Telling my story was essential to turning my life around and healing the hurt in my soul.  As I started to remember and piece together my past my counselor gave me several cautions.  I will share with you what I learned.

1.  The mind does not remember events in a nice, neat orderly chain of events.  The mind absorbs a collage of information and rearranges everything to suit itself.  Bits and pieces of several events may be mished-moshed together to form a single distorted event.

2.  My mind may put a kinder face on the monsters in my life, also known as false memories.  Horrible injustices perpetrated by other people imposing a false memory or changing an abuser to a ‘safer’ person.  I had heard of this before of a child reporting the opposite parent as the abuser.  (There is a certain logic to this, the kindlier person won’t abuse you more for telling.)

3.  Playing the blame game shifting the blame of current issues to past events chains me to my past and letting my past define me today.  The past brought me where I am today but I decide where I am going when I wake up in the morning.  As long as I am trying to blame others, I am not healing myself.

4.  Getting caught in the telling phase….going over the same story over and over and over and over and embellishing on the way.  If I wasn’t careful I could get stuck in a never ending loop of telling my story.  The idea is survey the damage then move on to the repair stage.

5. Giving my power away by allowing my abusers from my past to continue to control me today.  An important part of telling my story is to take my power back and recognize that damage was done.

6.  Avoid feeling so overwhelmed by past events that I slip into the nightmarish quagmire of thinking healing is hopeless.  Healing is possible.  Slow but possible.  (My counselor referred to me as a 10,000 piece puzzle.  Task isn’t impossible, just takes longer.)

7.  Don’t tell parts of the story just to shock someone else.  The graphic horrendous details usually have little or no value.  I usually share what I call my ‘Reader’s Digest’ version which skips over huge amounts of details and gives the main parts of the story.

8.  Not everyone is in a place to be able to hear my story.  My counselor took on the task of helping me heal implying that he was in a place and able to hear some of the more difficult parts.  Not everyone that I meet is able to hear what I have to say.  I need to be respectful of others that are listening.

I hope this information helps.