You're Not Broken: Understanding the Stages of Healing After Abuse

We expect healing to be this straightforward, linear, and predictable path toward better days. Yes, leaving an abusive person is a huge step forward. Some people come into therapy after leaving the relationship because they expected that once they were free from that person, everything would be manageable from that point forward with steady, consistent progress.

What we have found at Rooted Survivors, however, is that leaving the relationship is usually the cornerstone for change. It is the beginning of the road, not the end. Healing can be messy, uncomfortable, and full of surprises. The reminder for ourselves is just that, there is no specific roadmap through a breakup like this, and one-size planning and support will not fit all. There are landmarks, though, and that's where we can prepare you for what to expect with reminders that what you are feeling and experiencing are normal parts of the process. Even when they are awkward, painful, or challenging.

Healing and rebuilding your life after the trauma of having someone toxic in your life can feel jarring. You will experience a range of emotions. There will be moments of joy, relief, anger, defeat, grief, and hope, sometimes all in the same time and space. You will feel a variety of other emotions, thoughts, and a wide range of physical experiences as well. The reminder to yourself is that this is normal. It is not your fault. It is not a sign of regression or failure, and it is not something that we are trying to "cure" or get rid of. Healing is evidenced by your ability to allow and accept each piece of this process, especially when it is intense, heavy, or uncomfortable.

Here are the 5 general stages of healing that you can expect to experience after you have left the relationship. Our hope is that having this framework in your back pocket can provide you with benchmarks to recognize how far you have come, even when it feels slow or uncertain.

Stage I: Living in Survival and Re-Establishing Safety

Initially, there will be a lot of logistics to iron out after leaving the environment or the relationship. This will depend a lot on your circumstances. Some will need to re-establish new housing, work, and community around them. Others will need to determine how much or how little of the family, friends, and connections they can maintain and who they will have to break away from as a safeguard.

No matter where you wind up, you can expect your brain and your body to remain on alert for some time. Your brain mastered its ability to protect you when you were stuck living with or being around this person for so long. We have to allow it the space to rewire itself and to pull back from the overdrive of sending you signals and warning signs all of the time.

When you get to a new location or establish physical safety away from the abuse, you would expect that you could be able to immediately take a deep breath and settle into the safety that you fought so hard to establish. What your brain understands, though, is that you are in uncharted territory. This recognition alone will send your brain into a secondary warning response, and it will do everything it can to keep you alert and get your attention. Until you really give it time to learn and settle into the understanding that the threat is gone, your brain will continue to respond as if danger could happen around any turn.

Whether your threats were emotional or physical, you will continue to feel hypervigilant and "on call." You may experience bouts of numbness, dissociation, anxiety, or even depression. The reminder here is to engage in any supports that shift your experience just a little bit. Any moment of relief and reassurance will support your nervous system in moving closer and closer to consistent regulation.

Stage II: Awareness and Insight

This is usually a good time to come into therapy. Having a space where you can sit with someone who will validate your experience and name the behaviors that you endured is crucial. So much of abuse is deflecting and undermining you to believe that either you somehow provoked and deserved the toxicity, or that you were wildly mistaken and nothing ever even happened to begin with.

It is important for you to learn and understand the labels of different behaviors and tactics that were used against you. Understanding and believing your own story and experience is a vital first step in rebuilding trust with yourself. This step in the process can feel deeply affirming as you begin to recognize and have language around your experience. It can also feel disorienting and destabilizing as big breakthroughs happen, insight rises to the surface, and you begin to shift the narrative on big chunks of your memory and timelines.

Insight can be groundbreaking and revolutionary; it can also hurt before it heals. Having a space where you can be emotionally upheld as you work through your realizations is essential to your ability to continue to do the work necessary to unearth and shift your perspective and understanding. Understandably so, people often avoid this part of the healing journey for years. We have seen time and time again how restorative and renewing it is to have the peace and affirmation of knowing deep within yourself what your truth is and how you will build a new life around those values, realizations, and principles.

Stage III: Grief, Anger, and Emotional Intensity

As we’ve continued to note throughout this post, the range of emotions you feel will be expansive. Not only the emotions themselves, but also the intensity at which you feel them will shift from hour to hour. Think about all of the emotions and responses that you had to suppress and keep locked up, just to tiptoe around your ex or family member.

Whoever it is that was toxic or abusive to you, one thing you knew for sure was that you could never show your emotional cards. One moment of vulnerability would be met with a wide range of consequences: admonishment, silencing, rage. However they reacted, the message was clear, keep your feelings deep, deep inside and never let them show.

Once you have established safety and begin to build insight, your emotions will recognize the stability of this and they will finally have the space to release. The flooding of this rebound of emotions, in both variety and intensity, can take you for a ride. Again, it is important that you allow this as part of your process. There are certain interventions and skills we will use in and out of therapy, like DBT for emotional regulation, to support you in maintaining safety and beginning to regulate, but there is never an emotion that we will throw away. We want you to be able to feel it fully because it is true that every emotion has a half-life. Only when we allow the experience can the emotion serve its purpose and settle into its own resolve.

Stage IV: Rebuilding Identity and Trust Within Yourself

Once we process the flashbacks, accept and allow your emotional experience, and give space to your grief, you will begin to have your head above water again and will be asking yourself, "What's next?!"

This is a very exciting time in your path toward healing. This is where we get to put on our work gloves and get elbows deep in rebuilding a life that is meaningful, satisfying, and genuine. A life where every relationship and event you participate in resonates with your soul. We get to answer questions like:

• "What do I actually like?"

• "What are my preferences?"

• "What do I believe?"

To fully take your power back and build an inner and outer world that is authentic to you and where you want to be. Reconnecting with your values and your intentions, maybe picking up a new hobby or shapeshifting your career. You no longer have to do things to keep the peace and answer to someone else's demands. You learn to listen to the little cues inside of you and your voice gets louder and more powerful. Making small choices about how you spend your time, your money, and your energy helps build safe connections and a bright future.

Stage V: Integration and Empowerment

It's important to note that there is no "I have arrived" moment. Sometimes people are frustrated when they begin to realize this. They come into therapy asking, "When will I feel better? When will I be done with this?"

The truth is, we are always learning, evolving, and healing. You will make significant strides toward feeling resolved and healed from the past. However, we will never get rid of what happened. You will never be "done" with this experience. We know that can sound daunting and demotivating, but trust us when we say, "That's a really good thing."

You will reach a point where your understanding of and relationship to the past is different. It is no longer suffocating, excruciating, or destabilizing. You will work your way through the stages such that you are able to look at and accept your past as something entirely different. You will be able to carry this part of your story with you in a way that is hopeful, life-giving, and enriching. This will equip you to hold yourself up and also pour into others along the way.

Some signs of being more fully integrated will be:

• Acting first out of self-compassion instead of self-blame.

• Having clear boundaries and not feeling guilty for holding them firmly.

• Continuing to grow, build, and deepen your sense of purpose and identity.

Walking the Path Together

Ultimately, healing is a relationship with yourself. Wherever you are at in your journey is positive progress that will continue to support you and move you in the most effective direction. Be gentle with yourself. Remind yourself daily that this process is not concrete or linear. You may vacillate between these stages in different twists and turns along the way.

Maintain your curiosity and connection to yourself and know that this journey is powerful and intentional. When that voice inside of you is critical and says, "I should be over this by now," we hope you can meet it with compassion, grace, and reassurance.

If you are burdened by any part of these stages or just want a safe place to go deeper in your healing process, please do not hesitate to reach out to us today. We provide specialized virtual trauma therapy for residents in California and Oklahoma. Whether you are looking for EMDR to process painful memories or relational therapy to help you reconnect with yourself, we can match you up with a therapist who is skilled and truly understands.

Your healing matters. Partner with someone who will walk alongside you and specializes in Trauma and Abuse recovery today.