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TRAUMA THERAPY FOR WOMEN | ABUSE RECOVERY | ALLEN, TX
Abuse Recovery
"The conflict between the will to deny horrible events and the will to proclaim them aloud is the central dialectic of psychological trauma."
-Judith Herman
Some clients come in still unsure whether it has a name.
Some of you are still in it. Still managing the tone shifts, the corrections, the way they rewrite reality so that you're the one who's unstable. You keep thinking if you just explain it better, stay calm, react less... it might stop.
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Some of you haven’t left. You can’t, or you don’t know how, or it doesn’t even feel like there’s anything to leave. They say they love you. You’re trying to make it make sense. And you’re still not sure it even counts.
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Some of you left years ago. Decades. You’ve done the boundary work. You’ve healed, mostly. But someone gets too close in the grocery store, and you leave your body just like you used to. You don’t remember all of it, but your nervous system does.
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Some of you have never called it abuse. You trained for this long before adulthood. You learned early that love came with conditions. That it was your job to stay small, stay easy, and stay out of the way.
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This isn’t about what it’s called. It’s about finding the part of you that went quiet to survive, and helping it come back home.
This isn't just trauma therapy with a different label.
​Abuse recovery therapy takes a therapist with clinical specialization in coercive control dynamics, long term relational harm, and the survival reflexes that keep people in ongoing, confusing contact with what hurts.
It’s about:
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Understanding how power operated relationally
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Working with the shame that forms when harm is denied or minimized
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Identifying how coercion can look like care, and why your system believed it
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Tracking physiological survival responses without overriding them
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Knowing how systems (legal, therapeutic, or religious) can reinforce the original harm
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Staying with protective parts of you that still love or defend the person who harmed you
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It requires a therapist trained in relational neurobiology, coercive control theory, and the subtle patterns of complex trauma.
It requires someone who knows how to help you stay functional, without mistaking survival for recovery.
We treat patterns of harm that were chronic, relational, and often denied. By others, or even by you.
In adult relationships:
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Emotional abuse that made you second guess what you felt or knew
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Narcissistic abuse and gaslighting that made you question your own reality
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Intimate partner violence (IPV), including non physical forms
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Domestic violence (DV) that was denied, minimized, or framed as mutual
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Post separation abuse through legal systems or coparenting
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Coercion where you were pressured to comply but not “technically forced”
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Sexual boundary violations that left you confused or disconnected
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Financial control that limited your options or autonomy
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In early environments:
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Physical, sexual, or psychological abuse
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Emotional neglect or chronic absence
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Parentification or being the emotional buffer for an overwhelmed adult
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Survival based family roles where chaos trained you to perform or disappear
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Attachment wounds that shaped how you trust, reach for, or regulate
In systems:
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Religious or spiritual control that used shame, fear, or moral threat
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Institutional harm in schools, therapy, or care systems
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Cultural or family systems where silence and self denial were required
You don’t need a label to heal. If your system is still bracing, still managing, still adjusting around someone else’s power and control... this work is for you.
Strategic support is often the first phase of the work.
If you’re still in contact, or still trying to stay safe in a system that doesn’t see the harm, this work includes strategy, not just safety.
You don’t need to process it before you survive it.
In this phase, therapy includes:
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Tracking what’s safe to say, and to whom
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Preparing for how systems (legal, family, institutional) may respond
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Navigating contact with someone who distorts reality
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Staying present during activation without losing access to thinking
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Sorting what’s real without unraveling what’s still keeping you upright
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Recognizing shutdown, collapse, or silence as protective, not passive
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Strategy doesn’t postpone healing.
For some clients, it’s what makes healing possible.
Abuse recovery,
when you’re still in it.
This isn’t the part where things are clean or resolved.
It’s the part where you’re still navigating something you haven’t been able to name, or leave, or undo.
In this phase, therapy is about holding both what’s still happening, and what’s starting to shift:​
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Noticing when you’re minimizing or justifying what’s happening, and why that makes sense
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Tending to the part of you that still believes it’s your fault
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Tracking your own reasoning when you’re being gaslit or blamed
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Building tolerance for knowing what’s true, even when you can't prove it
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Staying connected to yourself, even when still connected to them
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Identifying where you’re being worn down, and where you’re still intact
This is what it looks like before the clarity. Before the exit.
It’s the first parts of your system starting to come back online.
Abuse recovery,
when you're out.
​This phase is about helping your system unlearn what it had to do to stay safe, and then rebuild what it never got to develop.
That looks like:
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Noticing when your nervous system is activated before you act from it
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Reorienting from external scanning (What do they need? How do I keep them calm?) to internal awareness (What do I notice? What do I need?)
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Feeling an embodied “no” and holding your ground
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Practicing boundaries without guilt
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Slowing down reflexive reactions
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Tolerating not being liked, praised, or understood
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Rebuilding the ability to choose
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Reconnecting with protective anger
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Trusting your own internal signals again
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