Verbalizing your experience of abuse is tough. Healing from your experience of abuse is tough. Writing about your experience of abuse and how you’ve triumphed over it is tough…

But publishing it?!? That’s a new kind of tough.

Where do you even start? Luckily Powerful Books helps you to not only develop a framework to write your story, but how you can tell it too. Even after the time and effort spent revisiting the toughest memories and articulating it in a way that a reader can interpret it, you still have to decide on taking that leap to put your story out there.

As victims of abuse, fear is what kept us silent and in suffering for so long. So to then invite judgment and criticism from not just the reader, but those who are the abusers and their enablers, a new layer of fear is applied. Fear functions the same. It’s meant to keep you silent. It’s meant to keep the abuse ongoing or the abusers unaccountable. Once you publish, once you face that fear, you invite the next level to triumph over.

Some people indeed are not happy that you’ve published, because by doing so you have caused them due shame. And sometimes those people take, or threaten, legal action. Welcome to the next level. There’s more to the story within the pages of the book we publish, it’s what happens after. The highs of feeling seen, and the lows of those who resent you for not remaining silent and are slaves to their vindictive nature.

A second edition to your book is a great opportunity to talk about the journey of writing and publishing itself, and the impact it had post-publishing. With that comes even more levels of growth. The reader of the second edition of your book gets a special gift. They get the answer you wished to know for yourself before you published the first time, they get to know what happened next and how you handled standing on business.

When you tell your story, and then put what happens as a result of you telling your story back into your story, you create something truly special. A Klein bottle is kinda like that. It goes right back into itself. To me, it’s a symbol of continuous growth. I have one on a necklace as a reminder.

Your messenger in a Klein bottle,

Michael.

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On X (formerly Twitter): @HeadThundercat