him my story (the second person that I’d told my story to). Tears couldn’t stop streaming down my face while telling him what I’d experienced. First time I got a chance to really share my story and feelings without experiencing the feeling of fear and shame of my “secret”. The tears stopped when it came to the part about me experiencing all the negative feelings toward the perpetrator: resentments, anger, hatred, and revenge. I’d even imagined how I would take revenge against the guy and what I would do to make him suffer. Wouldn’t kill him…That would end his suffering. Just make him suffer and be miserable as long as possible…I’d also experienced the feeling of shame and guilt for not stopping it earlier. I’d experienced the feeling of self-doubt as what was wrong with me for letting it went on for as long as it did. After I’d completed telling my story to the psychologist, I felt calm and composed. I told the psychologist that through praying the Lord’s Prayer that I no longer had those negative feelings toward the perpetrator because I’d forgiven the guy. Then, I’d asked the psychologist whether I was in denial or “not sane” for feeling like that? So, he gave me a “professional” opinion. He told me that I seemed perfectly fine and “sane”. He wished that most of his patients could do what I did to let go and forgive so that they could gain inner peace. I’d asked him if I needed to schedule another appointment for a follow-up with him, and he told me no need. He told me that I was better than “normal” and not to worry about what the others may think…
Eventually, I told my older sister of my “secret”. We both cried through the sharing experience. She said that if she could have known then, she would have used the shotgun to kill him. Of course that would have been the last thing that I would have wanted to happen. I would never want my sister to go to jail because of him. Another miserable life that he would have caused. I told her that he’s not worth it and just let it go. I told her that I was fine and that I no longer let the event control my feelings or emotions. It’s in the past and no need to let the event continue to create negative feelings inside us. I was good at reassuring my sister that I was ok at that time even though I was still experiencing the feelings of shame and guilt and self-doubt and resentment for what had happened to me. I didn’t want to tell my story to anyone else for a long time because I was afraid of what they may think of me.
Since then, I’ve shared my story with other people. The more I share my story, the better I was able to let go of the negative feelings and emotions that associated with the event and be “free” of it. Telling my story has helped me to heal!