The wound is the place where light enters you.
                    - Rumi

Have you ever felt so frustrated in the helping process you wanted to take over? Do you want to make a difference, but feel helpless at times?

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Surviving an abusive, coercive and controlling relationship is complex, confusing, extremely isolating, and can be terrifying at times for victims and their families and communities.  For those advocates and counselors helping people in abusive, controlling relationships, it is easy to lose your way, suffer from burnout, compassion fatigue and vicarious trauma, and experience times of helplessness and hopelessness, as well as frustration and anger from the great injustices and fear along the way.  Maintaining hope is crucial, as well as empathy, self-compassion, self-care,  staying centered, and recognizing what is normal in the process of healing and helping. We need to understand what healing looks like for survivors and how to effectively help along the way while creating conditions where survivors can best feel empowered. We also must pay attention to how we are being impacted by this work along the way,  and how to best sustain ourselves so we can continue to help.

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The Stages of Healing/Recovery of the Lost Self © 1994, 2006, 2018 is a conceptual model, and framework to guide the healing process for victims of domestic violence, and the key foundational concepts that assist organizations, helpers and survivors break the cycle of violence and help victims recover their sense of self. While every journey is unique the Stages recognizes some key milestones in healing, which starts long before a survivor has left the relationship.

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The Stages of Healing/Recovery of Lost Self Model was developed in 1994 by Rene Renick to help the healthcare community better understand the internal world of survivors so they could help and intervene more effectively. She used her learning from her clinical work with women in an outreach setting to identify the common milestones victims/survivors of domestic violence experienced using their voices and language to tell the story.  The Stages of Healing is unique in that it was developed organically from women's voices to capture a victim’s experience and the impact of that experience on her life.  I had the honor of working with Rene in 2006 to further develop the Stages of Healing Model and accessory tools for helpers, as well as research the model for validity and reliability, which was established in 2011.

 

The concept of losing one's sense of self is fairly universal to people who experience complex relational trauma, and individuation traumas, such as domestic violence. The process of recovering one’s sense of self, however, is complex, wrought with internal and external barriers, forwards and backwards movement, and can be very long and dangerous along the way. Helpers and survivors can easily get discouraged and frustrated in the process. We as helpers must stay vigilant and dedicated to understanding a survivor’s dilemma and be the holders of hope when survivors feel like giving up the fight, or feel they have no more options. The Stages of Healing aims to help others more clearly see a path for effective intervention, as well as that of hope, despite harrowing circumstances. The Stages can help us anchor to what is normal and expected for the healing process and maintain empathy when we get weary. Because the majority of domestic happens behind closed doors, we don’t often see what a survivor is up against, and it is easy for helpers to fall prey to myths perpetuated by the larger community and society, which can lead to blaming the victim, and losing touch with what survivors need. It can cause us to question why a victim "stays", rather than shifting the focus to why abusive partners continue to control and abuse their partners.

 

Finally, the Stages reminds us of the importance of building safe, trusting relationships, providing access to critical resources, such as housing, childcare, employment and health/mental healthcare, keeping children safe with their non-abusive caregiver, holding the abuser accountable and working to improve the systems that interact with victims in order to create the conditions where victims/survivors and their children can heal and thrive.