Our feelings are a non-fiction story

I did a presentation yesterday on the impacts that adverse childhood experiences have on life long relationships, and then the impacts the quality of those relationships have on life long health.

It's never a surprise when after a presentation like this, there's a line of people wanting to talk. Wanting to share their story.

I had a young woman tell me she'd struggled a lot in life with some things she'd experienced. She wondered out loud, though, if maybe she should not have struggled with those things because they really didn't fall into any of the commonly accepted categories of abuse or neglect.

I asked her if she felt hurt. She said she did. I told her that's where the story starts, then, not with whether or not her hurt was validated by the title of an experience.

Because abuse is not defined by someone's intentions, it's not defined by whether an act falls within or outside of a category or a law, it's not defined by evil or goodness - it's not defined at all by an act alone, a large and often ignored part of the definition is how the act is felt by another human being.

Too many people are afraid to tell the story of how they feel because how they feel doesn't line up with a cultural perception or understanding of they should feel.

Too many people don't talk about the feeling of abuse because they can't justify their feelings with a commonly accepted definition of their abuse.

And too much of the world is judging the validity of another's feelings of abuse by what we think should or should not qualify as abuse.

But here is what can't be judged: one's feelings, one's wounds, one's struggle to rewrite their hurtful history in a way that matches up with a cultural perception that doesn't fit kindly with the way one feels. And hurts.

I am so often reminded after these presentations just how many people are walking around with hurt-filled stories they don't feel they have permission to tell. People fear telling a non-fiction story they fear will be interpreted as fiction.

So they re-write their story as fiction and then bury it.

Buried stories become the stories we use to abuse ourselves. If I feel wrong about something that wasn't wrong, I must be wrong.

And I must be bad.

But I want you to know all feelings are non-fiction. Our feelings are the starting place for understanding our stories - and one another's stories - not someone else's validation of them.

Our feelings are the once upon a time in a story, not an after thought or an extra in the story.

It's always powerful to tell someone, don't focus on the event - focus on the wound. Events have a lot of definitions, wounds only have one.

Wounds are once upon a time, not the end.