I don't know if this applies to you, but I was largely in denial of things that happened to me in childhood. I don't mean that I didn't know they happened, but I insisted they didn't matter and demanded they be classified as just bad stuff that happened that didn't really matter. The issue with this was that this outlook implicitly demanded that I disown and devalue my own emotions about the things that happened. I think I was trying to control and suppress the underlying pain by minimizing and distorting my past experiences. The irony is that I insisted that classifying certain things as abuse was a distortion of reality. I was playing mind games with myself to try to avoid experiencing painful emotions.

I'm not saying that talking about childhood experiences is fruitful or necessary for everyone. And I would certainly say it is painful to allow dissociated emotions to surface. For me, though, my emotions were previously limited to a single thing: anger. I don't want to live that way forever. It is scary sometimes feeling the emotions that I had suppressed. Feels out of control. Sometimes the pain makes me wish I could go back. However, I see now that it was there all along, if masked by anger. Now I can better acknowledge the underlying feelings. The therapist and I are working on figuring out how to deal with these feelings in a way that isn't hurtful to me or others. Suppressed feelings can never be resolved. I don't know if you are suppressing feelings, but it seems like a possibility. The way you talk about your experiences reminds me of myself.

Another value in talking about this stuff is that I think denial can sometimes end up hurting other people. Not always, obviously, but sometimes. If I insist that certain things that happened to me were ok and not a big deal, that implicitly says that me doing the things that hurt me is also ok and not a big deal. This allowed me to hurt C terribly while denying responsibility for the devastation I caused.