***Trigger Warning***

Writing about what I went through on a public platform is incredibly scary for me. However, it is so important to the story of who I am today. I would like to say as a precursor to my writing that at this point in my life I have no malice intent or wish or negative energy toward the people who hurt me. That being said, being psychologically abused was the most traumatic event in my life thus far. I was at a point where my mind was only on my own pain, hopelessness, and death. I wrote many journals about all three that I will share with my blog in the future, but today I would like to focus on forgiveness. After I separated myself from him, I became an angry person. Anger is a trivial thing because if you let it in, in its full capacity, it can take over your life. I saw the world in red; pushing nothing but negativity outward to mask the negativity I felt inward. If you know me, you would know that I am not an angry person. While I may have moments of frustration, I am never truly angry in the debilitating sense of the word. Out of character and deeply depressed, the only way I felt any sort of power was through demonizing him. “Truly he had to be some monster to do this to me. Truly he must want to hurt me.” I felt as if this monster was dragging his talons down my back everyday—opening and reopening bloody wounds until the flesh was gone and the bones were slowly being broken down just the same. However, demonizing him was my way of masking the fact that I still loved him. Of course the love doesn’t just vanish after its all over, but I forced myself to feel that way because it was what I “should” feel. How could I love someone who hurt me that way? What is wrong with me? I thought I deserved it for so long. If someone loved me, that’s how they treated me, and it was the only thing I knew. There’s a funny thing about healing though. There comes a certain shame with having you eyes opened for the first time and seeing what you were. I struggled for a long time with the notion that the girl then is the same as me now. I say “the girl” because I was so ashamed of who I was while healing that looking back I refused to accept that it was me. As I got better, and I was gaining back the self worth I lacked back then, it was difficult to not blame myself for it all. It was so easy to say that I was too weak and it was my fault for letting him do that to me. I blamed myself for the way I was treated, neglecting the fact that I had been beaten down with words until I lost my own. Looking at these two mindsets towards both him and myself, my therapist assigned me homework to write a letter of forgiveness to both of us. It took me 3 weeks to do this. When I finally did, it wasn’t any “cookie-cutter” forgiveness letter. In fact, I wrote more about how I felt that I couldn’t forgive and why. Although I am at the point where I actually have forgiven now, I think its important to include my letters to give perspective and convey my emotions of the time. 

Please note that the following has not been altered in any way from when it was written with the exception of removing names out of respect.

“I decided that I was going to just write and see where this went instead. At the moment I am trying to figure out how I forgive someone who in my eyes is unforgivable. Every night I have tried to write my forgiveness for him and I can’t even figure out where to start or how it could even be genuine. I feel that even if I write my forgiveness for him, that I would be lying to myself and not helping at all. I want to forgive him, but I want to do it in a genuine way. It saddens me that I feel such hatred towards him, but it has been the only way for me to cope with what’s happened. I would say I forgive him because he wasn’t strong enough on his own, but at the same time I don’t know how someone could knowingly do what he did to me and stay— continuing to do it. I don’t understand what he did to me no matter how much I go through it. And to think… I loved him more than myself. I loved someone unconditionally, even if it meant I was being abused. It’s scary. I reread my old journals. Imagine my horror in knowing he abused me so badly that I wrote that I didn’t even deserve to breathe the same air as him. Reading about when he was upset and it was my fault because I didn’t know my place; that I was only here to make others happy. Worst of all…that it was my fault for his suicide attempt because I existed in his life. He had such a hold on me that I tore myself apart that night thinking he wouldn’t be in that position if he never met me. These thoughts to me are horrifying. He did that to me. That is not a Shannon I know or love. It is so difficult for me to look back at journals let alone pictures of myself from that time because I don’t even recognize the girl I see. I see a girl who wanted to slice open her legs because she hated herself so much and the pain she felt inside was so unbearable she wanted to feel it anywhere else even if it meant mutilation. I see a girl who wanted to starve herself for days and make herself feel so weak that she would shake. I was addicted to it. I wanted to see how far I could go. It was only when someone found out that I stopped but I think I would have gone for weeks if I could. I wanted to die more than anything. Most times it felt as if everything in my world was caving in on me. My thoughts became so twisted and dark every single night. When he was mad at me, which was usually every two days or so, I would collapse in my room from the physical pain I felt in my chest. Every time, I lost a part of me. That pain was worse than any pain I have ever experienced. It was those nights I wanted to die most. I had nothing left. No hope. All I felt was pain. Instead I would think about it. I never acted on it but my mind would play over and over again the scenarios of my grabbing the knife, lifting my shorts, and making horizontal cuts. In my mind I could feel a release and it was like for once the pain could just go elsewhere. One of my strongest thoughts that I didn’t come to terms with until months later was that I wish he would’ve hit me. When he would hurt me, I wished so bad it could be a punch or a slap, and that I could deal with the pain in a physical form rather than inside. It would be a way to hurt myself without me doing it and one could imagine, although dark, how much I wished it were my reality. I would write about how I deserved abuse and that I was nothing. To think of how to forgive someone who put me there leaves me with more questions than answers. I don’t know how to forgive someone who ripped my world apart. I don’t know how to forgive someone who watched and did nothing to stop himself. I do not accept what he did, but I do not know how to forgive. I wish he didn’t exist. I hate the fact that I’m so spiteful because it isn’t who I am. But if I don’t feel that then what do I feel? 

If I were to “forgive him” 

I suppose id say 

I forgive you. 

I forgive you for being too weak to stop yourself. 

I forgive you for not knowing how to love me the right way.

I forgive you for being addicted to drugs, I know it was something you were too weak to control yourself from.

I forgive you for attempting to kill yourself, you were weak and needed me to witness it for your own reasons.

I forgive you for all the times you screamed at me, accusing me of cheating when it came from your own insecurity.

I forgive you for treating me like I didn’t matter, you never could figure out what actually did.

I forgive you for hurting me as bad as you did, you never knew what you were capable of.

I wish that after writing that, that maybe I would really mean it. Although in my mind it all could have been stopped if he truly cared for me, even if it meant breaking up with me. But instead he was so afraid to lose me that he stayed and watched himself suck out anything I had left.

As a second part to this I am supposed to forgive myself. 

I’ve never shared this with anyone but I think I only recently realized that an emotion I feel towards myself is almost... embarrassment? But not in a regular sense of the term, because I’m not embarrassed of what others would think of me. I look at myself and feel embarrassment because I can’t believe that I did that to myself and that I let someone do that to me. I’m embarrassed that the only humor I knew was self-deprecating jokes. I’m mad at myself for making every conversation I had about how horrible I was or my life and how everything revolved around me. I partly blame myself for the relationship because if I wasn’t so messed up and maybe if I didn’t have so many issues then he wouldn’t have abused me at all. Although I know that isn’t true, it is how I feel nevertheless. Sometimes I think that I am the reason he became that way. It is scary that he still has that hold on me. As much as I wish I didn’t, I do still blame myself for everything. Some days my mind knows better but my emotions say otherwise.

But as I did with him I will try to do with myself. 

So here it goes:

I forgive you. 

You were in a state where all you knew was trying to keep your head above water, even if it meant talking to the two people you loved everyday about anything bad in your life.

I forgive you for staying for so long. You believed in love and loved him like no one else. You didn’t want to believe that he was even worse than ******.

I forgive you for thinking you deserved abuse and death. You were in so much pain and you didn’t know that it would ever get better.

I forgive you for not knowing better.

I forgive you for thinking you were the problem. You knew you were the common denominator between him and ******, but you couldn’t know that they preyed on you. 

I forgive you for being subjected to his abuse, you didn’t love yourself enough to stick up for yourself yet.

I forgive you for hating yourself, you were taught by important people in your life that you weren’t ever enough and it caught up to you. You placed your values on everything but what was inside, and when you lost everything you had nothing left. You couldn’t have known that.

I forgive you for being weak, because you never knew what it was like to be liberated and strong.

After writing that I did mean it. It was different this time. However the hardest part about forgiving myself is to keep meaning it for days or weeks or months or years; not just after I wrote it. I don’t want to reread those words and feel that I was blind to the truth or that it wasn’t really reality. 

Forgiveness is one of the hardest things I’ve had to do—and I haven’t quite done it. I hope one day I can. I want to be free from him. I don’t want to have to worry about leaving my house and seeing him or living with PTSD. I want to live my life where he doesn’t have any impact on me. I want to be unfazed when I see his name or go to his town or go shopping. I want to live my life without him being a negative part of it. To wish him to not be a part of it, although I want to, I know is unrealistic. At the end of the day he is a part of it, He is my history and how I learn and grow. But I don’t want him to have the hold he still has on me. 

I just want to be free.” 

That was written in August of 2019 at 12:02 AM. In March of 2020, I’m so proud to say that I don’t feel these things at all anymore. I found more freedom in forgiveness than I ever did in hatred. I no longer feel like he has power over me, and forgave him by humanizing him. I do not accept what he did, but he is a human just like you or me. I mentioned the PTSD which I will delve into in another blog…but when I wrote this letter my life was still riddled with it. It is not something that goes away over night, but I overcame a lot of my triggers between anniversaries of traumatic events, leaving my house, talking about what happened and the list goes on. While I still deal with the PTSD in different ways now, I manage it and accept it for what it is. In my experience, although it is painful to be triggered, the only way to cope is to embrace it as it is temporary and will pass. It is out of my control, as was what happened to me. None of it is fair, but I am so in love with the life I live today and I couldn’t imagine not being here to experience the beauty of living. I am not perfect, I struggle still with new issues arising in their own time, but they come at the time that I am able to handle them. Although it is incredibly difficult, the only way out of the storm is through it. Have faith in yourself, even if just a little bit, and hold on to it. You will return to your strength. It may take time— more time than you’d like, but I promise you that time truly does heal with your help. If you want to get better, work on yourself until you create so much self love that no one can take it away from you. You have the power in your life, even when you think you don’t. Lastly, forgive for YOU. The anger and hatred you hold on to disturbs your own peace and takes over your life. It takes you away from your true self. After everything your “monster” has taken from you, don’t let them take your heart and soul. You have the power to transcend these emotions. It’s not easy, and it sure as hell took me a long time to do so, but learn to forgive. Learn to love. Learn to let go.