Your Story Matters

The mental storm of abuse is one that comes in waves, like torrential rain beating down in fury, flooding the ground all around us. The dark clouds momentarily break here and there helping us regain our footing. For what seems like longer than we can endure, the storms keep coming. It's not sustainable. It is more than anyone should ever have to bear. But we do. Each time.

This is what it's like dealing with the confusion and depression that comes with leaving a manipulative relationship. It creates depths of exhaustion we can't explain. It comes and goes and comes again.

I noticed, the journey to healing has many stops along the way. One I find extremely difficult and damaging is this:

Once you realize you weren't the problem, you ask yourself what the fuck is wrong with people?

We can get stuck, like in the mud that follows a storm, in this question.

It fucks with our thoughts on humanity. If you are like the typical person that is targeted by a narcissist, you know the ones — the highly empathetic, highly sensitive, compassionate and kind ones, ready to give chance after chance, to see the human in everyone, to see the trauma that drives someone to hurt others in order to save themselves from their own trauma — then you know this question is so hard to shake until there is an answer you can live with.

We spend an incredible amount of time wondering what went wrong, and then we often land on the question of how. How can someone treat another human like this?

If we allow ourselves to get sucked up into the eye of the storm long enough, we can see clearly.

It can leave us scarred, with a wound that had to scab over so many times it leaves us with little trust in the world.

Telling our story, out loud, or on paper, gives all this energy a place to live outside of the body.

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Speak your truth and let the storm move through you instead of staying lodged inside you, because a storm that passes through leaves mud, but a storm you hold onto leaves rot.

I don't have a neat answer to what's wrong with people. I'm not sure there is one, not one that actually satisfies the question the way you want it to. And I am so exhausted from trying to figure it all out. But I know this much: the exhaustion isn't just in your head. Depression and confusion after something like this aren't a character flaw or a failure to "get over it fast enough." Your nervous system spent way too long in survival mode, bracing for the next unpredictable thing, and it doesn't just stand down the moment you leave. It takes time to convince your body the storm has actually passed. That exhaustion you can't explain — that's not weakness. That's a body coming down off of years of high alert, and it has its own timeline, one that doesn't care how ready your mind is to be done with this.

So if you're in the mud right now, still asking the question, still soaked from the last wave, give your story a place outside of you. We are never meant to sit alone in our most difficult experiences. Share your story, say it out loud so you can begin to heal.