What’s Story Mining?
Story Mining is a guided process for women unearthing their true selves after - or within - an abusive relationship. Through conversation and intentional reflection, Story Mining helps you unearth a self you may have lost - or one you never got the chance to become - and reclaim the gold that was always in you. I'm Regina Blitstein, and I lived this before I ever guided another woman through it.
Who am I?
Writer, guide, and creator of Story Mining. I help women reclaim their authentic selves they lost inside abusive relationships.
The history of Story Mining
Story Mining has an origin story that begins long before it had a name.
During one of the hardest periods of my life - years spent inside an abusive relationship that had gradually dismantled my sense of self - I kept a journal. Not because I was trying to build anything but because I was a writer, and writing was the only tool I trusted when everything else felt unsafe.
I wrote to survive. I wrote to remember what was actually happening when the gaslighting made me doubt my own memory. I wrote to give my anger, my grief, my confusion, and my longing somewhere to land that wasn’t subject to someone else’s revision. The page became my only non-judgmental witness - the one place where my truth stayed exactly as I left it.
What I didn’t know then was that I was doing something that would eventually become a methodology. I was mining. Layer by layer, entry by entry, I was excavating the truth of my own experience and - slowly, haltingly - finding my way back to myself.
Those journal entries still exist. You can read them as I’m posting them currently in My Domestic Abuse Survival Journal on my blog, Once a Time a Time - raw and unfiltered, written in the middle of the experience rather than safely from the other side. They are the original Story Mining sessions. And they are the reason I know, with absolute certainty, that this process works.
Because it saved me first.
Experience a taste of Story Mining with The First Dig where I guide you through a single reflection that invites you to take a moment for yourself, land in your own skin, take a breath and feel your feelings.
A note before you go:
If what you read here touched something that feels bigger than a blog post - if you’re in a situation right now that feels unsafe, frightening, or out of your control - please don’t navigate that alone.
The National Domestic Violence Hotline is available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week: call 1-800-799-7233, text START to 88788, or chat privately at thehotline.org. The Crisis Text Line is also available anytime: text HOME to 741741.
You don’t have to have it figured out to reach out. You don’t have to be ready to leave. You don’t have to know exactly what you need. You just have to make one move toward something safer - and these resources will meet you exactly where you are.
Story Mining is here for when you’re ready to go deeper. But your safety comes first. Always.
