The toss up between deleting for sanity and keeping evidence

[Hmmmm5]

I was part of an awful relationship that ended a few months back. I have no energy to go into the details but bad. I've run a mile and removed him off everything but I have a dilemma about our text history. There's a year worth of texts of us messaging almost everyday. The content of some of them plague me. Sometimes I go back and read them and it brings back awful memories. But I'm scared he's going to try ruin me, my job, my friendships. I've heard nothing from him for weeks though but the fear is still there that he's going to try ruin my life because he has the influence to and he has it in him.

So I find myself wanting to delete every trace of this man forever so I can try forget and move on, but also feel like I need to hold on to all these text messages in case he ever tries to do anything. It's the only evidence I have minus my word that he is a nasty person. But I can't stop reading things over and over again and it's consuming me. I really feel like I'm going to be defenceless if I delete it all. I don't know what to do?

Can you send them to a file on your computer? Or email them to a trusted friend or family so you have them if you need them but not direct access?

I'd screenshot some examples, save to a memory stick and then delete from your phone.

Create a new email address and email them to it. Don't have the email account set up on your phone so you'd have to go on the website and sign in to see them or print and put them in a safe deposit box/self storage facility which stores personal documents or has very small boxes available depending how far you'd need to be removed from them and if they're important enough to spend money on storing them. Or print and put in the loft.

You can archive the chat on whatsapp I think. It gets sent to your email. I recently stumbled across chats from 2018 i did not even know were saved.

Maybe get a new phone and keep the old one hidden away for future reference if needed? Fresh phone/start? Hope you're okay, sounds bad.

I had similar at the end of a relationship. We were mainly on WhatsApp so I emailed the conversation to myself via the app which is a format that makes it much harder to scroll through and requires going into email etc. Stopped me looking.

Good luck OP. Hope you are ok.

Archive them

Then they are available if you need them & easy to recover, but not in front of your face

Thanks for the suggestions. I've archived it on WhatsApp but still I go look every so often so not enough. I exported the chat and emailed it to myself but it exports it in like a text format so I assume something he can say I easily made up and typed myself?

I'm thinking about the screenshot thing but will be a lot of work to go through the year and screenshot all the shit he did. But I can't think of anything else so might have to do that, send it to myself on email, and delete everything off by phone.