The Power of Our Stories: Remembering, Healing, and Reclaiming Ourselves
It’s been 42 years since my life split in two—the day the girl I had been for eighteen and a half years was taken from me on the floor of a small-town convenience store in Louisiana.
That night changed everything. What happened there was a violation of both body and spirit—an act of violence that ended one version of me and began another.
For many years afterward, I carried that experience like a buried seed—hidden and suffocating, trying to grow in the dark. I told myself I was protecting myself and others by keeping quiet. I didn’t yet understand that silence can become its own kind of prison. The secret I thought I was holding was, in truth, holding me.
The Inheritance of Silence
For decades, the secret lived inside me like a slow-growing disease, eating away at the parts of me that still wanted to live freely. Eventually, with the help of some extraordinary people and teachings, I began to see that silence wasn’t protecting me—it was suffocating me. I realized it was time to let the secret breathe, to let me breathe, to finally free myself from the prison I had built around my own truth.
We all make choices and carry regrets; that’s part of being human. Reflection allows us to take responsibility for our actions, but shame does something different—it isolates us. Shame builds walls. It’s the silent prison we create when we’re too afraid to face ourselves or be seen by others.
Secrets and shame live at the heart of this story. They always have. The seeds of secrecy were planted in me long before that night. I learned early from my mother that some things weren’t meant to be shared. And she had learned the same from hers, and so it continued—generation after generation.
My mother never drank or abused her children like her parents had, but the effects of addiction were still in our home, woven into the air we breathed. One of those effects was the art of The Secret.
And by “secret,” I don’t just mean something scandalous. It could be as simple as what we were having for dinner or as complicated as an argument between siblings. In our house, “family business” stayed in the family. Always.
But I was terrible at keeping secrets. I was the chatterbox—the one who told the things you weren’t supposed to tell. As a little girl, I’d share family “business” with aunts, uncles, cousins, even the neighbors. I didn’t mean harm; I just didn’t understand why it was such a big deal to talk about the life we lived at home.
When I was caught—and I often was—I’d be called a liar. And in the confusion of being punished for telling the truth, I slowly learned to become what I was accused of. Over time, I told small “white lies,” exaggerations, half-truths—the kind that sound prettier or make a story more exciting. My father would call it “the gift of exaggeration,” and maybe it was. Of course, exaggeration is just a pretty word for lying.
So by the time that night came, forty-two years ago, I was well-practiced. I was primed for a good secret. When I called my mother afterward, bruised and broken, I did what I had been taught to do—I lied. I exaggerated. After all, it was part of my gift. I told her I was fine, even as my body told a truth I couldn’t yet speak. I had finally learned the “art of keeping a secret”.
Looking back, I can see how that moment sealed something in me. I thought keeping quiet would protect me—that silence meant I’d never have to step back into that cold room again. But silence became another kind of prison. By holding the secret so tightly, I left my body and a piece of my spirit trapped in that room, waiting for the sound of my own voice to set them free.
Now, with time and compassion, I understand more. When my mother was a child growing up in an abusive home, telling the truth was dangerous. The art of The Secret was born from wisdom—an act of survival. And like me, my mother was always more than her secrets. She was a loving wife, a loyal sister, a mother who was smart, kind, funny, harsh, and tender all at once. None of us are only one thing. Secrets and lies dwell in the same place within us—and so does the truth. Which one grows depends on which we choose to feed. By finally giving air to my secrets, I began to build a bridge back to the truth—to my truth—to the truth of who I am and who I want to continue to be.
The Living Nature of Memory
When I began to speak about what happened decades later, I discovered something essential: memory is not carved in stone. It’s a living, breathing presence—shaped not only by facts but by the feelings that hold them.
Each time we remember, we travel not through a fixed past but through the living terrain of emotion—what the body recalls, what the heart still carries, what the spirit has begun to release.
Memory is a river, not a monument. It moves and reshapes itself as we grow — carrying our truth in its current, not carved in its stone.
In the beginning, when I started to remember details that had been long buried in my body and psyche, I wanted every detail to be exact—as if perfect accuracy could validate the pain—as if perfect detail could not only validate my pain but cleanse me of the shame I’d been holding that was never mine to feel. But healing isn’t about proving; it’s about honoring. My body remembered long before my voice did. It remembered fear, stillness, the moment breath left—and the moment breath returned. In remembering my death that day, I also remembered coming back—my rebirth. That moment of return was my beginning again.
Shame, Truth, and the Seeds We Water
Shame grows best in the dark. The longer I stayed silent, the more it rooted itself in me—feeding on self-doubt, isolation, and the old family belief that speaking would cause harm. But when I finally began to tell the truth, something miraculous happened: the shame began to dissolve.
My mother’s silence suddenly made sense. In her world, telling the truth as a child could have been dangerous. Her secrecy wasn’t deceit—it was self-preservation. And just like me, when I kept silent about what happened, she kept silent about whatever traumas had happened to her. And in keeping silent, we were simply living out old patterns—doing what generations before us had done to survive.
For years I thought speaking up would somehow disappoint my mother. Now I understand and feel her support in the work I’ve done to let go of my shame. With her at my back and in my DNA, I know that speaking my truth doesn’t mean remembering or knowing every detail. The truth I speak includes her voice—and every voice in my lineage that once held the truth in silence. In her own way, she did the same. She lived a different life than the one she grew up in. She made a different choice. And just like me, she carried patterns that were no longer needed or that no longer served her. She shifted the story and began to heal the DNA—just as I am doing now, and just as the generations to come will continue to do.
One of my regrets in life had always been that I never had the courage to tell her about that night. And in not doing so, I never gave either of us the chance to hold one another in our shared pain. I’m not sure how she would have reacted back then if I had told her—but I do know that in speaking it now, and in standing in my truth today, she and I are finally doing that in another way. I don’t get to feel her arms around me again or look into her eyes or feel her hand stroking my hair, but I do feel her love and support in living a life that no longer includes the shame that secrets feed on.
Curiosity as Compassion
There’s a quote often attributed to Walt Whitman:
“When you find yourself being judgmental, be curious instead. Curiosity is another form of compassion.”
That line has become a compass for me. When we bring curiosity to our judgments—of others and of ourselves—we open a deeper door to compassion. We soften enough that the past, with all its joys, sorrows, traumas, truths, and untruths, no longer consumes us in its details.
Curiosity lets us ask:
What did I learn to do to stay safe? What did my mother learn? What pain shaped the choices we both made?
These questions don’t erase responsibility—they illuminate understanding. They turn judgment into tenderness, and tenderness into love.
“When we soften toward the past with curiosity, we begin to heal not only ourselves but the generations who never found the words.”
A New Story Emerges
Telling my story no longer feels like betrayal or reopening a wound. It feels like breathing life into a scar—recognizing it as a symbol of a life fully lived, a reminder of how courageous it is to keep going, through both triumphs and missteps.
It reminds me that the past is not fixed—it’s alive within us, asking to be met with curiosity instead of fear. It reminds me that even in our hardest moments, there is something unbreakable beneath it all: the will to live, to love, to tell the truth, and to keep becoming.
The Jennifer I am today understands that when we stop watering the seeds of shame, new life takes root—curiosity, compassion, courage, and love. The soil of truth becomes fertile again.
When we tell our stories—first to heal ourselves, then to reclaim our power, and finally to serve others—we join a greater lineage: one that transforms pain into wisdom, and silence into song.
And that is how a new story emerges.
A Closing Reflection
As I share these words, I want to honor something essential — this is my memory, not a precise record of facts. Some of the facts aren’t exact, but it holds my truth, and mine alone.
I’m learning that memory and fact are vastly different things.
Memory breathes. It carries emotion, sensation, and meaning far more faithfully than it carries dates or details. It’s how the soul remembers — not to prove, but to understand. The soul shines a light on what is important to remember, freeing us to live more fully. Sometimes the memories that rise to the surface don’t always add up in terms of facts, but I believe even that is the soul calling us back to connection.
The truth of what I lived is here, even if every moment isn’t factually correct.
I offer this story not as evidence, but as remembrance — one woman’s truth told through the lens of her heart and body.
I hold deep gratitude and compassion for my mother, Faith, and for her parents before her. They, too, carried stories they could not tell — stories that ripple quietly through our lineage and, in their way, through the earth itself.
I also hold deep gratitude for my siblings. We all have our own memories and stories we’ve lived. We started life together and have each followed our own paths. The love we shared in our childhood and beyond weaves through it all. Our memories don’t always fit together like a perfect puzzle, but they are all parts of a beautiful picture that includes every one of us.
May this story serve as a reminder that compassion and curiosity can turn even inherited silence into sacred understanding.
May curiosity continue to guide us.
May compassion keep softening what has been hardened by fear.
And may truth — in whatever form it takes — set us gently free.
Author’s Note
This story is one of the many roots that grew into The Elimination Code — the body of work that now guides my teaching and healing practice.
Through the lens of Pride Energy and the Four White Lion Wisdoms — Clarity, Focus, Purpose, and Divine Action — I continue to explore how truth, curiosity, and compassion can transform what once bound us into what now frees us.
Our stories are living things. When we meet them with love, they become pathways — from silence to song, from survival to sacred purpose.
With gratitude for those who came before me,
and for every soul learning to live in the light of their own truth.
🦁 — Jennifer Mark, Creator of The Elimination Code
