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Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/33170
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

It's a tough question any way you slice it. Let me show you how I've written it all out, put it out there, and had the very people that did those things that hurt me read it without them ever understanding it was them and their actions.

First. I write fantasy, though I had my start in fanfiction (still mostly fantasy, but still). So what I do, is I create a character (or characters) that 'do the thing' that I need to write about. Whether in story or the backstory of a character (it doesn't even have to be the main character). Then I let them work through it, or have them struggle through it. Either way, I can show exactly what bothers me, but in a way that makes the characters feel almost disturbingly real.

Examples. In my Naruto Fanfiction, Butterflies, I wrote Aya as as socially inept orphan. She had trouble saying more than a few words before she'd start tripping over them, because she shut the world out since her parents died. I let myself work through my anger at the world through her. But I ramped it up to eleven in an offshoot, Butterflies Solidarity, where she's eternally pissed at the world--blaming them for throwing her away after her parents deaths.

Also in Butterflies Solidarity, Aya works through figuring out her own sexuality, navigates the lows of her depression, and finds purpose in the arms of a woman she never thought she'd see again.

In the Sequel to Butterflies--The Butterfly Effect--I have Aya working through neglect, her own shortcomings, and coming to terms with abandonment issues (having found out her parents weren't dead, but were presented to her as such to keep her from going rogue to find them.

It's cathartic, working through these things with characters being the 'Id' trying to work it all out. And, in doing it in this supposedly roundabout way, the very people that hurt me in the past have read it, and never knew I was talking about them (i.e. their actions, attitudes, and often rejection).

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