How Stories Staunch Our Wounds

A deep dive into trauma, suffering, and the healing power of fiction

Jul 02, 2025

This isn’t the post I intended to write.

In my drafts, there’s a whole outline about how to build conflict into the bones of our stories. I’ll get it finished soon, I promise. But not today. Today, I’m going to write about the two things that have always ruled my life: stories, and the tangled chaos of complex trauma.

Before we get started, a warning: the first section of this post contains descriptions of childhood sexual assault, self-harm, attempted suicide, and emotional abuse. If you’d rather avoid that, feel free to skip straight to Surviving Through Stories and keep reading there.

Cracking myself open

Almost as soon as I was alive, I started looking for a way out. It wasn’t that I wanted to die. I just wanted to be somewhere else. Someone else. Anyone and anywhere but here.

My dad was cruel and often violent (an alcoholic, like most of my family) and when I was twelve my mum moved out and left us with him. At fourteen, her new boyfriend put his hand up my shirt and tried to kiss me. It took days to work up the courage to tell her, and when I did, she cornered me: screaming and demanding to know why I was lying. The onslaught went on for over an hour while I cowered and cried, curled up like a pill bug in the armchair of my sister’s living room. It only ended when the boyfriend admitted what he’d done—showing more mercy than my own mother ever would. A year later, after the court case (and the discovery he’d abused other children), she married him. When I close my eyes, I can still feel the contours of that armchair. As though it’s pressed forever into the soft wax of my body.

Later, I ended up in a mutually abusive relationship. When the arguments got bad, my partner drank bleach, put her fist through a window, or hacked at herself with a craft knife. I spent more nights than I could count in the hospital, hollow and grey in its antiseptic light. Waiting for the doctors to do nothing. Send her home. And for the whole cycle to begin again. To this day, there are books on my shelves that are still splattered with her blood.

I am shaking as I write this, like I’m back there again. Because that’s the nature of trauma: while the world moves on, it stays trapped within us like shrapnel—a frozen explosion of moments, repeating over and over again.

I’ve never posted publicly about any of this before. Never cracked myself open and bled for the whole world to see. But I have to do it now. Because Pagewake is rooted in the transformative, life-giving power of stories. To me, they’re the most important thing in the world. And this is why.

Surviving through stories

Hans Christian Andersen’s famous fairytale, The Little Match Girl, shows us how deeply suffering and stories are entwined. It’s about a little girl who, freezing to death in the middle of winter, lights one of the matches she’s failed to sell and sees a whole other world: a warm stove and a wonderful meal. Someone who loves her. From the moment I could read, I learned to disappear from life in the same way—seeking refuge in imaginary worlds. It wasn’t just a comfort. It literally kept me alive.

The human mind is resilient, always looking for ways to survive the unsurvivable. And for many with trauma and pain, stories do exactly that: opening the door to somewhere safe when reality is anything but. Protected inside the covers of a book, life has meaning and purpose. No matter how magical the world, there are rules that must be followed. A structure that’s always the same. Each story has its own beginning, a middle, and end—an echoing refrain of stability when our lives are wracked by storms.

As we learn to tell stories of our own, this process becomes even more powerful. Suddenly, we aren’t just finding a sanctuary in someone else’s world: we’re building our own. Writing our own stories gives us the very sense of control and agency that’s been stolen from us. Wrapped in the armour of our inner worlds, we can be powerful and loved. Our characters can be comforted and saved, taken away from the pain and transported somewhere better. Somewhere they can be whole.

Trauma robs our lives of meaning. And stories give it back.

They can provide safe harbour for our hearts and souls when we’re dashed upon the rocks. But it isn’t always calm winds and safe sailing, and there’s something lurking in those waters that—if we aren’t careful—might just swallow us whole.

Diving too deep

It’s one of the most painful truths about trauma: the very things that kept us alive can also push us further down. They can keep us underwater, and even drag us deeper. If we let them, they can drown us.

This too is part of my relationship with stories. Because I didn’t just spend most of my life wanting to escape the world, I wanted to escape from myself. Everything I’d been through had taught me one thing: I was unacceptable, unworthy, and repulsive. So, for over a decade, I tried to be someone else. Someone who deserved love, and could finally find the better life that always seemed just out of reach.

I got deep into tabletop roleplaying games—both in-person and online. There were months, even years, when I spent most of my time being someone else entirely. Pushing myself further and further away. And it felt glorious, like everything I’d ever wanted, but the effects rippled through my life like a poison. I tried to disappear entirely, drifting further and further away until I was nothing. No one. I lost touch with reality, and slowly the darkness that was eating me alive became unbearable.

It’s exactly what happens to the Little Match Girl, too: striking match after match, escaping over and over again into that warm and comforting world until, eventually, she vanishes altogether. The next morning, on New Year’s Day, the townsfolk awake to find her tiny frozen body, just lying in the street. But ironically, it was the Match Girl who set me free. Reading about her in Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estés’s incredible book, Women Who Run With the Wolves, I recognised myself in the Little Match Girl and knew I had to do something. Had to find some way to accept myself for who I was, no matter how painful and impossible that felt.

At the start, I was terrified that healing would take me away from my stories. That my relationship with them was too toxic and I’d have to give them up before I could get better.

In the end, I needn’t have worried.

Because with a little space and some much-needed self-acceptance, I started to see the truth: that stories weren’t just a survival mechanism, and they weren’t just an anchor dragging me down into the depths. They could also mend my wounds and make me whole again.

The path to healing

Here’s something strange about trauma: it isn’t stored in the same part of the brain as other memories. It exists as an eternal nowness—a single moment (or several) trapped like bubbles in amber. It’s what makes a memory traumatic in the first place. Trauma stays lodged deep inside of us, undigested in our minds. Not an event that happened in the past, but something that (in a very real way) is still happening to us. This is why trauma is so hard to heal, and why it’s passed down from generation to generation.

As Stephi Wagner says: “Pain travels through families until someone is ready to feel it.”

Trauma is a broken blade, lodged deep inside of us, and it will stay there until we’re brave enough to cut it out. But that can be unspeakably painful, even impossible—especially while we still have to get up, go to work, and pay the bills. And here again, stories can help. Because we don’t always need to perform open-heart surgery on ourselves. Not when our characters are there, offering themselves up as willing subjects and guides.

Through them, we can hold space for things that would otherwise become unbearable.

Even after everything, I find that pain is easier to face when I’m wearing someone else’s skin. Our characters might have wounds exactly like our own or vastly different, but either way the impact is the same. This allows us to handle our wounds at a distance. And as writers, we can make sure that it all turns out well in the end. With the help of our inner worlds, we can reframe our own stories, chip away at that bubble caught in amber, and allow time to start flowing again. We can excavate the shrapnel that’s been buried inside us for so long and, with our characters walking beside us, finally bring it into the light.

I’ve written many wounded characters over the years. People dealing with a painful past, isolation, and mental illness. And each one has knitted me back together—patching a little of my battered spirit with their own.

Of course, truly healing from complex trauma requires much more than just writing stories. It takes time, self-compassion, journalling, self-help books, and often the support of a good therapist—if we’re lucky enough to find one and able to afford them. But through all of that, stories can be our constant sanctuary. They can bring comfort to the living nightmare of this world, create a sense of meaning when life feels meaningless, and open a way towards wholeness.

That’s why Pagewake exists: because stories aren’t just a way to survive life, they’re a path to reclaiming it.

And if there’s any greater magic than that, I haven’t found it yet.