Bringing It Into The Light – PART IV: Naming What Happened

This post is part of my “Bringing It Into the Light” series, where I explore the journey of naming, healing, and reclaiming my voice.

There is a particular kind of courage required to name something you’ve spent years avoiding. For me, that word was abuse. Even now, it feels heavy. It feels too big. It feels like a word that belongs to someone else’s story — someone who went through something worse, something more obvious, something more dramatic.

But the truth is simple:

If you are being diminished, controlled, dismissed, or made to doubt your own reality, you are being harmed.

And harm has a name.

Using the word abuse felt impossible at first. It carried shame. It carried fear. It carried the weight of every moment I had minimized or rationalized. Saying it out loud made everything real — and real things demand to be faced.

Language is powerful.

It can feel like a spotlight, exposing everything you tried to hide.

It can feel like a burden, too heavy to carry.

But it can also be liberating.

Naming what happened didn’t change the past, but it changed my relationship to it. It allowed me to stop fighting myself. It allowed me to stop pretending. It allowed me to stop shrinking. It allowed me to begin healing.

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