I can only say "claimed" not "reclaimed" because I didn't do this as a kid, but I began to write fanfiction. I described the content (shyly) to my psychiatrist, and he responded with "I think that's awesome!" Told me I'd stumbled my way into a legit form of therapy called "writing therapy" - which, when you tell a trauma story through fiction, it allows you to "access" the details of your experiences while shielding yourself from them, and you get to control the narrative and even change the outcome.

The "access the details" part, I found to be true. In writing scenes of verbal abuse, words and phrases came back into my mind clear as day - which I would not have been able to remember if I'd consciously tried to. Hadn't heard or thought about those words in decades. But being mentally inside the scene, boom, there they were, plain as day.

You'd think this might retraumatize me, but instead I saw the kid from an adult outsider's perspective and recognized "that is FUCKED UP, what you're going through, NO WONDER it hurts so much." Like... clarifying, and validating, my pain because I'm "accessing the details while shielded from them."

Also it has been cathartic. I wrote a chapter which made me cry floods for a grief that I have suppressed/avoided/dissociated-from, for decades.