John Chapter 8, Verse 32 – “Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free”.

There seems to me no greater truth written or spoken than the words, “The truth will set you free”.

Only people who have been subject to the kind of torture by evil people, the way I have (call them sociopaths, narcissists, psychopaths, whatever – a lethal thorn by any other name smells as putrid) can truly understand the effects of such torment.

Anybody else – friends, family, counsellors, doctors, psychologists, even ‘experts’ on personality disorders, try as they might cannot ever REALLY 100% comprehend the depth and complexity of it all.

Kind, well-meaning people, who assume that you are ‘obsessed’ with your abuse because you never seem to talk about anything else, think they are helping when they say things like, “Let it go”, “Move on”.

What they don’t realise is that they are inadvertently doing one of the things your abusers did. They are not allowing you to find your voice. They want you to shut up, just like he did.

This apparent obsession is not a yearning for him– for someone who treated you with dreadful cruelty. Your yearning is to be heard. The catch-22 is that to be heard means to be fully understood by listeners and that validation cannot be provided by anyone who cannot 100% appreciate what you need to say. Or for how long you need to keep saying it.

Sometimes, the ‘support’ that is so desperately needed, turns on you. This so often happens to the victims of all types of bullying, when the very people who are supposed to help, (whether through ignorance, misunderstanding, disinterest etc) end up re-victimising the victim.

Then when the victim, with nowhere else to go, kills her/himself in despair, the re-victimisers say, “We tried to help but she/he didn't co-operate”. Typically, the victim is blamed - not the bully, not the ‘helpers’ – it’s always the victim’s fault.

There is much advice out there on how to ‘let go’ of what the evil one did to you (and often continues to do). E.g, “You will never get closure from a narcissist/sociopath etc, so forget it” and “You can’t make sense of the senseless”.

I’ve found myself repeating these mantras, perhaps thinking that if I say them often enough, they will work.

Maybe with some people, or the passage of time, or both, it seems to work. However, the fact that many of the people who say “It worked for me, so it will work for you too”, write books and websites and blogs on the subject – tells me that whilst some of them are genuinely doing it to help others through the horrific aftermath of life with a psycho - there are probably just as many who have to keep plugging away because they have never let it go either and however much they protest otherwise, they too are still trying to make sense of the senseless.

Having said all that, I’m not writing this as a criticism of those people (their hearts are in the right place), or as a criticism of the lovely, well-meaning friends who unfortunately invalidate you just as the abuser did because they don’t want to hear about it anymore, and tell you to let it go, move on.

I’m also not writing this to make other victims of psychos give up on life in despair, because they feel that their bewildered pain will never go away.

Quite the opposite in fact.

I once told my ex-husband, when we were still together, that there was no point in lying to me and that I didn’t need to ‘spy’ on him either. I said, “I don’t need to go looking for the truth, it always comes to me”.

It always seemed to then, but my mistake was in thinking that the truth would always come to me - that I didn’t need to go looking for it. Well-meaning advice to “drop it”, “move on” reinforced the idea that I should not seek the truth. Or even wait for it to seek me. Just “leave it, it doesn’t matter, move on”.

But it does matter. It matters because in seeking and finding the truth and then accepting the undeniable truth you find, only then can you ‘let it go’. The truth can be unbearably painful. But the fact that it IS the truth is the only thing that can liberate you. It is the only thing that can put an end to that yearning to find a voice, to be validated.

The truth really does set you free.

Every single day that passes without the lies; the treachery; that endless, underlying anxiety; the feeling of having to tiptoe through a field of landmines; the hostile tension; that blood-curdling, empty-eyed stare; the complaining; the blaming; the crazymaking; the gaslighting; the cruelty; the feeling that there is a leak in your soul where the life is slowly being drained from you; the ache to be genuinely loved; the yearning for peace; – every day is a blessing from God.

John Chapter 8, Verse 32 – “Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free”.