I want to preface this by saying that this isn’t something I have seen anywhere in the literature nor have I pulled from any resource. It’s just, over time, I realized that the model of healing people have didn’t seem to line up with what I saw or experienced.
And there was also a HUGE difference in how specific resources impacted victims depending on where they are in their healing.
I have literally never seen resources identifying that they are appropriate or inappropriate for certain stages of healing.
A lot of what we see in terms of healing is prescriptive (forgive! let go! move on!) tends to actually be descriptive.
Meaning that people generally recommend the results of healing as the cause of healing, and it is horribly invalidating to a victim and also doesn’t actually work. I mean, I have literally never seen someone ‘decide to forgive’ a person and then they’re healed; literally never.
There are certain things that, in my opinion, tend to facilitate healing, the main thing being time and space from the person that has harmed you.
Which makes sense – your body, for example, wouldn’t be able to heal from a knife wound if you keep stabbing the knife back in.
But in reality, not even doctors or therapists can ‘heal’ anyone.
The best a medical doctor is able to do is to remove what is impeding healing/causing harm and then facilitate the body in being able to repair itself.
A therapist is generally working with a client to help them make the choices that are best for themselves and supporting them in that.
Honestly, I wonder how many of medical or psychological issues are basically professionals trying to encourage us to do whatever we already know to do. It’s easy for a medical doctor to conduct emergency surgery from an automobile accident, but it is a whole other situation for our primary care physician to talk to us about overeating or smoking or drugs.
This doesn’t apply to children or adults in extreme abuse situations, but a lot of abuse support is helping a victim realize they need to leave a situation and that they can leave a situation.
Victims stay because they love the abuser and believe wholeheartedly that they can change or stop. So it is a sort of gentle re-programming and it almost has to be self-incepted. It’s one thing for your friend to tell you you are in an abuse dynamic, it’s another to realize it for yourself.
So if I had to distill the healing process into a ‘prescription’, it would be to:
stop the harm, validate your experience and sense of reality, start to process what happened and anything else from your history or past, work on boundaries, learn about healthy relationships and communication, and support oneself in living a life for yourself so that you can live a healthy life with others.
The model of healing that I have developed looks like this:
Crisis Phase
- harm ends/safe
- harm recognized by victim
- harm validated by others
- victims receives support
Processing Phase
- process experience
- integrate reality
- learns about/from experience
- grief model (denial, anger, bargaining, depression) to acceptance
Transition/Moving Forward Phase
- letting go
- forgiveness (optional!)
Integration Phase
- build/strengthen life/relationship skills
- better boundaries
- better emotional regulation/increase distress tolerance
- increase shame tolerance
- address co-dependency
- re-parent self
- change how you relate to others
The Sun Rises
- forgive/accept/celebrate self (let go of shame, self-blame)
- self-acceptance
- self-compassion
- self-worth
- gratitude/appreciation for self and life
- celebrate progress
- change how you relate to self
- weave the future you want into the present
You are the light at the end of the tunnel.
- shine your light on yourself, your life, the people in your life
- conscious choices about the life you want to build
Additionally, I sort of stumbled into another stage of healing, which is to have relationships with people that are ‘repairable’.
From a comment I made elsewhere:
So we’ve been learning that having boundaries is important and keeps us safe, but also we’re probably not always going to be perfect about it or we have those bad days or whatever, and so having a safe relationship with someone who extends you the benefit of the doubt means functionally having a relationship that is repairable, and one where even if we do a dumb thing that might hurt a person we care about, we aren’t really harming them.
It’s the first time in my life I’ve really ever experienced this type of dynamic in multiple relationships – where there is the safety, goodwill, trust, and space to allow repair attempts – that it’s kind of blowing my mind.
It just reminds me that we can focus so much on ourselves or the other person, but if we focus on the dynamic (and whether it is a safe, supporting, fun one) that might matter most?
I’m still formulating my thoughts around it, but it’s been -mind blown- level of living. Like in the best way. It’s not a binary safe/unsafe paradigm but a ‘safe to be repairable’ paradigm.
Hopefully this makes sense. Again, I want to emphasize that I am not a mental health professional and I have never read this in any resource, so it is important to take it with a boulder of salt and work with a therapist. I cannot recommend therapeutic support enough.