My First Year Without Alcohol Journal Entries

9.27.24 Journal Entry Notes.

I realized I should probably have included trigger warnings in many of my essays and on these entries. Please accept my apologies and excuse that I am new to writing for public consumption. Trigger warning: Violence in nightmares, sexual assault (rape).

These nightmare accounts were a bit jarring to read today. For context, I had been suffering from frequent nightmares and sleep paralysis related to PTSD since I was raped in 2014 by my former husband. While I went to see a therapist after that happened because I was struggling to face each day and afraid to fall asleep at night, it wasn’t until I started consulting a dream interpreter/oracle in mid-2023 that the nightmares and sleep paralysis finally started to resolve.

See, there was a reason my subconscious kept trying to get my attention. Even after I got sober and had mostly worked through the abuse and rape, there was a lot of unprocessed trauma to be sorted and dealt with now that my conscious mind knew I was finally safe.