How to Share Your Story of Abuse and How it Helps You to Heal

Sharing your story—publicly or privately—is a significant step in the healing journey for any survivor. 

Some prefer to share their story with one or two trusted people. Others may want to share it with groups of safe people, such as family, friends, or a community group they belong to. 

Sometimes, survivors want to put pen to paper and write or type their story out—for personal reference or in a published forum. 

Whatever way you choose and feel comfortable doing it, we encourage you to find a comfortable space where you feel safe to share your story.

How to Share Your Story of Abuse

If you want to share your story publicly and anonymously—using a pseudonym, we invite you to consider sharing it with our MEND community in our collection of stories. 

Survivors often experience a new sense of freedom when they write their stories. And when they are shared in safe spaces, they provide freedom for others who find themselves in these challenging relationships. 

If you want to share your story publicly and anonymously, we invite you to contribute to our MEND community's collection of survivor stories. Here’s how:

Here, at MEND, we use a pseudonym for every survivor. Some survivors choose to write or share their stories publicly using their real name. Jessica Simpson is one of those survivors who wrote her story in a book and published it for both her own healing journey and for victim advocacy. 

How Jessica Simpson Told Her Story of Abuse

In 2020, actress and singer Jessica Simpson shocked the world with her memoir “Open Book.” 

In her powerful autobiography, she shed light on the profound and damaging impact of abuse in her life. Simpson traced her trauma directly to the root: the unaddressed sexual abuse she experienced as a little girl manifested itself throughout her life in an ongoing battle against drugs and alcohol addiction. 

Perhaps the most applicable part of her testimony came from an interview with ABC News. Simpson said that one of the reasons she shared her abuse story was so that she could “accept it” and “say it out loud.” She felt she could heal more after talking about the abuse. 

Simpson saw herself as a cautionary tale. She shared her story so that “parents would be more aware of situations their kids might be facing.”

Her story shows how helpful it can be for victims to speak about their experiences, even if they do so in writing and choose a pseudonym. Getting your story out, in whatever capacity feels comfortable and right for you, can be an integral part of the healing process.

Benefits of Sharing Your Abuse Story

1. Talking Helps Us Process

When Simpson fully disclosed her experiences to a therapist, she could identify the deep-seated issues that stemmed from her trauma. She says that it helped her accept it when she wrote about the abuse.

While internal processing is an essential after-effect of abuse, bottling up your emotions and experiences can make it more challenging to sort through the painful experience. Talking aloud about your pain with a trusted listener like a therapist or friend can help you reflect and see things from a new perspective. 

Writing down your abuse story can also be transformative - whether it’s public with your real name or a pseudonym or it’s kept private. 

2. Talking Allows Others to Help

Going through abuse can be isolating for multiple reasons. One of which is that there may be social constructs in your family or social circle that make the idea of talking about abuse especially daunting. 

Simpson expressed that growing up as a preacher’s daughter, she felt that sex was a taboo topic. This made the thought of coming forward to her parents scarier. Even though she was the victim, she still felt guilty about the sexual activity she experienced.

But once she told her parents about the family friend’s daughter abusing her, they stopped socializing with the family. Simpson wished that her parents had helped her by talking through her experiences. However, she said that being physically removed from the situation was a first line of protection–something responders are wise never to hesitate to do. 

As Jessica’s story highlights, perpetrators of sexual abuse are often in very close and trusted positions within a victim’s life. Abusers often gain the victim’s loved ones’ trust. 

Because of this, the support system surrounding the victim is often oblivious to abuse. And you do not have a chance to help if you are not aware of what is happening. Unfortunately, speaking up about abuse does not always result in gaining support. 

If you decide to share your story with someone you trust and find they are not compassionate, believing you, or supportive, please know that you are not alone. We call this type of response Double Abuse®. We encourage you not to isolate in response but rather to seek outside help from a well-trained therapist or a domestic violence advocate or call the National Domestic Violence Hotline for help.

3. Talking About It Enables Forgiveness

Simpson found much of her healing by confronting her perpetrator, which helped her forgive and let go. However, this is not advisable for everyone, as each situation differs.

Experiencing abuse can create thoughts like:

These lies can become entrenched. But they don’t need to be permanent. 

The key to putting these lies behind you is placing the responsibility for the abuse solely with the abuser. 

This does not necessarily require face-to-face confrontation.

If you believe such a step would be best for you and have sought advice from experts who are highly skilled in abuse and trauma, and they agree, we encourage you to follow your instincts. 

Whether confrontation is part of the process or not, seeking to forgive is essential to your health and freedom - it takes you off the hook and puts them on it. 

Forgiveness gives us the strength to remove the influence of the person or people who hurt us. 

And one can forgive and still seek legal retributions for the abuse perpetrated against them. It does not mean forgetting or reconciling with the abuser. 

Forgiveness is about freeing you!

Sharing Your Story of Healing and Empowerment

We welcome you to consider publishing your story anonymously on our website. 

Our collection of stories helps bring comfort and hope to others in these similar relationship dynamics. It shows them they are not alone. 

If you are comfortable and ready, visit this “Share Your Story” link to upload your story! 

Or if you prefer to write it down privately to keep for yourself, that is an equally good option. Writing is therapeutic; it helps to process and brings perspective. 

And if you aren’t ready to share or write your story, that’s okay! Take the time you need. 

When you are ready, we encourage you to seek safe people to share your story with. You can also come back and share it here.