Learning Safety After Trauma

mosaicseasonslifec
6 days ago
5 min read

Gentle note: This post includes personal reflections on domestic violence, childhood sexual abuse, and trauma recovery. Please read at your own pace and take care of your heart as you do.

This morning, I woke up rested.

That sentence might sound ordinary to someone else. To me, it feels nothing short of miraculous. I slept more than seven hours straight without waking in fear. No jolting awake. No hypervigilance. No bracing my body for impact.

For years, sleep was not rest. It was vulnerability.

My ex-husband violently hurt me while I was sleeping. Before that, in my childhood, people who were supposed to be “safe” sexually abused me during nap times. Somewhere deep in my nervous system, my brain learned: Sleep is dangerous. Rest is unsafe.

Once your body learns that lesson, it doesn’t forget effortlessly.

Rest did not come easily to me. I’ve had to learn it. Practice it. Fight for it. This morning’s sleep feels like proof that my body is finally catching up to the safety my life now holds.

When I woke up and realized I had slept peacefully through the night, I felt awe instead of fear. A quiet, peaceful awareness settled in: My body is learning something new now.

How Trauma Teaches Us to Blame Ourselves

As I continue unpacking my own healing, I’ve found myself gently wondering about self-blame and shame. Abuse is always a choice made by the abuser. Yet, I’ve been reflecting on how being physically hurt or disciplined as “punishment” may quietly train a person’s mind to link pain with personal fault.

When someone is physically hurt as a method of correction, the internal message can slowly become: If I am hurt, I must have done something wrong.

Later, as an adult in an abusive relationship, that same distorted logic can resurface: If this happens, maybe I caused it.

Maybe I need to behave better.

Modify more.

Shrink further.

Maybe he doesn’t realize what he’s doing. Maybe he doesn’t mean to.

Harm does not become harmless just because it’s misunderstood, minimized, or hoped away. Impact matters. Intent does not erase responsibility.

Abuse is still abuse—even when the survivor is trying to make sense of it in order to survive.

If that was once your way of coping, of staying alive, of holding onto the possibility of peace—your confusion makes sense. Your mind was reaching for safety with the tools it had at the time. We were never required to understand abuse in order to deserve freedom from it.

Let me be clear in the way survivors often need to hear it again and again:

Domestic violence is never the victim’s fault.

Not in childhood.

Not in adulthood.

Not ever.

“Why Didn’t You Leave?”

People sometimes ask that question as if the answer is simple.

I didn’t leave because it didn’t feel safe to leave.

I didn’t leave because I didn’t want my children to be alone with him.

I didn’t leave because, for a long time, I didn’t even know leaving was an option.

When you live in survival mode long enough, your world becomes very small. Choices shrink. Fear gets loud. And you learn how to endure instead of escape.

The Truth I’m No Longer Hiding

This has been on my heart for a long time. Today, I’m taking down some walls.

I am a survivor of domestic violence.

There are places in my home that still echo with the shadows of memories I wish I could forget—outbursts, emotional abuse, physical violence. In those moments, I often felt numb. Dissociation became my shield.

Domestic violence didn’t only happen while I was sleeping.

One day, he hit me in the face and my glasses broke on impact. I remember holding the pieces in my hand afterward, staring at them like they belonged to someone else. Such a small, ordinary object—now unmistakable proof of what my life had become. I didn’t break those glasses. He did.

For a long time, I kept those glasses - not out of attachment, but because they quietly testified to a truth that I wasn’t yet ready to say out loud. They were evidence that what I lived through was real. I wasn’t imagining it. It wasn’t “just stress,” or “just tension,” or “something I could fix if I tried harder.”

It was violence.

For years, I believed my children never witnessed the abuse. I thought I had protected them by hiding it well.

Then one day, I learned they did know.

That realization hit me with a tidal wave of grief, guilt, and unprocessed emotion. A truth I never wanted to face—but one I am now holding with both honesty and compassion for myself.

The physical abuse left wounds on my soul. I hid what was happening because I didn’t want to hurt the people who loved me. I learned to isolate in the middle of chaos. Days turned into weeks. Weeks into months.

My personality craves deep, meaningful connection. Yet I built walls to keep people at a distance because I didn’t want them to see my pain. It felt like a constant war between who I truly was and who I had to become to survive.

It was hard to know myself. Even harder to love myself.

When Identity and Reality Collide

When I finally became honest with myself about what I had endured, I wrestled deeply with it.

How does someone with my education… my advocacy… my passion for whole-person wellness… end up here?

I’ve helped strangers through the beginning stages of healing. I speak about the mind, body, and spirit connection. Here I was—this was part of my story.

Trauma does not check resumes. Abuse does not discriminate.

Rewiring What My Body Learned

Neuroplasticity is the brain’s ability to rewire and learn new patterns. That’s exactly what I’m doing now—slowly, intentionally, even imperfectly at times.

I’m learning how to respond to triggers without isolating. Without gaslighting myself. Without abandoning my own truth.

It takes conscious effort most days.

When I feel my world shrinking again—whether it’s physical space, mental space, or emotional space—I remind myself:

Take it back.

Square footage.

Head space.

Emotional capacity.

Voice.

Rest.

All of it belongs to me.

Safety Is a Human Right

No one should suffer domestic violence.