💞The Journey of Healing and Restoration through the Lens of Complex Trauma: A Survivor’s View.
When someone survives sexual abuse or trafficking, they do more than survive a dangerous situation, they survive the repeated erasure of identity, autonomy, and worth. Exploitation inflicts deep wounds: physical, emotional, and spiritual. Healing from that kind of trauma doesn’t happen overnight. It is long, slow, and repetitive. It may seem like the healing will never come, but with a foundation of faith, love, and choice, healing is possible.
Relationships lie at the heart of this healing process. Trauma, particularly sexual exploitation and trafficking, usually happens in isolation, under the control of someone who, through coercion and manipulation, strips away a person’s essence and identity. All of their potential, their goals, their identity, has been reshaped to suit the abuse of the trafficker. The only way to really bring about healing from complex trauma is by doing the opposite of what was done. In the case of abuse and trafficking survivors, whose abusers have used isolation as one of their tools for control, integration and community is not only recommended, I believe it is required.
Healing Requires a Community
Trauma distorts everything. It changes how survivors see people, love, safety, God, and themselves. It wraps abuse in confusion and false promises of care. Many survivors carry layers of complex trauma that include abuse, abandonment, exploitation, and betrayal. Most trafficking survivors experienced abuse long before they were trafficked, and they have learned to survive in chaos. This means that the damage to their identity didn’t begin with the trafficking. For those who provide care for survivors, it is crucial to go back to the first instance of abuse and begin the healing process there.
Survivors have learned to live in a state of high-alert, to please or submit, and to suppress their own needs. Healing requires the opposite experience: safe, stable people who don’t control, who don’t demand, who offer the gift of choice and truth without manipulation.
To walk with a survivor is to walk slowly, patiently, and with great humility. Healing cannot be forced, and it is never linear. But in Christ, there is redemption, and I am proof that no person is beyond restoration.
The Three-Phase Model: A Framework for Healing
This blog series will explore key trauma treatment models that can support the healing journey, starting with the Three-Phase Model, a widely respected approach for addressing complex trauma. While this model is clinical in origin, it aligns beautifully with biblical principles of care: safety, truth, mourning, restoration, and community. Let me begin by stating that I am not a licensed clinician, but I am a subject matter expert on the topic of long-term abuse, recovery, and restoration. I am not giving medical advice, nor am I advocating for treatment models or plans. I am going to highlight some of the methods used by experts who come alongside survivors and provide my own experiences as a survivor within those models. What I cover with your role below is how counselors over the years best helped me in my own journey. I also pulled on information and knowledge I have gained over several decades of education and training in survivor advocacy and trauma-focused counseling. There are three phases to this model, and three phases of the healing journey for complex trauma. I have moved through all three of the phases of both, and sharing my journey in this blog is actually part of my own continued experience as both a survivor and an advocate.
Phase One: Safety & Stabilization
What it addresses: Basic needs, emotional regulation, establishing safety. Coming from a place where my own childhood was not one of safety and stabilization, I can attest to the fact that if one does not have food on the table, or a roof over their head, or they are unsure of their own physical safety, there is little chance that they are able to think about their own mental health or more complex personal needs. The existence within the fight, flight, or freeze state has changed our ability to think logically. We are relying on instinct, and that doesn’t allow for time for deep personal reflection or self-awareness. Before a survivor can begin to understand their own situation, they need to have their most basic needs met - food, a safe place to sleep, and freedom from worrying about the next threat coming at them.
Themes: Survivors often have a history of being silenced and overpowered. This phase is about returning power to them, gently, respectfully. Most survivors have lost the ability to make their own choices. This may result in feeling overwhelmed when presented with too many choices, but it is important to slowly reintroduce them to their voice and autonomy. What to wear, or what food they want to eat is as good a place as any to begin.
The danger: Moving too quickly. Survivors may want to please you or appear “okay,” and as a caregiver, you may want to dive in quickly and “cure” them, but beneath that can be layers of chaos, shame, and intact trauma bonds. Rushing into complex trauma before building coping skills risks re-traumatization.
Your role: Offer presence, not pressure. Build trust. Teach grounding techniques. Offer truth with gentleness. Help them understand what’s happening in their body and mind, without judgment. Grounding techniques were one of the most helpful parts of this phase for me. For survivors, we need to re-tell our experiences, not relive them. Being present and in the moment with the survivor, keeping them grounded in the present, can help them go through their experience in a safe environment.
What to watch for: Dissociating. Many survivors have developed a dissociate process to help them “check out” when things are stressful or painful. Many times, it was this process that helped them survive. When I was being abused, my mind went anywhere but where I was. I was unable to remove myself physically from my situation, but I could remove myself mentally and emotionally. While this was a vital survival technique for the survivor during their abuse, it can become an avoidance technique when delving into difficult topics or when doing memory work. Care workers should not force survivors to talk about things before they are ready, but when I was in the early stages of my counseling, I would often “check out.” For years, none of the counselors acknowledged it, until someone did. I was in my late 30s when a young male counselor brought my attention to it in a way that made me realize what I was doing and why. He wasn’t aggressive, dismissive, or angry that I didn’t seem to be engaged in our session. Instead, he approached it in a way that showed me that even if I wasn’t fully paying attention, he was. “Hey Joey, I think you were somewhere else just now. What happened that made you feel the need to dissociate?” I knew I tended to zone out, but he helped me name the behavior, and together we worked through why it was necessary when I was younger, but a hinderance to my recovery now that I was no longer in a dangerous situation. Giving me the name, and reasons, and other techniques to use instead of checking out was an immense help. Many survivors don’t know why they do what they do, but helping them to understand their behavior can empower them to take a more active role in their own path to recovery and restoration.
Spiritual layer: Introduce God as safe. Not demanding. Not controlling. He is the Healer, Defender, and Restorer. I went through decades of counseling, and I suspect there are not many methods and models I did not try over the course of my life, but until God was at the center, nothing fully restored me. Sure, it gave me logical explanations, coping techniques, and rationalizations, but until I handed everything to God, there was no restoration. As a Christian, I am an advocate for the amazing and all encompassing love of God. As a caregiver, it is important not to allow your own religious beliefs to cloud the healing path of the survivor. You can share what God has done for you, but any choice to follow God must be their own.
Phase Two: Memory Work
What it addresses: Trauma processing, grief, shame, false beliefs. It empowers the voice of a silenced experience and, if done at the right pace and with the right balance, it can improve the self-efficacy of the survivor. Memory work is vital to the grief work that MUST BE part of the restorative journey for any abuse or trafficking survivor. Abuse, specifically sexual abuse and sex trafficking, results in a kind of death of who we are as people. We have been ground down, reshaped, and turned into someone else’s idea of who we are, and we don’t get input into that new identity. My abuse began when I was four years-old. At the time, I didn’t understand the depth of my loss, but as I grew, and I saw all of the things that others were experiencing for the first time, I knew I had lost part of myself. Back when it was still fashionable to wait until marriage to have sex, I was unable to participate in that because that choice had been taken away from me. The consequence was that sex wasn’t special, intimacy wasn’t kind, and I wasn’t as valuable as the other girls who had made the choice to wait. By the age of 14, I was having regular intercourse with anyone who could offer me something in return, whether it be a coach to sleep on, a meal, or even just a compliment. Sex was the currency that I used because it was all I knew. Even though I told myself that it didn’t matter, and lots of girls were having sex, I still felt that loss. Years later, through counseling, I needed to grieve for all of the things I lost. My innocence, my autonomy, my self-value and self-worth. There is a grieving process that survivors undergo, and for me, it happened in the memory work of phase two.
Themes: Survivors often feel intense shame, not just about what happened, but about their responses: freezing, returning, trauma bonds. This is where guilt must be separated from shame, and trauma responses from identity. Guilt (what we do) differs from shame (who we are). It impacts people on a personhood level, and it is subjective, and rarely rational. Again, talking about my own experience, shame was like a cancer to me. It was so deeply ingrained in who I was as a person, or non-person, that I couldn’t look in a mirror and NOT see the shame that enveloped me. It gave me a sense of “otherness.” I wasn’t like everyone else, I was different, I was less, I was damaged, broken, dirty. I didn’t choose to be abused, but it didn’t alter how I viewed myself. The nature of sexual exploitation is dark, it is secretive, and like it or not, society tends to blame the victim. Why didn’t we just leave? Why didn’t we tell someone? Why didn’t…why didn’t….why didn’t… I have fielded those questions from countless people, and from myself. The truth is, I did tell people. I told A LOT of people, but the very nature of sexual abuse makes it uncomfortable for others. Even today, in Japan, the clear preference for people is to close their eyes and pretend they don’t know what is happening around them. It takes the heat off of them, and makes it someone else’s problem. I understand this tendency, this is not a topic that is easy to discuss, and even for trained professionals, there are a lot of pitfalls and dangers tied to giving aid to someone who is in an abusive situation. I say this with a desire for every person who knows of someone who is being exploited to stand up and defend that person, but with the understanding that not everyone will.
Also addressed here: Ideas around love, sex, relationships, dating. The survivor of abuse or trafficking has a distorted view of these things because of their experiences. Gentle exploration into what genuine love is, what a healthy relationship looks like, and what true intimacy means can help survivors recognize negative behavior patterns and spot red-flags moving forward. Part of the reason memory work is so important is because it can tell the full story, and it can help spot skewed thinking that may be the result of their experiences. Even now, I’ve never shared my full story in one sitting or to one person. Most of the time I told fragments, bits and pieces, but never in its entirety. I suspect part of the reason is because it would take hours, but another reason is because I understand that it’s a lot to take in for most people. If I’m honest, I don’t like looking back at my life and how it unfolded. But memory work can help us say aloud the things we are thinking and when someone who hasn’t lived through that abuse hears the things that we say that seem to be off, they can call attention to it. I used to talk about everything that happened to me after my father left as my own choices, and my bad decisions, my mistakes. Talking to different counselors over the years, and going through the memory work helped me understand that my “crisis brain” took control at age four, leaving my “thinking brain” sitting idle. Every choice I made while holding onto my unresolved trauma was impacted by all that had happened to me. This is not to say that I do not bear responsibility for my choices, it is merely to say that I wasn’t equipped to make good choices, and I did the best I could with what I had at the time. I bring this up now because part of my distortion was thinking that the moment my sexual abuse ended, my trauma ended. It stayed with me like a shadow, influencing every choice, every decision, every move I made until I finally obtained the skills and tools I needed to put those memories into proper perspective. I understand the desire for people to blame survivors for choices they made because we also blame ourselves. The memory work revealed the distortions I had believed as truth because of my guilt and shame. At this point I also want to highlight the fact that God’s promise to forgive us and forget our sins was paramount to me being able to evaluate my past. Hebrews 8:12 tells us that he will remember our sins and lawless deeds no more. I confessed all of my sins to God, and Psalms 103:12 says that as far as the east is from the west, so far has He removed our transgressions from us. THAT promise, that grace, that forgiveness meant that I could give everything to Him, and then look at those actions from a perspective that was not tainted by guilt and shame. Once I could speak these actions aloud to someone else, they were able to point out the distortions in my thinking and explain my past to me in a way that helped me understand why I did what I did, and why it was a fairly normal reaction when viewed through the lens of complex trauma.
The danger: Jumping into storytelling without building capacity to handle the emotions. Just “telling the story” isn’t healing, understanding the story through a safe lens is. The survivor has to be the one that decides when to share, what to share, and to whom. Counselors and advocates should avoid pushing the survivor to tell their story, but should also be cognizant of the desire for the survivor to avoid examining what happened. Retelling traumatic events is never easy, so the listener should avoid making judgments, pushing, or skipping over things. When a survivor is sharing, the listener should engage, nod, ask questions, show they are invested in what is being shared. They should also understand and explain to the survivor that merely retelling their story will not bring them catharsis or healing. It requires a deeper look into how the story impacted them as it was happening, and how it impacts them now. This is a partnership that will take years, and a journey the survivor will likely be on for the rest of their lives.
Your role: Listen without shock. Normalize trauma responses. Use trauma-specific therapies when appropriate (in the upcoming blog series, I will be looking at EMDR, Somatic Experiencing, and Trauma-Focused Cognitive Behavioral Therapy and how those worked, or didn’t work, for me in my journey). Speak truth about love, sexuality, and identity in a way that restores, not shames.
Spiritual layer: Grieve with them. Help them mourn losses with God. Let them see a God who weeps with them, not one who blames them. Growing up in the Bible belt, it was easy for me to hear people condemn “easy” girls and it seemed like a lot of us were definitely headed to hell based on those overheard conversations. This really made me believe that I was too far gone for God, and He wouldn’t have much use for me. I wish they had talked more about how God loves everyone, and His promises are true regardless of our past. Never let a survivor believe that we serve a God who doesn’t love them.
Phase Three: Reintegration
What it addresses: Future identity, stability, purpose, connection, and empowerment. Moving from Victim (Stage 1), to Survivor (Stage 2), and finally, Leader (Stage 3) of this Three Phase Model is a powerful journey for any survivor to experience. It may take years, or, in my case, decades, to get to this point, but with dedication, understanding, and hard-work, this is an achievable goal that helps take a victim and turn them into a warrior.
Themes: This is where survivors begin to dream again. They set goals, return to school, build healthy relationships. But it’s also a time when shame can re-emerge: “Can I really live a normal life? Will people see me differently?” It’s difficult to escape the labels we give ourselves, especially after years of those labels being reinforced by others. There is a phrase I use often when describing my journey, and why it took me so long to get to where I am now. Comfortable misery. I was miserable, but after decades of not knowing where my next threat was coming from, at least I knew what to expect. I was comfortable in that misery, until I wasn’t. It all comes crashing down at some point, and some of us are really good at pushing it off and pushing it off, but it is always there, ready to pounce. If that trauma is not addressed in a healthy and productive way, it will destroy your joy.
Your role: Celebrate growth. Model healthy boundaries and relationships. Use a strengths-based approach, highlighting resilience, wisdom, and leadership. This was a long-awaited stage for me. I learned about it long before I arrived at the point where I was ready to fully reintegrate. My biggest takeaway from this phase, the most impactful AHA moment for me happened a couple of years ago, when I finally realized that I have grown IN SPITE OF my experiences, not BECAUSE of them. There was a time where I believed I was the person I am today BECAUSE of what happened in my past, and while there is some truth to that, taking that stance robs me of my victory. Yes, I experienced traumatic sexual abuse over the course of nearly a decade during the most formative years of my life. Yes, I went down a lot of roads that I should have just avoided, and I managed to survive those experiences as well. However, I am who I am today not because of what happened to me, but in spite of it. There is more freedom in this statement than I can properly convey in words, and I wish I were better able to hammer this home in writing, but anyone who has made it through their own journey and arrived at this place will understand the strength of those three words, “in spite of.” Your role, as a counselor or advocate, is to make sure that the survivor you are working with knows that they are their own person, and their identity does not have to be defined by their past. Reinforce to them that it is possible for someone who has survived trauma to define themselves apart from that trauma. In a way, believing that I was who I am because of the trauma was another form of control taken away from me. I didn’t choose the abuse, I managed to survive the abuse, and now I am defined as a survivor of abuse. None of that was an autonomous choice by me. Arriving at the point in my journey where I could choose my next steps was freeing. I have chosen to fight human trafficking and child exploitation, but that choice is mine. I could have also chosen to become a globe-trotting food critic, or a stay-at-home mom, or an executive at a Fortune 500 company. All survivors must know that they are free to define themselves, and they may choose to do so in a way that never acknowledges their past. If that is their choice, let them make it, and encourage them to be whomever they wish to be. For too long their choices were made for them. Do not risk re-exploiting them by pressuring them into becoming a leader or advocate because you think they should. Also, never tokenize survivors. Yes, most NPOs need to raise funds to continue their work, and what better way to do that than to show a great success story? But if you push them into the role when they do not want it, you are re-exploiting them. If you make them the face of your campaigns without consent or without offering them fair compensation, then you are re-exploiting them. Treat them as you would any other expert in the field and you will reinforce the truth that they have value and autonomy.
Spiritual layer: Affirm that they are not defined by their past, but by who God says they are. Sharing the verses I listed above may be helpful in assisting them to overcome some of the shame and guilt that is tied to their past. Equally important, however, is your ability to protect yourself along this journey. Care providers are susceptible to Vicarious Trauma. This is a dark area, and it can weigh you down spiritually. If you are experiencing disrupted spirituality, cover yourself in prayer, and make sure you practice self-care on a regular basis. Enlist a close friend as an accountability partner who can help keep you grounded. Consistent teamwork is required for everyone involved in the healing process.
