Over the years, I’ve worked with a great many patients who carry the aftermath of physical abuse, emotional abuse, or both. If you’re one of them, I want to say something plainly, at the outset: healing can take place. It takes effort, and it takes time to rebuild trust — in others and in yourself — but it is possible, and I’ve watched it happen many times.
The first real step is finding a therapist you can work with. Recovery from abuse isn’t something that happens on a fixed timeline, and it isn’t something that happens with just anyone. It takes a real sense of safety and trust with the person sitting across from you, and that takes time to build. I’d rather a patient take several sessions to decide whether they feel comfortable with me than rush into deep material before that foundation exists.
Abandoning secrets
Abuse depends on concealment. It survives in silence, in the things a person has been made to feel they can never say out loud. Therapy, as I think about it, is the counterforce to that silence — sharing secrets, opening all the locked doors, letting all the monsters out of the darkness, is the hallmark of psychotherapy.
I often work with patients using what I call “monster therapy” — encouraging someone to picture their trauma as a distinct entity, one that has been quietly controlling them from the shadows. By naming it, describing it, and bringing it into the light of conversation, that entity loses much of its power. Secrecy, left unexamined, functions almost like psychological blackmail — it generates ongoing fear, anger, loneliness, and suspicion that don’t have anywhere to go.
Uncovering feelings and emotions
For many patients, therapy is the first genuinely safe emotional space they’ve had. Learning to release anger, grief, pain, fear, and even joy is a necessary part of that process — even though a lot of cultural messaging suggests that showing emotion is a form of weakness. In my experience, it’s the opposite. Suppressing those feelings is what keeps them in control of you.
Part of this work involves learning new patterns for relationships, and finding language to communicate needs that may never have felt safe to voice before. The underlying goal is a shift in identity — from someone something happened to, into someone actively engaged in their own healing. That shift doesn’t happen in a single session, and it isn’t supposed to. It builds gradually, as trust in the process grows alongside trust in yourself.
If any of this resonates with your own experience, know that reaching out is itself an act of courage, and it’s the step that makes everything after it possible.