For years we have written our life stories here; but we came to the point where the internal turmoil it was causing prevented us from continuing. Our difficulty wasn’t that we doubted what we were writing. Instead, we were troubled by how telling our story was apt to impact other people’s stories. We value our right to speak about our experiences with integrity and honesty; but in doing so it was inevitable that we were telling the stories of others who might not want their stories told.

It’s been more than a year since we last posted our thoughts at this site; but it is time to start fresh. We are beginning again from a new perspective and approach. We are still committed to speaking with integrity, but our focus isn’t on how people injured us, causing grief and trauma. I think it is apparent that trauma has been a huge part of life for us – a given which doesn’t need to be justified, amplified, or proven. We want this to be a safe place for everyone (internal and external), and giving details about traumatic events and experiences can be triggering to some. We want to focus more on the process of working through traumas and the challenges that we encountered in the process. We recognize the importance to our pears of having the insights and perspective of someone who has gone through the process of healing and learning to live a healthy, balanced life. That sounds a bit too much like we feel we have “arrived”, which isn’t the case at all.

When we were in the pit of our miserable, pre-therapy days, I would listen to people talk on the radio about how awful their lives used to be before they turned everything around and achieved their perfect, happy lives (and wrote a book about it). Many times I wished they would have a guest speaker who was still in the process of becoming who they wanted to be so that I could learn from their process. I want to be that voice for my brothers and sisters who recognize how much farther they have to go. One of the advantages of a blog is that we can grow along side of each other.

There is more to write before this “Beginning Again” post is complete; but this is enough for now. I will pick it back up soon.