From 2012: Blogging the Parasite out of my Head: Writing about the abuse
(One of my favorite post titles.) This is a much-shortened version of a post I wrote in March 2012. For the full post, see here. Yes, blogging my story did indeed help me to finally get it out and start to heal from it:
I hope this will be cathartic, get the truth out, so that I can heal from what has emotionally and spiritually traumatized me. I hope to make it (and my private account) a repository for all the hurt, pain, anger and bitterness, so that I can transfer it out of my heart.
I have dealt with previous abusive situations in this way, putting them into writing and then posting them on the Web, and it has been largely successful in helping me move on past those times.
I feel that if I just make it vanish, hide the story, it will do no more good than it did with my previous abuse stories.
For example, right after college I began writing College Memoirs, which were a combination of good things and life during that time, and the terrible things that happened with guys who used and abused (I hesitate to refer to them as “men”).
I was going to publish them, but feared libel suits, so I began putting the stories into my fiction instead.
But since the demands of fiction are that you don’t put your own life stories into your stories exactly as they occurred, or else your stories will appear pieced together like Frankenstein, I didn’t feel like my stories of abuse were quite dealt with yet.
I also read an article in Writer’s Digest about writing and publishing abuse stories, and the healing it can bring:
Harrison told her editor that she wanted to write a nonfiction book about her relationship with her father. Because the editor had published Harrison’s autobiographical first novel, she asked if she was sure she wanted to do that.
Harrison was sure. In fact, she’d been trying to write about her father in an essay but felt she was trying to do too much in too short a space. Feeling as if she’d betrayed herself and her story by first writing about the affair as fiction, she had a compelling need to set the record straight.
…“One of the solaces that art can offer you is the chance to make something out of what’s hurt you. You can objectify an experience, put it on paper, craft it and shape it. There’s perhaps an illusory control over it. But it is significant.” –Sandra Hurtes, Spilling Secrets
So I posted a public version of my College Memoirs, first in e-mails to friends, then on a Myspace blog, then on my website.
Even though they don’t get many hits, the stories have been read by some, and in the past several years, I feel myself finally moving past these things that happened 15-20 years ago. They are on the Webpages now and don’t have to be carried around inside me.
I also have a full account of what happened in this new case, but it is so personal and private that I keep it locked away from anyone but myself. Just as with the College Memoirs, I have a personal and a private version.
My hope is that this blog will have the same effect as those public Memoirs. It has been said many times that the abused need to get their stories out into the open, not hide them for fear of “airing dirty laundry,” because that just victimizes them further.
I’ve been revising a full account of the abusive situation with Richard and Tracy. As I work on it, it answers questions that come up. For example, I was starting to feel like Tracy was right and the disagreements were my fault. But as I reviewed the details of the time we lived in the same house, I began to remember what really happened.
It was about all the crap I saw her doing to Richard and the kids every day. It was about a battered man defending his battering. It was about her smacking his arm and giving him looks so full of anger and threat, that he looked scared.
It was about her overhearing me telling my husband not just about her jealousy, but about her abusive behavior of Richard and the children.
It was about her starting a smear campaign against me, deliberately to drive a wedge between Richard and me.
No, she had to put the spotlight all on me with all her ridiculous “rules” which I couldn’t possibly meet–
–so she could continue doing her bad behaviors in the darkness–
–so that Richard would never break free of her control.
The trouble is, she so successfully convinced Richard of her smears, and so successfully turned things around on me, that on 7/1/10, she still made it all about me, still tried to insist that I was the one in the “wrong”–
–not because I was actually wrong–
–but to take the focus off her and her own abuse and bad behaviors.
The other trouble is that abusers can so worm their way into your head, that even though a part of you screams that you’re not the one in the wrong, you’re not the one behaving badly–another part of you keeps thinking, “What if she’s right? What if I really am the one behaving badly?”
I’ve been fighting this for years, not since 7/1/10 or the e-mails she sent me 8/1/10, but since January 2008.
It gets imbedded so deeply that it almost seems impossible to get out. It’s like a parasite.
Blogging is helping me to get it out, finally, because:
- not only can I write about what happened,
- but I have all sorts of private writings which I can look back at later and see what I wrote,
- and I also have this foundation already written, on which I can build with more memories and insights as they come to me.
I thought maybe I shouldn’t blog about this, just keep it under wraps. But now I see that it must come out, that silence is just what bullies want out of their victims.
And if Richard or Tracy sees it, so be it. This is what Richard and Tracy are truly like. I am not lying.
And I have online court records and newspaper reports to prove that I am telling the truth about them.
[Update: They found it just two months after I posted this, and both accused me of lying and threatened me, as you can read here.]
I must keep blogging to get the parasite out of my system once and for all, so I can be free at last of Tracy’s influence, and:
- to defend myself and my innocence
- to break the silence which abusers want their victims to keep
- to get Tracy’s parasite out of my head
- to have peace and remove Tracy’s destructive poison through this surgical removal (ie, writing about it) out of my heart and onto the [digital] page
- to warn others about how narcissists and other personality disordered persons can work
- to sympathize with those with NLD, Asperger’s and introversion who are bullied by those who do not understand them
- to stick up for all abused and bullied people
- to provide help for those abused people who feel driven to read the abuse stories of others
I recall how hard it was to find stories of people who had been abused by friends or spouses of friends rather than by family, co-workers, classmates or significant others; this adds one more. I know what it’s like to constantly search the web looking for stories of other people, in various stages of their healing journey, who have been through abuse in some way.
Here is a story for such people.
(Because this is a story about my healing journey and some people on the Net can be cruel, I’m switching off comments.)