“Not all who hesitate are lost. The psyche has many secrets in reserve. And these are not disclosed unless required.” ~ Joseph Campbell

One day, while I was traveling abroad, I wandered into a bookstore and stumbled upon a publication by Darren McGarvey, a Scottish Orwell Prize-winning author, titled Trauma Industrial Complex: How Oversharing Became a Product in a Digital World. The title felt powerful and demanded that I pick it up, so I did. I read it and came away feeling it was both fascinating and necessary. He writes about something I, too, feel is important. I have no connection to him and nothing to gain by sharing this with you. I only think it matters, and that it may matter for those of us living in a certain kind of post-separation and divorce domestic violence.

One of the things McGarvey explores, as I understand it, is the difference between telling our pain and healing from it, and how, especially online, being heard can sometimes seem like getting better, even when deeper healing is still waiting for us. I read that and felt it land somewhere true in me because alienation gives us so much to say. Many of us might feel unheard, and some of us might feel disbelieved by the very people and systems that were meant to help and protect us, and so the longing to say it out loud, somewhere someone might finally listen, is enormous and completely understandable. I have felt that longing myself, and I still do.

He also gave me language for something I had felt but never quite named. So much of where we gather now lives on online platforms that quietly profit from our suffering, hold our attention the longest when we are at our rawest and most vulnerable, and were never built to help us heal. They are only designed to keep us coming back, the algorithm. McGarvey writes about how suffering itself has become a kind of currency in this digital world, packaged and rewarded and, too often, left unattended. And I, too, have come to worry that pain laid bare again and again in online spaces, without the steady hand of professional support around it, may deepen the wound it is trying to ease. Our hurts need a careful type of holding that platforms can never offer.

What I have come to understand, for myself, is that these places can witness, and they have their own value. But the deepest work, the trauma, the loss, the aching of a family torn apart, should be carried out with experts in domestic violence, trauma, and the breaking apart of families. Joseph Campbell taught that the hero must walk into the dark and through it to come home changed, and what I took from McGarvey was a reminder that the work Campbell points to waits for us in the private inner work. That being heard, as much as it may matter, is not the whole journey.

I should be transparent about my own choices and about why I have this website. I am grateful beyond words for the awareness others have so bravely shared online, because it was their voices I found when I first searched, frightened and trying to understand what was happening to my family. I do not know where I would have been without them. Awareness matters. Lived experience matters. Changing systems that seem to fail families matters. I am grateful to everyone who gives their heart to that work, in whatever way feels right to them. My own way has simply been a more private one, one I decided upon in part after reading McGarvey’s book. I have built this site as cautiously and privately as I knew how, because my story is so closely woven with my family’s that I feel it was never only mine to tell, and we still live inside it. So what I aim to build on this site is awareness of post-separation and divorce domestic violence as it happens in my own state, a mapping of this harm onto established state laws. I hope that by doing so, it might help shift things for families like mine and for all of those who will come after us. I share what I can through lived experience while protecting the people I love. I reserve the rest for private work, as someone who knows the deep relief of being heard and is still learning the difference between saying a thing and truly healing it, even when the situation is not resolved.

I recommend reading Darren McGarvey’s book. His words feel empowering, important, and necessary. I offer it here in the hope that it might be beneficial for others. You can learn more about him and his work at darrenmcgarvey.com. I have never met him, though I would love to one day, and perhaps even sit in on one of his talks. Until then, thank you, Darren. You’ve given me something I very much needed, and at just the right time.

With heartfelt care,

A Maine mom