The Power of Creativity to Heal
Trigger warning: Contains discussion of child sexual abuse.
Recently, I relaunched my newsletter, The Creativity to Heal. This is a repost. If you like it, please consider subscribing. It’s free!
I chose the name of this newsletter when I first began healing in earnest. The pandemic had just ended, and I’d been working through the workbook The Courage to Heal: A Guide for women survivors of child sexual abuse. I stopped about a third of the way in when I read one woman’s account about her mother. It cut me to the bone. I hadn’t been prepared to see myself represented so closely. I’d always known what had happened to me, but I’d held it away from my sight. I could hear it scurry around in the shadows, but if I didn’t look at it, I didn’t have to admit it occurred.
It’s interesting how we keep our abusers’ secrets. It’s like we have as much at stake as they do. To tell is to lose everything, but when I think of all I’ve lost in telling my story, I recognize that those relationships were predicated on a shared truth built by my mother. One everyone agreed upon. When you tell, you lob a grenade into that shared family narrative, and for the most part, the one that gets blown apart is you. To be clear, her abuse shattered me. Telling was critical medicine. I needed to do it to survive, but it came at a significant cost.
Even a family who hurts you or stands by while you get hurt and protects your abuser is still a family. Being outside that threatens centuries of biological programming. I didn’t cut off contact with them on a whim. Every stage hurt. Every act, took something, some deep part or truth from my very makeup.
Today, I finally went to my Facebook page to delete all of my family members loyal to her, which is to say, all of them, which sounds more war-like than it is. In other words, my family is very good at going through life in a state of vague awareness. No one looks inward. It’s never been a part of the family culture.
My father passed away in 2013. As recently as last year, one first cousin wished him a happy birthday on his Facebook page. Another first cousin “liked” it. It’s not that they weren’t aware that he passed. It’s that they forgot. When Facebook notified them it was his birthday, that cousin thought, “I’ll wish him a happy birthday.” And then, I surmise, he didn’t think about it again.
Why does my father’s page still exist? Shortly after he died, I deactivated his account to download the content before deleting it. Deactivation means that other users cannot see it. My younger brother told me that my mother’s been telling everyone that Facebook won’t “allow” her to delete the account. Before deactivating it, I’d made his page a “memorial” page. That’s gone now too. When I checked it today, it looked like he’s alive and well, just not posting.
My mother blocked me on Facebook after I posted a piece accusing her of poisoning me as a child and poisoning my father to death. I thought she’d left social media but found out through someone else that she’s still there. I went ahead and made sure I unfriended my father’s page.
Unfriending the rest of my family took longer than necessary. I went to one account, selected the “mutual friends” list, and stared at the names, trying to talk myself into what I knew I had to do. Knowing you’re persona non grata among your family is one thing. Actively removing their access to you proved far more difficult. However, once I started, it got easier. In the end, none of them will think about me again. They’ll reinvest in whatever my mother’s telling them about me if she speaks of me at all — which I doubt. None of it has anything to do with me anymore. In fact, this last stage was simply me admitting to myself what’s always been true. They’ve never been a family to me.
With the holidays fast approaching, families are on my mind. I hear others talk about the plans they have in place to manage toxic family members and cope with the fallout of spending time with them. People cope with alcohol. Others navigate it alongside allied siblings who agree and won’t gaslight. Many people will ignore it with copious amounts of holiday comfort food.
I used to. I stuffed my face to stop the scream trapped in my chest.
I had no one on my side. No one sympathized. No one saw what was happening to me as anything other than my problem caused by my faults. My mother had everyone wrapped around her narratives so tightly that if anyone had a problem with so much as the temperature of the room, it was their problem. She’s not just an angel; she’s an angel who must be protected and venerated at all costs.
You’ve never seen anything like it. I’ve never met its equal elsewhere.
I found myself fighting for my voice so strenuously it was killing me. All I’ve ever wanted was my voice. I sacrificed everything for it and find, as I face the holidays alone, it’s enough. I keep thinking that loneliness will catch up with me, and sometimes it does.
Going no contact with one’s family, especially before the holidays, is probably not an option for many, but limiting contact to only what’s necessary, or even spreading it out so that you don’t have to spend all of it with just one part of the family may prove helpful. I’m always amazed at what people will grin and bear, but we’re grownups now. We don’t have to do as much as we think we do.
That’s much easier said than done, I know. Going no contact with my family has been a process that started in earnest back in 2014 with my first essay about my abuse. The pressure to stay connected, especially through social media, is intense.
But writing about my abuse provided rungs on the ladder of my escape. With each essay, I climb one more step to freedom.
Before I started healing, I knew the abuse impacted my life, held me back from my potential, and even poisoned my marriage, but I never felt it. I’d done a bang-up job not handling it my entire life. Healing would mean I’d have to feel, examine, and repossess it. It meant admitting to myself that I was much more damaged than I’d ever imagined.
Imagined.
As a child, I used my imagination to escape. My disassociation took the form of writing desperately in my journals and repeatedly reading the same fantasy novels. And that’s how I lived.
I’d grown so good at pretending nothing was happening that I used to tell people my family was perfect. I’d replaced the fantasy family of my imagination with my family, and I was so successful that I never doubted it. I suppose I felt like my life depended on it. In many ways, it did.
But I’d need to imagine a different way of existing to heal. I’d need to dismantle the brittle scaffolding of my childhood fantasies. The thing was, well, there was nothing else but chaos, terror, betrayal, and anguish whipping through the air of that space. I felt like admitting what happened would be like losing my mind.
Many days, that’s exactly how it felt, but I rebuilt myself slowly, quietly, and consistently. I want to tell you I erected a different scaffolding now, but it feels more accurate to say that I don’t think about any of it the same way.
Accepting what happened to me in all of its gory reality was like lighting a fire on a house soaked in lighter fluid. As it burned, I felt it rage, destroying everything. Some days, I felt like I could feel it burning my nose hairs.
That’s a strange thing to write, but it’s an even stranger sensation to experience.
I returned to this space and the idea that creativity saved my life once and would save my life again. Healing takes courage. It’s grueling, uncomfortable, often unrewarding work. No one understands your triggers, nor will they make room for them when they sideline you for a day, a week, a month. I’ve written this before, but it bears repeating: I’ve lost countless opportunities due to the heavy burden of horror and pain I carry. My abuse began before the age of three. My triggers often don’t have names or events that I can trace back to an explanation or meaning.
But I have tools now, powerful tools backed by science, and as long as I apply them, I make progress each day. That’s the thing: when you reach out for help, it will come, but you have to do the things. You can’t just wait for someone to make your pain go away.
I’m close to the end of all this. I can focus for multiple hours at a time, writing various projects on the same day, returning emails, and responding to readers’ comments in real-time — things I haven’t been able to do before.
I tell you all this because I want you to know how far I have come. I heard about a schizophrenic woman who, in just eight months of eye movement desensitization reprocessing (EMDR), was cured of audio and visual delusions as well as her disassociative episodes. Her therapist said that she was tenacious about her healing. She would use the same tools I’m working with between sessions.
I’d stalled in my healing until I found those tools. Now, in between my EMDR sessions, I have plenty to do that helps me recover and prepare for the next session. Her story inspires me. I hope mine can do that for you if you need it.
So, why The Creativity to Heal? Because healing is not a one-size-fits-all proposition. It takes courage, yes, but it also takes imagination and grit. You have to be able to imagine a better world before you can build it. Imagination takes creativity. And science has proven that employing creativity in healing works.
So, that’s why The Creativity to Heal and I aim to offer people as many tools as are scientifically proven to work.
©Punt On Point Media, Inc. 2023
