Healing Journey: Reclaiming Your Life After Abuse

In this Still Waters Podcast episode airing April 23, 2026, Teri continues a series on abuse by explaining how abuse affects people during and after the experience, impacting the body, mind, inner life, and sometimes faith. The episode describes the nervous system’s “danger volume knob,” emphasizing that survivors’ reactions make sense in unsafe environments and often persist after danger ends through fight, flight, freeze, and fawn survival responses. It explores common aftermath effects including shame, anxiety, and depression. She also addresses spiritual confusion when abuse is connected to the church, clarifying that God is not aligned with abuse. 

00:00 Welcome 

00:49 Danger Volume Knob

01:42 Survival Responses Explained

03:08 When Survival Stays On

04:05 Shame After Abuse

05:23 Anxiety and Hypervigilance

06:23 Depression and Shutdown

07:14 Faith and Spiritual Confusion

09:06 Parenting After Trauma

11:58 Healing and Boundaries

14:02 Closing Support

Contact The Still Waters Team 

www.stillwaterslife.com

Email us at:

• Julie@stillwaterslife.com
• Rufus@stillwaterslife.com
• Teri@stillwaterslife.com
• Abrielle@stillwaterslife.com

Let us help you find healing and wellness at The Still Waters.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:23

Hello everyone and welcome back to the Stillwaters Podcast. Today's podcast is airing on April 23rd, 2026. On this episode, we're going to pick back up with our series on abuse. We're going to talk about what abuse does to a person, not just in the moment that the abuse is taking place, but after the abuse has taken place, how it affects the body, the mind, and how it really can touch somebody's inner soul and sometimes even challenge their faith. And before we go any further, I just want you to hear me out that if you've experienced abuse, you're going to have reactions to that abuse. They make sense in an unsafe environment. I want you to imagine your body as like it has a volume knob for danger. At one point, something happened that required that volume to be turned all the way up as high as it could go. So your body system did exactly that. It cranked it up so you could respond, survive, and stay alert and aware. But afterward, that volume, it doesn't always turn back down. So now things that are seemingly small can feel very loud and large. And sometimes things can feel intense. And you might be wondering: like, why does everything feel like it's so over the top? Well, that's your your body, just learn to keep that volume high. So when someone experiences abuse, the body goes into survival mode. It's trying to protect you. You've probably heard of the terms fight, flight, freeze, and fawn. These are not personality traits, they're actually survival strategies. When somebody's in an abusive situation, some people fight back, uh, but some people's natural instinct is to run. Some will freeze and so they'll just go completely still and not be able to move. And some will try to keep the peace at all costs. So when this happens to someone, their body doesn't choose this consciously, it chooses what it believes will keep them the safest in that very moment. I've heard people say, Well, I didn't fight, I must have wanted that abuse to happen. Well, no, that's that's not the way it works. The body chooses the survival strategy. So if you are somebody who, for example, froze when you were in an abusive situation, that's not a weakness that you had. That's just how your body responded. Um, so this fight, flight, freeze, and fawn responses are designed to try to help protect you. But the challenge is that those responses don't always turn off when that danger ends. So later on in life, you might notice things come up. So you could feel anxious, but you don't know why. You could be overwhelmed in certain situations that seem really tiny to other people, um, but for you, they're just giant. You you might struggle to relax and feel on edge, maybe even on edge around certain people. Or maybe you go in the other direction and you just shut down completely. Your body just kind of goes offline, just like when you turn your computer off at night, it just goes offline. Okay, so that's not your overreacting, but rather your nervous system remembering what happened to you in the previously abusive situation. So, abuse doesn't just affect our physical body, but it also affects how a person feels about themselves. And one of the most common effects of abuse is shame. People that feel shame believe that something is wrong with them. And rather than thinking something happened to them, they think, nope, something's wrong with me. And that is a really, really difficult place to be. I remember a client saying it felt like I was carrying around a stain that no one else could see, but I could feel it all the time. So if you've, you know, uh have a stain on your shirt, maybe you've had dinner and you you're eating dinner and you you spill something on your shirt. Normally everybody else can see it, right? Well, this person felt like their abusive situation was that stain. But nobody, nobody knew it was there except them. They could see the stain, but other people couldn't. That's what that shame does. Kind of tricks your mind. It attaches the harm to your identity instead of placing it where it belongs, which is on the person that caused the abuse. So let's talk about anxiety because anxiety after abuse is extremely common. It can feel like your body is always waiting for something to go wrong, even when you're in a safe circumstance. A person that's dealing with anxiety really often has a detachment from reality. They overthink conversations that they have with people, they replay interactions that they have with others over and over and over in their heads. They kind of prepare for the worst-case scenarios in in life. And then another thing that's real common is they scan others for changes in that person's tone or their facial expressions. It's like the body's in constant overdrive, asking, Am I safe? Am I safe? And it and it doesn't always believe the answer. On the other side of that, sometimes the body really gets just gets exhausted, it gets tired because of depression. It doesn't get, you know, tired like I need to sleep tired, right? I need to sleep because I'm tired. It's just an inner tired where everything feels heavy. Motivation to do things is just a big struggle. Finding joy in life is extremely hard. And even the tiniest of things that need to be accomplished take great effort. Your body can't just stay on high alert forever. So depression can just shut it down. Now, another thing that's worth talking about is something that doesn't always get talked about enough. And that's how abuse can affect a person's faith. For some people, abuse creates what I'm going to call spiritual confusion, especially if the abuser used scripture and twisted it. Or maybe the abuse happened in a church setting. Or maybe spiritual language was used to silence someone or to control them. When this happens, people start asking questions like, well, where was God during all this? Why didn't he stop it? And then that can cause individuals to you know have a trouble trusting in God, and sometimes even trusting themselves. These are real questions that people ask themselves. But let's be very, very clear. God is not aligned with abuse. God is not standing next to one saying, control that person, silence them, harm them, okay? That's not in God's character. We're told in scripture that God is near the brokenhearted. He's not far from a person who suffered from abuse. He's not, he's not disappointed in that person because that abuse happened, but he's near to that person. So sometimes healing spiritually begins by separating who God actually is from what was done, especially if it was done in supposedly in his name. And those are not the same things. Okay, now I want to talk about something that a lot of parents deal with. Parenting after experiencing abuse can look different than the parenting of a person who was not abused. Some parents that are survivors become very, very protective of their children, always scanning, watching, trying to prevent anything from ever happening to their child. Because they know what it feels like to have been abused, and they they want to do the right thing and protect their child. Other parents they may get overwhelmed and they don't fully trust their own instincts or they question themselves constantly. Parents just want to keep their kids safe, but they don't even know what safe looks like. And that too is a difficult place to be. When this type of fear shows up, you might notice things like feeling uneasy about other adults that your child is around, or being afraid to let your child go places, over-explaining safety, or you could go to the opposite end by avoiding conversation altogether because it feels too close. Now, none of this means that you're a bad parent, it just means that once again, as a survivor of abuse, your body remembers what it didn't get protected from. It's like when someone has a car accident. I remember my husband had a bad car accident a long time ago, actually. A garbage truck pulled out in front of him and he couldn't stop his car, and so it, you know, fast enough, so it just, you know, crushed his car. And he was in it. So he spent a few days in the hospital and then thankfully he recovered from his injuries. But after that accident, he rarely drove by that accident site anymore when he was on his way to work. Because his body and his nervous system remembered that trauma that took place at that car accident site. Your body always remembers trauma. So going back to parenting, parenting after trauma can be very challenging. You're doing it, you're parenting the best you can, but the memories of that trauma impact how you parent. Just like my husband could not return to that site because he didn't feel safe, a parent will control their parenting, or their parenting will be influenced because of the trauma that they experienced. Okay, I want to come back to something that I believe I said at the beginning of the episode. And it's because this is important. Your reactions make sense in unsafe environments. Even if they feel inconvenient, even if you wish they were different or other and other people don't understand them, they make sense because your body learned something real. But you know what? Even though that happened, healing is possible. That abusive situation that you endured isn't the end of your story. Healing doesn't mean pretending that the past did not happen, but rather it means that the past doesn't control every part of your present anymore. It involves learning to notice your body without being critical of how your body responds. It involves understanding your triggers and what they are and when they're happening and how you're dealing with them. Healing involves setting boundaries to protect yourself. Healing involves talking with a trauma-informed counselor or coach, not just a good friend that can mentor you. And that's incredibly important for survivors of abuse to remember. If this episode stirred something in you, let's take a moment to slow down. Do some breathing, ground yourself, put your feet on the floor, recognize what your current reality, and don't go back to where you were. Abuse changes people. There's no way around that. But it doesn't define the end of anyone's story. Your body learned how to survive, and with time, support, and the proper care, it can also learn how to feel safe again. And you don't have to rush that process and you don't have to do it alone. Thank you for listening to this episode of our series on abuse. I know it may have been difficult for some of you. If you need help processing an abusive situation that you've experienced, please reach out to our team. Or maybe you know someone who could benefit by hearing this podcast. Share it with them and encourage them to reach out to our team. We're ready and willing and equipped to help people who've been in abusive situations. Until next time, may you find healing and wellness at the Still Waters.