Courage.

I am beginning to see the importance of keeping this blog. At the time, the process of writing was my security blanket, my game of let's pretend other people will recognize their feelings reflected within my words. My writing at those times was to say - this is survivable, I am surviving this.

And now when I look back - I've recently put together posts from other blogs and retired the originals - I can remember how difficult things have been, but also how brave I was to dare put those awful experiences, and sometimes they were experiences of pure horror; into words.

The belief that tragedy can be memorialized so that it may be celebrated, is my 'North Star', This is why I don't use a concept of past trauma as something to be understood to get to healing. A process of understanding can be derailed by the power of recognition. And a  therapist who doesn't know how to go beyond this absorption - as experiences are suddenly reorganized around the new understanding - leaves his or her clients stuck with a polarized view.

Because a polarized view is comfortable; it promises protection and justice.

But other theories lead to communication and change, to integration.

Every character in the narrative account is an aspects of oneself. The incident is memory, you are each role, you react within to each role. The truth of this, knowing oneself as the abuser, knowing that oneself did not rescue, but actually abandoned oneself is hard to take. Eventually it opens a gap for the present reality to rush in.

The actual truth has gone.

Unless you recorded it as it happened?

A bad thing is a bad thing and it will always be so. The way out of the pain of it is to walk a path of personal integrity; to honour the experience with honesty, and to hold the fire-like energy of fear, rage and panic as if it was a lightning bolt in one's hands. 

In my view, there is no healing, but scars can be worn with pride.

And this is where I am in relation to my husband.

Except I am scared of him.

I don't want to see him ever again.

People don't change unless they actively chose to...

And I did record a lot of it - audio - as it happened.

I can hear his words and the way he spoke.

I know what scared me and why; fear was hard to recognize, harder to deal with.

It always is...

Always will be.

But I have to engage with it at some point.

I don't think that I tell what actually happened, as a narrative in this blog?

That can be changed - will I write factually, or from my heart?

I don't know.

Within the accounts of the past years there is glory, courage and fortitude; shame, guilt and betrayal. 

And I'm not clear what I will do next to pull the separate and broken strands together.

But I think we both know, that I will write about it!