I’ve been where you are.

Not in the abstract or as a professional who studied it from the outside – as a woman who endured emotional and physical abuse by someone who told me he loved me – but often did not act as if he did.

I came to the relationship young – straight from a childhood that had its own complications into a life with someone who slowly, steadily, became the center of my universe while totally eclipsing my sense of self. The years when a person is supposed to figure out who she is – what she believes and what she wants – mine were swallowed up in the drama and chaos in which he kept our life swirling. I was so caught up in it, I didn’t notice anything was missing from my life – until I did.

And when I did notice, there wasn’t much “me” there. Instead of learning how to be myself, I’d learned to make myself small and manageable and quiet – so his needs and wants would be the only ones I could see.

I existed for years in that miserable state, believing I was doomed to a life of unhappiness, stress and invisibility – and that nothing could help turn things around for me.

But one night, during “just another one of our knock-down-drag-out fights” that had become the all-too-familiar rhythm of life, I did something different. I picked up a pen and a blank sheet of paper and wrote the first words of what would – decades later – be turned into Story Mining.

The account I wrote on that night turned out to be the beginning of a journaling practice that was the turning point; my journal was how I started finding my way to myself. The pages revealed over time that I’d not forgotten who I was before him and that I had a strong urge to discover who I could have become without him. I started seeing glimpses of a future where I could make my own decisions, trust my own instincts, hold my own opinions without someone else’s voice overriding them.

The process was revelatory, powerful and life-changing. The excavation of a self that was buried but never gone – that is what Story Mining is built from. It’s also built on something else I learned in those basement pages: that telling your own story – even just to yourself, even in fragments – is how a self gets rebuilt. Excavation uncovers what’s there – story is what carries it forward.

I’ve been gradually transcribing and publishing the actual journal I kept during my own relationship on my personal blog, Once a Time a Time. I believe they’re an important part of Story Mining history because they chronicle in real time the journey I was on, sorting things out on my own. The posting of those entries is a work in progress; I add to the archive a little at a time, as I feel ready to share them publicly.

Because these are unfiltered, in-the-moment entries rather than processed reflection, they read differently than the rest of what I write on the blog here and on the rest of this site. If you’d like to read them, they’re here: Read the journal archive →

I am not a therapist. What I am is a woman who went looking for herself and found her – and who built a method, from that lived experience, for helping other women do the same.

The women I’m here for are the ones who are curious to find what is buried beneath the rubble of their lives. Those who feel, somewhere underneath everything they’ve survived, there’s strength, wisdom, independence, spirit – gold to be unearthed.

If that’s you – the Mini Dig was made for you. And The Full Dig, when you’re ready for it, is a conversation between two women who both know what it means to have to find yourself, sometimes for the very first time, sometimes long after you thought the chance had passed.

It hasn’t passed. I’m proof of that.

Unearthing the gold in you.
– Regina Blitstein, Founder, Story Mining

The artwork you see here was painted by Tiffany Arp-Daleo, who kindly let me share some snippets of her paintings on this page. It felt right when contemplating a visual accompaniment for Story Mining to select something made by hand, with care – and her work embodies exactly that spirit.

Thank you, Tiffany.