How Do You Recover From Abuse?
Therapy for painful relationships in person in Wichita and online across Kansas
Many survivors find gardening is a metaphor for their recovery journey: beautiful new things springing up from the bare ground
What It’s Like After Leaving Abuse
What is it like to leave abuse?
First of all, if you’ve ever seen the movie Tangled, you may recognize yourself in Rapunzel’s flip-flopping emotions of relief and self-blame, relief and self-blame. You too may feel rage at your abuser one day then desperately miss them the next day (welcome to trauma bonds). Leaving abuse can feel messy, confusing, full of both relief and grief.
While you lived in abuse, your brain focused on monitoring how to keep you safe and it probably pushed away any knowledge, emotions, and sensations that weren’t helpful to staying safe. But after leaving, your brain may feel like there’s now space for all those backlogged experiences to come flooding up - so some people actually feel worse in the early days of leaving abuse, than they did while numbly surviving it. If this is happening to you, know that it doesn’t mean you made the wrong decision.
It is also common for confusion and self-blame to fill your brain while you’re living in abuse - stark clarity about the situation may not come until you’ve left it. If memories your brain had pushed away are now popping up and you’re overwhelmed by how much worse it was than you’d thought when you left, know that this is a phase that happens to a lot of people, too.
And that’s before we even talk about the safety concerns in some situations, and the general symptoms of trauma that most survivors grapple with! (After any kind of traumatic experience, you may experience things like flashbacks, insomnia, nightmares, panic, rage, brain fog, numbness, fear, triggers, avoidance, emotional fragility, and feelings of worthlessness.)
If a lot of these things feel familiar to you, pause and be kind to yourself. Begin your healing journey with simply saying to yourself: “I’m dealing with the aftermath of abuse and these symptoms make sense after what I lived through.”
Healing is tended like young growing plants: nurtured and protected on their way to becoming resilient and strong
How to Heal the Brain After Abuse
Healing from abuse is a dynamic and highly individual process.
You may need to improve your sleep first; someone else may need help for panic attacks first. You may need to process sexual abuse; someone else may need to process spiritual distortions from religious abuse. Therapy for abuse recovery is tailored to you. During abuse your needs were secondary to someone else’s demands, but in healing work, your needs are primary and they will show the way forward. Learning to be curious about what you’re experiencing and staying with curiosity rather than numbing, pushing away, or being overwhelmed by it, is part of healing. Your experiences matter, and they shine a light on how to move toward healing.
However, even though healing work is highly individual, you may find it helpful to think about your journey though a big-picture framework of abuse recovery. Judith Herman developed a three stage process in her book Trauma and Recovery, suggesting that:
“The fundamental stages of recovery are establishing safety, reconstructing the trauma story, and restoring the connection between survivors and their community.”
The way I often see these steps manifesting for abuse survivors engaged in healing work, is this:
Establishing Safety. First, getting out of the abusive situation whenever possible, will have a large impact on the healing work to follow. Your brain won’t focus on processing trauma when it’s busy focusing on staying safe. So this stage can involve getting to physical safety, gaining some coping skills to help your body relax into that safety, learning to draw boundaries so you remain safe, and getting the basics of self-care on board: eating, sleeping, socializing. This stage might also include solving housing and financial viability if those were impacted by getting out of abuse.
Trauma Work. It’s important to walk into this stage at a pace your nervous system can cope with: going too fast can cause overwhelm. If you’re wondering what kind of trauma therapy is best for you, look at this post about choosing a therapist for PTSD, and you may want to additionally filter your search for people who are familiar with treating abuse. Therapy with me, for instance, tends to combine somatic work and EMDR at this stage so that memories no longer have so much power to trigger, cause nightmares, or use up your energy to avoid. The bad memories can become just that: memories, not something you’re continually fending off.
Reconnection. Because interpersonal trauma and abuse can devastate your self-image and your perception of others and the world around you, this final stage of trauma healing helps you move back into the world with meaning and a sense of belonging. Without this work, life can become constricted as the brain continues to prioritize safety above connection and as it shies away from reasonable risks. So in this stage of healing, you gain the capacity to take healthy but boundaried risks, build community, and to make meaning of your experiences.
These three stages are not entirely linear - you will likely cycle through elements of all three stages on a regular basis. But as a rough outline, they do serve as a roadmap for healing work that you can keep an eye on. Safety, then trauma processing, and finally the blossoming of a new life.
Places can become vibrant with new life, like a summer garden and like abuse recovery!
How Long Does it Take To Heal From Abuse?
You may feel immediately better after leaving abuse - or you may feel worse for a while as the symptoms your brain was busy suppressing, now have space to pop out. Similarly, you may feel better for a while and then hit a “traumaversary” where your body is remembering the anniversary of something bad and resurrecting symptoms in memory of it. So one day you may feel very healed, and the next day you may be fighting despairing thoughts that absolutely nothing has changed! It’s normal to have ups and downs: try to ride them out while reminding yourself of the overall progress you’re making. Healing is not linear.
What age the abuse began can also have an impact on the healing process: brief abuse in adulthood may have a totally different recovery speed than someone whose entire childhood was overshadowed by abuse. Not only do the things you experienced impact your timeline, things like the level of social and financial support you have right now can also impact the process.
Healing doesn’t have a set timeline, but that doesn’t mean you won’t notice differences all along the way!
Therapy for Abuse in Wichita, KS
While healing is not linear and doesn’t happen on a set timeline, your brain does possess tremendous capacity to heal. If you’re looking for therapy in Kansas that will support your brain and body toward healing the trauma of abuse, I offer free consultations to all new clients because I believe you deserve to walk into therapy already knowing that it is the right place for the work you want to do. You can read more about me here and then reach out to schedule your free consultation today!
Elizabeth Peters, LMSW is a licensed therapist seeing clients in person in Wichita and online across Kansas. She provides EMDR and somatic therapy for adults who are overwhelmed by anxiety, trauma, painful relationships or spiritual harm.