Stories as Therapy: Overcoming Trauma and Finding Hope In Imagination
Colourful dreams may just save your life.
One of my earliest memories was of sexual abuse. I was 5 or 6 years old.
It wasn’t his first time. This time, the boy, our house help, had caught me washing my mother’s shoe under the rain. He told me to follow him. There was something in his words and stance, that made me afraid. But he cautioned:
If you don’t follow me, I will tell your mother you were washing her shoes in the rain.
My mother was famous with her children for her cane. I was still a child and did not know if I would be spared. So, I followed the help and right in front of my elder brother and I think a younger sister, he laid me down on the floor, took down my panties, and got on top of me.
I remember clutching at something — I want to say a toy…but my mother didn’t really get us toys so…I cannot really say what I held onto. What I do remember though was — I had let my mind go somewhere else that wasn’t right where I was being abused. As an adult, I like to think that a story took over and what I had held onto, was a story.
Over the course of my lifetime, I have understood something very important to me — my mind wanders a lot during intense adverse situations and this has saved my life, more times than I can count.
And when I go through my life’s memories, I count them as:
Twenty years ago, I had lived in fear of my father. He ruled the home with a fierce hand. He walked into the house and we scurried away. His words were often cutting — like a razor blade. His demeanor always told you that you were an irritant to him. His call for you always felt like a death sentence.
Here was our home. Here we were meant to feel safe. But in our home, all we felt was horror. We were under the dictatorship of a tyrant.
I do not know how my siblings got through but I doubt they had the saving grace I had from stories created in my mind.
Just this year, a sibling said:
Whether life or death, my money will not go into saving that man.
When I expressed my shock, more than one told me:
The fact that you have forgotten and forgiven does not mean that everyone is there yet.
They also insinuated that it was so easy for me to express shock and found my reaction self-serving because my father and I are now buddies.
I did not defend myself mostly because I felt it may sound patronizing if I told them how creating different story narratives and living in my head, saved me. But that is exactly what helped me.
I read every single book that my parents had. In school, I found my place in the library. And from there, I started to dream, to hope, and to write my own stories.
I dreamt always of a life beyond the moment. I made that life as clear and as colourful as can be. All that remained was for me to wake up one day and walk into that life. That was how vivid the life of the stories I had created had become to me.
When I couldn’t tell stories, I wrote poems. I wrote songs and I sang them — all from my stories. They were all about the future and all about the life that called to me, just beyond my horizon. I just knew that I would not always live under the iron hand of my father.
I remember one song I wrote specifically for my father. I entitled it Survivor. Didn’t even know Destiny Child then.
Stories also helped me forget. Reaching forward to the life I dreamed of and coloured helped me leave behind the things that hurt the most in the present. Maybe that ultimately helped heal my relationship with my father. That and space. Lots of space.
Ten years ago, my worries were about my place in the world. What was I going to be? Would I be rich? Would I be famous? Would I make it? I told myself so many stories.
- I told myself stories of being the efficient secretary for a very powerful man. I would accompany him in his private jet as he conducted his business all around the world. While on the jet, I will keep writing my stories that will eventually become bestselling novels someday.
- I told myself stories of being Nigeria’s ambassador to Europe or the US someday.
- I told myself stories of writing TV scripts like Tyler Perry.
The more I told myself these stories, the more I dreamt and the faster my pen worked.
I would come back from work and just enter into my head space and dream all the stories I told myself. Waking up was depressing. So depressing that I attempted suicide not less than three times until I figured — I was either too much of a chicken to actually go through with it or there was just some force beyond me that needed me to suffer more in life.
Living through these current ten years I hear the inevitable call of my 40’s. Still a bit distant but inevitable as life continues. I look around me and so much has changed but storytelling has never left me.
While living in an abusive relationship, stories became my life. I had journals where I coloured my life after abuse. I knew where everything in my house would be. As an insomniac, I knew I would have a balcony so that at night, I could walk around, and look at the lights, and while looking through the buildings, I could imagine soaring overseas and enjoying being free.
Today, I am a mother. I am human. I am alive and I am still telling myself stories, writing my journals, and colouring my dreams.
There have been so many back-breaking, heartbreaking moments in my life and if history proves true, the future may not be all rosy either. But, I am here, journal in hand and I will live, one story at a time until one day, I will shut my eyes and focus on one last story:
The afterlife.
Where I shall spend eternity. It will be just as colourful. It will have flowers and books and chocolates and food and wine. It will have a life-sized robot of my daughter, my siblings, my friends, and all those that I have loved and cherished. And it will be alright.
