Child Abuse Recovery

You try to avoid thinking about your childhood…

And sometimes that’s easy because you have large gaps in your memory from that time.

But at other times, intrusive memories, intense emotions, or extreme reactions frighten you and disrupt your life.

Rest can be difficult to achieve due to periods of insomnia, disturbing nightmares, and chronic feelings of restlessness when you’re awake.

You feel deeply and intensely. A small criticism will ruin your mood for days, dropping you into sadness and shame. Some traffic can stir up strong irritability or even rage. You may have a lingering sense of not wanting to live anymore, pretty much 24/7.

Relationships are emotional minefields. Anxiety and preoccupation about what your partner thinks about you and your relationship alternate with desires to escape and just be on your own. The fears your partner is untrustworthy or will abandon you feel real, but it hasn’t happened yet, so you don’t know what to think or do with the constant uncertainty.

Then there’s the “strange” stuff. Experiences you may not talk to many people about. Feel like you are floating outside of your body, hearing voices in your head talking to you or telling you what to do, or finding things in your home you don’t remember buying. These are dissociative experiences and are common for many survivors of childhood abuse.

If you received mental health services in the past, you might find yourself now with a slew of diagnoses from depression to ADHD to Bipolar Disorder. Each person you see adds another label or writes you another prescription. With no one centering on your childhood trauma, you don’t feel much closer to living outside of the haunting legacy of your past.

Growing up around violence and abuse…

Physical and verbal violence, sexual violation, and emotional abuse can have lasting effects on your nervous system, sense of self-worth, and beliefs about relationships. When you were a child, your developing mind and body weren’t equipped to understand or cope with these extreme circumstances.

As a child, your brain was trained to constantly seek out and prepare for danger. This continues into adulthood as hypervigilance for physical or emotional danger.

You may have thoughts, such as “What if the guy delivering my Amazon package is actually a serial killer in disguise?” You may be extremely in-tuned to the slightest changes in the behavior and moods of others and “read into” text messages and DMs for possible signs someone is mad at you.

Adult survivors of abuse have nervous systems that are constantly in the body’s threat mode. In adulthood, this is experienced as anxiety, panic attacks, suicidality, addictions, dissociation, and depression.

Existing in our threat mode all of the time is exhausting and miserable. There is no way to be fully present in the moment, feel restful and peaceful, or trust ourselves and others.

You are not alone… and you’re not “crazy” either.

No one wishes child abuse on anyone, but the reality is there are millions of people who have experienced childhoods just like yours and live daily with the consequences of trauma that you also struggle with.

These symptoms can be explained by new and emerging brain science. There is nothing crazy about you. You are responding in the ways human brains naturally adapt to the terrible things that happened to you!

Sadly, many survivors blame themselves for what happened to them as children and feel guilty about how they now respond to events in their past. Shame is a universal feeling for child abuse survivors who received powerful messages they did not matter to the adults in their lives.

To make sense of the abandonment and betrayal they experienced, children assume it is something about them that caused the abuse. Coping with trauma through addictive substances, liquor, sex, self-harm, or eating disorders is prevalent because these strategies diminish symptoms. Hence, the brain learns to repeat these behaviors over and over. You make sense!

I understand… and I want to help.

As a child-abuse survivor myself, I can empathize with what you might be experiencing as you consider starting or resuming therapy.

I remember thinking, “If I just don’t think about it, it will go away, right?”

Well… it didn’t. In fact, my symptoms got exponentially worse as time went on.

But connecting with a capable, trauma-informed therapist set me on the right path. I gained control over my emotions, increased my self-esteem, and learned to engage in healthy relationships.

It’s not your fault, and you deserve a chance to heal.

Therapy has been clinically proven to help childhood trauma survivors improve their quality of life. But it has to be the right kind of therapy.

Here’s what I mean by that…

If you do typical talk therapy where you just talk about the trauma, it can actually re-traumatize you. So, effective therapy will incorporate additional, evidence-based strategies to help you regulate your mental and physical reactions to the trauma as you process it.

That’s what we’ll do together. I create space for you to grieve and express your anger for the safety and protection you deserved but didn’t receive when you were a child.

Here’s what it looks like:

We’ll begin by making sure you understand how the abuse and trauma have affected your brain and body. Understanding abuse and its effects normalize your experiences and reduce shame or fear you might have as you think or talk about them.

We’ll also do various practices to soothe your nervous system when it becomes dysregulated, so you can learn how to shift your brain out of threat mode and into the calm, restful window of tolerance.

We will identify the negative core beliefs about yourself and relationships that imprinted the fear and shame of abuse. I understand that many of these core beliefs are deeply ingrained and are difficult to change. While it can take time, I employ evidence-based strategies to help you transform these beliefs as quickly as possible.

You may know exactly which techniques you would like to try in therapy or may want to look them up before reaching out to me. I absolutely respect that! The clinical terms of the strategies I employ are mindfulness, Internal Family System (IFS), somatic experiencing, emotional freedom technique/tapping, EMDR, hypnosis, Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy, Dialectical Behavioral Therapy, expressive arts, and narrative therapy.

If you suspect you have Dissociative Identity Disorder or have been diagnosed already with DID, I can help. I have specialized training in treating dissociative symptoms and am deeply respectful of each unique system’s goals. Through our work together, we can enhance inter-system communication and collaboration to bring harmony to your inner world.

You CAN liberate yourself from the legacy of trauma!

If you are a survivor of childhood abuse and are struggling, I encourage you to reach out. Returning a sense of empowerment to trauma survivors is incredibly important to me.

We will have a conversation about where you are in your journey, and you can see if I am someone you might be interested in working with.

The consultation is totally free, and there’s no pressure to schedule an appointment.

I’m here… waiting to listen with a compassionate ear: (407) 885-6151.