When Leaving Does Not End the Abuse: Trauma, Neurodiversity and the Cost of Silence
One of the most dangerous misconceptions about domestic abuse is that leaving ends the risk.
For many victims, leaving is not the end of the abuse. It is the beginning of a different form of it.
The physical proximity may stop. The home may change. Legal processes may begin. Police may become involved. But control can continue through other routes: money, debt, data, children, reputation, paperwork, systems, silence, delay and disbelief.
That is why post-separation abuse must be understood properly.
The Domestic Abuse Act 2021 recognises that abuse is not limited to physical harm. It includes economic abuse, controlling or coercive behaviour, emotional abuse and psychological abuse where people are personally connected. Economic abuse can include behaviour that affects a person’s ability to acquire, use or maintain money, property, goods or services.
That matters because victims have been saying this for years.
Abuse can look like a threat. It can also look like a debt. A message. A form. A password alert. A contact detail used without consent. A system that expects the victim to prove, again, why they are concerned.
The impact is not “just admin”. It is safety. It is housing. It is credit. It is parenting. It is employment. It is sleep. It is the constant mental load of checking whether something new is innocent, mistaken, malicious or dangerous.
Many victims do not stay silent because they have nothing to say.
They stay silent because speaking previously resulted in disbelief, minimisation, retraumatisation, procedural exhaustion, or fear that their trauma responses will be used against them.
The question is not always:
“Why didn’t they report?”
Sometimes it is:
“What happened when they did?”
Victim blaming does not always arrive as open hostility. Sometimes it comes through tone, delay, minimisation, poor recording, disbelief, or a failure to join the dots. The victim is left feeling they must present perfectly to be believed: calm enough to be credible, detailed enough to be taken seriously, but not so detailed that they are labelled obsessive.
For neurodivergent victims, this can become even harder.
ADHD, autism, dyslexia, dyspraxia, trauma responses and PTSD can affect processing, recall, communication, emotional regulation and the ability to engage with authority under stress.
Neurodivergent communication styles can be misread within safeguarding and criminal justice settings.
Information dumping may be interpreted as inconsistency. Precision may be labelled fixation. A need for certainty may be mistaken for challenge. Written communication needs may be misunderstood as avoidance.
Without trauma-informed and neurodiversity-informed practice, reasonable adjustments risk being treated as behavioural concerns rather than accessibility needs.
That distinction matters.
A trauma response is not a credibility flaw. A need for written records is not non-cooperation. Detailed documentation is not obsession. Hypervigilance is not hysteria.
Across healthcare, safeguarding and policing, trauma-informed practice is not simply about kindness. It is about safety, accessibility, accurate assessment and reducing avoidable harm.
When professionals misunderstand trauma or neurodivergence, the consequences are not theoretical. They affect credibility assessments, safeguarding responses, engagement, trust and outcomes.
The Victims’ Code requires victims to be treated with respect, dignity, sensitivity, compassion and courtesy. The Equality Act 2010 requires reasonable adjustments where a person is disabled. The College of Policing recognises the importance of risk assessment, safeguarding and victim-focused practice in domestic abuse.
These standards matter most when a victim is distressed, neurodivergent, traumatised or frightened of not being believed.
There is a particular harm when PTSD caused or worsened by abuse, reporting, or system involvement is then treated as a reason to doubt the victim.
That is how people become silent.
Not because nothing happened.
But because speaking up has already cost too much.
Silence is dangerous. It allows patterns to continue unchecked. It leaves victims managing risk alone. It protects poor practice, whether by individuals or institutions. It teaches survivors that the safest thing to do is say nothing, document nothing, challenge nothing.
That cannot be the standard.
Victims should be able to report concerns without being punished for the effects of what they have survived. They should be able to ask for reasonable adjustments without being treated as difficult. They should be able to request email communication, accurate records and trauma-informed handling without that being reframed as unreasonable.
Leaving takes courage.
Reporting takes courage.
Continuing to speak when systems have failed to listen takes something beyond courage. It takes the refusal to let fear become policy.
Post-separation abuse is real. Economic abuse is real. Neurodivergent victims deserve to be understood. PTSD should never be weaponised against the person living with it.
Leaving should not mean carrying lifelong responsibility for proving risk alone.
Trauma should not become evidence against the person carrying it.
Neurodivergence should not reduce access to protection.
And no victim should ever be made to believe that silence is safer than seeking help.
Sometimes healing does not look like meditation apps, neat routines, or doing everything the “right” way.
Sometimes it looks like sitting on the floor at 11 o’clock at night beside a motorbike with the seat off, staring at a fuse box because your mind will not settle until you know whether it is the battery, the fuse, or just another thing that has fallen onto your shoulders to sort out alone.
Tonight was hard.
I had already spent time riding earlier because I needed to clear my head. Riding has always done that for me. I grew up on the back of a bike. I have ridden on and off for over ten years now.
Almost two years ago, I completed my CBT for the third time. This time, I knew I was not going to let anyone take that part of me away again.
Friends, family, and colleagues could not always understand why I would choose to ride. What they did not realise was that, at that time, I was living through things I could barely articulate. Much of it was happening in silence.
They also did not realise that riding was one of the only things that made my whole body relax.
At the time, I did not understand dissociation. I did not have the words for it. I only knew that I had shut down so hard in order to survive that feeling anything at all had become difficult.
But on a bike, I could feel.
It was never about chasing danger. It was about finding a place where my body finally stopped bracing for it. For a while, the bike was the only place where I was not waiting for the next thing to happen.
I was just there.
Present.
Awake.
Alive.
I drove to Manchester for my test, and one of the instructors that day spoke openly about his own PTSD after serving in the army, and how riding helped him. I heard him then, but I did not fully understand it.
It took me a year.
Now I do.
He had no idea what I was living through. He had no idea that six months later, I would be diagnosed with PTSD too. But his honesty stayed with me. If I ever saw him again, I would want to thank him, because sometimes people say things without realising they have given someone else language for their own survival.
For some people, motorbikes will never make sense. In healthcare especially, there can be blunt assumptions about riders and risk. But the reality is more complicated than that.
Risk is subjective.
People drive cars recklessly every day. People drink. People use drugs. Chronic stress damages bodies quietly over years. Trauma changes the way people react to uncertainty, silence, fear, and pressure.
For me, a few hours on a bike can help calm the stress responses that build up over time.
That matters.
Self-care matters. Feeling free matters. Sometimes freedom is simply a helmet, an engine, and a stretch of road where nobody is asking anything of you for a little while.
When the battery was flat tonight, it threw me more than it probably should have.
Not just because my plans for tomorrow changed, but because it triggered that familiar feeling that everything ultimately falls back onto me. So when a colleague messaged, I sent her a photo of the fuse box I was sat tinkering with, trying to rule out every possibility before the replacement battery arrives in the morning.
Logically, I knew it could wait.
Emotionally, I could not switch off until I had checked everything.
Trauma can do that. When you have spent years anticipating the next crisis, the next escalation, or the next consequence, it changes how you process your own needs.
You stop asking for help.
You stop explaining pain.
You just keep functioning.
My best friend lives miles away, but she always knows when something is wrong because I go quiet. I shut off. I disappear into doing. Into fixing. Into surviving. Into movement.
That was me tonight.
The reality is that there has never really been anyone coming to save me. I learned that a long time ago.
There is no emergency contact for emotional exhaustion. In reality, I do not even have an emergency contact listed anywhere. No obvious person to name. No automatic safety net. No rescue team arriving when life becomes too heavy.
Most of the time, I am the person people call when they need help.
And honestly, I do not resent that.
Caring for others is part of who I am. It is woven into both my personal life and my professional identity. Supporting people matters to me deeply.
But some nights I understand why others want to be in a relationship, and why they need that side of life. Not to be rescued. Not because they are weak. But because steady, practical, human support matters. Someone safe to call. Someone who notices when you go quiet. Someone who understands that even capable people get tired.
For me, that still feels complicated. When you have been through enough, closeness can feel less like comfort and more like risk. But I understand why people still want that connection. It is not about needing to be saved. Sometimes it is simply about not having to carry everything alone.
Social media is full of messages about independence. About not needing anyone. About strength meaning self-sufficiency.
But I do not think most people genuinely want to do life entirely alone.
I think many of us simply adapt to the absence of reliable support. We become resilient because we had no alternative. We become independent because dependence was unsafe. We learn to survive because survival was required.
And eventually people mistake survival for not needing connection.
Tonight reminded me that healing is rarely neat.
Sometimes it is deep conversations and therapy sessions.
Sometimes it is practical problem-solving.
Sometimes it is a fuse box under a motorbike seat at 11PM because your mind needs certainty before it can rest.
Maybe that is why we need to talk more honestly about what coping really looks like. Not the polished version. Not the inspirational quote version. The real version. The late-night, practical, messy, human version.
Because sometimes the people who look the most capable are the ones quietly holding everything together with no emergency contact, no safety net, and no room to fall apart.
And maybe that deserves a little more understanding too.
The events that unfolded were directly linked to the abuse my children lived through. I will not expand on those details publicly because some things belong to them, not the internet. Their story is not mine to expose. My role is to protect it, even while telling the truth about what trauma leaves behind.
Friday also marked the anniversary of my ex’s arrest. For a short time, I believed that moment meant safety had finally arrived. The reality that followed was very different. What came afterwards exposed my children and family to risks I never thought possible, not only through one individual, but through systems and institutions that were supposed to protect us.
This weekend was not only about an anniversary.
It was about what resurfaced because of it.
Trauma does not disappear because time passes. It shows up in behaviours, emotions, reactions, fear, anger and overwhelm. Especially in children.
And when it does, the hardest reality is not just managing the moment. It is knowing that, when everything falls apart, me and the kids only truly have me.
There is no reliable safety net arriving. Not in the way people imagine. Not consistently. Not when the damage has already been done and the consequences are still living inside my children.
That is why I went to the rocks.
Not because I had spare time. Not because it was scenic. Because my body knew I needed to reset before I broke under the weight of it.
People often think trauma lives in memory alone. It does not.
The body remembers what the mind tries to forget.
Certain dates pull you backwards. Certain places do too. Sometimes it arrives without warning, tightness in your chest, pressure in your throat, a sudden need to move, drive, breathe, or escape. For years, I did not understand why I instinctively sought out open spaces, music, nature, long drives or silence.
Now I do.
This morning, I drove the children to school and then headed to the rocks, the same place I used to go after leaving. I remember the first few times I went there. I cried most of the drive. At the time, I did not understand why being there mattered so much.
Looking back, I can see that my body was searching for regulation before my mind had fully processed what had happened.
People can dismiss walking, music, fresh air, the sea, nature, or grounding techniques as “airy-fairy”. They are not. The nervous system carries trauma. It also recognises safety, rhythm, space and movement before we always have the words for why they help.
Trauma changes the way you live. I have certain clothes I wear because they make me feel safer. Certain items I keep with me. Certain routines, places and songs that act as anchors. They may look insignificant to anyone else, but to a traumatised nervous system, they are reminders that I have survived before and can survive again.
Today I walked to the top, somewhere I had not climbed since carrying my then three-year-old on my back with the dog beside me.
It was almost comical at times. I avoided the proper path and ended up climbing through brambles instead. At one point, I was practically on my hands and knees dragging myself up the final stretch just to reach the spot I needed to get to.
And the dog never left my side.
She kept stopping and looking back to check where I was. No formal training. No commands. Just instinctively staying close while I crawled through mud, brambles and exhaustion towards somewhere my body had decided mattered.
When I finally got there, I sat.
Headphones on. Music playing. Breathing.
For the first time in a while, everything went quiet.
Walking back down, I did not want to leave. I circled for a while, climbed back through the brambles again, and delayed going home because something about being there made me feel human again.
Maybe that is what healing sometimes is.
Not fixing everything.
Not pretending it never happened.
Just finding a moment where your nervous system stops fighting long enough to let you breathe.
There is a version of me that existed before all of this, and I know now I will never fully be that person again. For a long time, that grief consumed me. I thought being broken meant I had lost myself forever.
But being broken also gave me understanding.
It changed the way I see pain in other people. It taught me to recognise what fear, exhaustion and trauma can look like beneath behaviour. It changed the way I advocate, the way I work, the way I parent, and the way I see injustice.
When you have lived through institutional failure, coercive control and fear, you begin to understand how many people are silently carrying things nobody else can see.
I have spent much of my life giving other people what I never had myself, support, compassion, protection and reassurance. Somewhere along the way, I forgot that self-care is not selfish.
It is necessary.
Because school runs still happen. GCSEs still happen. Parenting still happens. Life still continues.
Today, my 15-year-old came home after his first GCSE exam.
I asked him how it went.
He shrugged and said he did not even understand the question.
And I just told him, “You’re fine, as long as you tried your best.”
Because honestly, after everything he went through last year, I did not know whether he would emotionally make it to this point. Trauma comes out in children in ways people often fail to recognise. Attendance can be resilience. Showing up can be courage. Sitting an exam can be survival.
So I am proud of him.
Not because of grades.
Not because of results.
Because he showed up.
Because despite everything, he walked through those school gates and sat that exam.
Sometimes healing looks like climbing through brambles to sit on the rocks with your headphones on because your body needs reminding that you survived.
Sometimes resilience looks like a child walking into a GCSE exam after a year that nearly broke him.
And sometimes the strongest thing a person can do is keep showing up for their children, while finally learning to show up for themselves too.
Even when healing means accepting that the people and systems you believed would stand beside you were never really there.
Monday, 21 April 2026 · Two Years On · reconstructed from entries dated 11 and 15 August 2024
When Rest Still Does Not Feel Safe
Two Years On, reconstructed from entries dated 11 and 15 August 2024
This post brings together entries originally written on Sunday 11 August 2024 and Thursday 15 August 2024.
It has been rewritten and reshaped for NAAVoices as part of moving my older writing onto this platform. Some lines remain close to the language of those days because the immediacy matters. Others are written with the clarity that only distance gives.
Together, they tell the fuller truth of what those days did to me, and what I understand now about trauma, re-traumatisation, and the damage caused when systems become part of the harm.
On Privacy, and Not Being Fragile
I never hid what happened.
What I chose not to do was tell everyone.
For the most part, I kept what I was living through private. That decision was deliberate. It was not shame. It was not denial. It was not fear of judgement.
It was autonomy.
I told only a very small number of people at work. People I trusted deeply. People who were close enough to know something was wrong, even if they did not know everything.
Even they only knew enough.
I imagine more than half of my colleagues still do not know what I have lived through. That has always been intentional. I kept my professional life and my private life as separate as I could, not because I was hiding, but because I needed some balance. Some safety. Some part of me that was not completely swallowed by trauma.
Privacy is not secrecy.
It is not concealment.
And it is not shameful.
Sometimes that boundary exists because I do not want pity. Sometimes it exists because I cannot bear the well-meaning but exhausting question, “Are you okay?”
I know people ask it kindly. I know it usually comes from care. But when you are holding yourself together with everything you have, even being asked to assess your own pain can feel like one demand too many.
I was not fragile.
I was functioning.
I was working, parenting, showing up, answering messages, doing what needed to be done. I was also living with something complex, ongoing and largely invisible.
PTSD did not make me weak. If anything, it revealed a level of resilience I did not know I had. It also gave me a depth of understanding that no theory, no training and no professional language alone could ever fully give.
Some things are learned academically.
Some things are learned by surviving them.
Injury, Not Weakness
Looking back now, I can see something much more clearly than I could at the time.
What happened to my mental health was not random. It was not an overreaction. It was not weakness. It was not some hidden flaw in me suddenly surfacing.
It was injury.
And it was cumulative.
Domestic abuse caused the first damage. Police failures deepened it. Re-traumatisation compounded it. Family court prolonged it.
Every incident added something. Every delay took something. Every forced retelling left another mark.
I understand now why so many victims, and so many women in particular, end up being judged for their mental health, when what people are often seeing is the consequence of what was done to them.
The panic. The sleeplessness. The fear. The emotional shutdown. The hypervigilance. The tears. The inability to settle. The inability to rest.
These things do not appear out of nowhere.
They are the visible aftermath of prolonged harm.
What broke in me was not caused by one email, one conversation or one bad week.
But there were two days in August 2024 that made the damage impossible to ignore.
When the System Becomes the Trigger
The relationship ended.
The harm did not.
It simply changed shape.
It moved through police contact. Through delay. Through safeguarding failures. Through being forced to explain the same things to new people over and over again. Through emails and updates that reopened what should never have still been live.
Sometimes the abuse ends in one form and continues in another.
Sometimes the system becomes part of the trauma too.
That was what I was only just beginning to understand in August 2024.
People often ask whether PTSD or C-PTSD means you cannot cope with stress. The truth is more complicated than that.
Many people with trauma cope incredibly well under pressure. We plan ahead. We stay alert. We anticipate problems. We become responsible to a fault. We keep going because there is no other option.
The problem is not always the crisis itself.
The problem is what happens afterwards.
PTSD is not simply about stress. It is about a nervous system that no longer recognises safety properly. Even when the original danger is no longer physically present, the body does not always believe it.
If something echoes the original trauma closely enough, a person, a place, an email, a conversation, a building, a system, the body reacts as though the danger is happening again.
That is why triggers are so often misunderstood.
They are not always dramatic. They are not always like the flashbacks people imagine from films. Often they are quieter. Stranger. More physical. More cognitive. More exhausting.
They can look like no sleep. Racing thoughts. Compulsive planning. Dread. Emotional numbness. Mistrust. Hyper-alertness. Feeling unable to settle even when you are physically still.
That was what it looked like for me.
And one of my strongest triggers had become police contact.
Not because every officer was the same.
Not because every conversation was harmful.
But because police contact had come to represent something much bigger than individual people. It had come to represent failed protection, unanswered disclosures, safeguarding failures, lost time, repeated harm and the unbearable knowledge that I had asked for help and had not been protected when it mattered most.
Sunday 11 August 2024, 02:39
The Night I Broke
The first entry was written in the early hours of Sunday 11 August 2024, at 02:39.
It began in the bluntest possible way.
That was the day I broke.
Even now, I think that was accurate.
What broke me was not simply the email itself. It was what it reopened.
That night, a police email tipped everything sideways. On paper, it was an update. In reality, it dragged me straight back into months of unresolved trauma.
I had been absorbing it for months. I had been taking it. I had been keeping it contained.
Since January, I had held off taking the handling of the case outside official channels. I had kept hoping my voice would be heard within the system. I had kept hoping justice would come the way it should have.
I kept wanting to believe it was one officer. One failure. One catastrophic lapse.
Not something wider.
Not something more systemic.
Not something that would keep reaching into my life month after month.
The new officer who emailed me was kind. That matters. She had not caused the life I had endured over those previous months. She was not the one who failed to act when it mattered.
What I could not bear was this: she was updating me with information I had already received months earlier from a different set of officers.
In an instant, I was back in December.
That was the point at which I broke, and others recognised I needed help before it escalated.
Not because one email caused everything.
Because it landed on top of months of unresolved harm, delay, repetition and re-traumatisation.
By then, it had been nine months since I disclosed.
Nine months.
Long enough for a life to fracture. Long enough for trauma to settle in the body. Long enough for people around you to start assuming things must surely be improving, when the reality is that process is still dragging you backwards.
It should have been dealt with much earlier.
I should have been in recovery by then.
I should have been able to begin counselling. I should have been able to work properly with support services and start processing what had happened to me.
Instead, there was more pressure. More delay. More repetition.
More harm, dressed up as procedure.
Somewhere in the middle of it, I lost the one person in the system who had made me feel that the abuse I had survived actually mattered.
That loss is difficult to explain if you have not lived through something similar. Sometimes, when trust in a system is almost gone, one safe professional becomes an anchor.
Not because they fix it.
Not because they save you.
But because they make the reality of what happened feel seen.
Losing that kind of anchor, when everything else is already unstable, can feel devastating.
The Email to BBC Watchdog
That night, I was sick of being re-traumatised.
Sick of the updates. Sick of being dragged back. Sick of weighing, every single time, what it would cost other people if I stopped keeping all of it quiet.
Sick of silence starting to feel less like dignity and more like containment.
That was the night I emailed BBC Watchdog and Panorama.
I did not want to be the person sending that email.
I had spent months trying to protect my privacy, my profession, my colleagues and the quieter corners of my life. I had not wanted to make everything public. I had not wanted to become another woman shouting because the proper channels had failed her.
But there comes a point when silence stops functioning as a boundary and becomes another room the harm is happening inside.
That was the night I reached that point.
Forty-Eight Hours Awake
By then, I had been awake for 48 hours.
I remained awake throughout the entire night.
There is a particular kind of exhaustion that comes with trauma-triggered sleeplessness, and it is difficult to explain to someone who has not felt it.
It is not ordinary tiredness. It is not just feeling drained after a bad night.
It is deeper than that.
Stranger than that.
Your body is present but not fully yours. Your skin can feel too tight or too distant. Your thoughts slow down and race at the same time. Everything feels heavy and unreal all at once.
Small decisions become enormous. Replying to a message can feel impossible. Deciding what to eat can feel absurdly hard. Time goes strange. Your emotions feel both raw and numbed out.
And still, life keeps going.
Children still need feeding. The dog still needs walking. The washing still needs hanging out. Messages still arrive. Appointments still happen.
The world keeps asking ordinary things of a body that has not rested in days.
Sunday 11 August 2024, 22:32
What the Body Was Doing
The second entry was written later the same day, on Sunday 11 August at 22:32.
That matters, because it shows how quickly the raw breaking point became a question about trauma, triggers and what all of this was actually doing to me.
By that point, the question was no longer only, why has this happened?
It had become, what is this doing to me?
The answer was in my body.
That week looked like this:
Sunday night: no sleep. Monday night: asleep around 3am. Tuesday night: slept. Wednesday night: asleep around 1am. Thursday night: an email from a former investigating officer, no sleep. Friday: crisis calls with Victim Support, CMHT and the British Legion. Friday night: asleep around 4am, awake by 8am. Saturday night: another email from the new investigating officer, no sleep.
Three full nights without sleep in seven days.
Not because I could not cope with ordinary life. Not because I was weak. Not because I was falling apart for no reason.
Because my nervous system did not perceive safety.
That distinction matters more than it sounds.
Stress was not the real issue.
Safety was.
The Splinter
There was another thought going round and round in my head during that time.
My ex was placed on bail within two months, once the case reached someone who treated it seriously.
Two months.
That fact sat in me like a splinter.
Because if that level of action was possible within two months once it reached the right hands, it is impossible not to ask why it was not possible earlier.
Why not in January?
Why not sooner?
Why only after more damage had already been done?
At the time, I was carrying concerns I could not yet prove. I want to be careful about that, because hindsight and evidence are not the same thing as fear in the middle of trauma.
I also want to be honest.
I was not the only person asking those questions.
My IDVA raised separate concerns from her own professional position. It was not just me lying awake imagining things. There were reasons those questions existed.
That matters, because survivors are so often encouraged not to trust their own reading of patterns.
We are encouraged to minimise. To self-correct. To avoid sounding difficult. To avoid sounding paranoid. To wait quietly until the pattern becomes undeniable.
Often, the person living inside the pattern sees it first.
Professionals who listen carefully may see it second.
Institutions, if they see it at all, often see it last.
“Every Avenue Possible”
I was told that the investigation into the abuse of my children had “followed every avenue possible.”
That phrase has stayed with me.
Because what it meant in practice did not match what it sounded like.
DC Rhian Davies, the children’s investigating officer from PVP, spoke to my children. My ex was spoken to.
No one else who had been in our home was approached.
No witnesses. No friends. No one who had seen. No one who had heard. No one who could have spoken to what life was actually like.
That is not what “every avenue” sounds like to me.
By the time I fully understood how limited that investigation had been, I had run out of fight. Trauma does not just wound. It depletes.
There comes a point where even pushing back against obvious failures requires energy you no longer have.
What made it worse was the familiar feeling that I was facing all of it alone again.
Thursday 15 August 2024
The Day Someone Finally Acted
The third entry was written on Thursday 15 August at 16:02, after the first urgent contact with mental health services had happened.
That was the point where the experience stopped being only about collapse and started becoming about recognition.
The day after that sleepless night, I spoke to Jackie in Professional Standards and to a woman from the Royal British Legion who had been supporting me and my children.
That second conversation mattered.
She could hear the level of distress I was in. She did not minimise it. She did not leave me to explain it over and over. She did not ask me to make my pain tidier before acting.
She heard it.
And she acted.
She contacted CMHT directly on my behalf.
That intervention changed everything. It also exposed one of the hardest truths in all of this.
It took my service history, my link to the forces, for someone to step in with the urgency the situation had needed for a long time.
That is not easy to admit, because gratitude sits alongside discomfort there.
I am deeply grateful to her. I will always be grateful that she heard what others had not heard and acted when I no longer had the strength to keep turning my distress into words people might take seriously.
But gratitude does not erase the inequity.
Support came when the right person made the right call.
Need alone should have been enough.
First Mental Health Contact in 34 Years
Within a few weeks, I had been seen by CMHT.
That marked the first contact with any mental health service in 34 years of my life.
That fact matters more than I can easily explain.
I had never previously needed psychiatric care. I had never needed crisis intervention. I had never needed long-term mental health support.
I had worked, parented, carried responsibility, managed pressure and kept going without any of it.
So when I reached CMHT, it was not evidence of some long-standing inability to cope.
It was evidence of sustained trauma.
It was evidence of cumulative harm.
Even getting to that appointment was difficult.
I had to walk past the police building connected to so much of the harm just to reach the service meant to help me. Once I was near it, memories came back in waves. Sitting in the car with distressed children, waiting. Holding everything together while the person responsible seemed able to move through systems with ease.
By the time I was in the waiting room, I struggled to articulate how I felt.
That is one of the cruellest parts of finally getting support after a long period of survival. People imagine that when help appears, words become easy.
They do not.
Years of emotional suppression do not dissolve just because a room is safe enough for them.
The practitioner was visibly shocked by the scale of the police failures.
That was validating.
It was also painful.
Because it reinforced what I had already begun to understand.
I was not recovering from something that had ended.
I was still living it.
Not Depression
I was very clear throughout that appointment.
I was not clinically depressed.
I was experiencing low mood when triggered, yes. Exhaustion. Fear. Emotional shutdown. Hypervigilance. Panic. Sleep deprivation. The strange deadness that follows prolonged alertness.
That is not the same as depression.
I knew that if the wrong label was attached to what I was living through, the real issue risked being missed all over again.
Context mattered.
This was not a long-standing mental health problem appearing out of nowhere. This was a nervous system responding exactly as expected to unresolved threat.
That is part of what so many victims are up against.
Once you become visibly unwell after prolonged harm, the focus can shift from what happened to you to how you are presenting now.
The system starts responding to the symptoms and forgetting the cause.
You become anxious. Too emotional. Not coping. Difficult.
And the original injury drifts into the background.
That is not understanding.
That is misreading harm.
I was not seeking a label.
I was seeking stabilisation while external threats were still active.
Why EMDR Had to Wait
We discussed trauma-focused therapies, including EMDR.
I was explicitly told that EMDR could not begin while the police investigation remained ongoing. That was clinically appropriate.
People sometimes interpret pauses in trauma therapy as avoidance. But trauma processing cannot be done properly while the body still believes the danger is live.
It requires at least some baseline sense of safety.
If investigations are ongoing, if legal processes remain unresolved, if emails and updates keep reopening the wound, that safety does not really exist.
Processing trauma while still inside the conditions that keep recreating it can destabilise rather than help.
That is not avoidance.
That is correct timing.
Immediate Regulation
The focus had to be on immediate regulation instead.
Medication was discussed not as a long-term answer, but as temporary stabilising support for acute symptoms such as insomnia and heightened arousal.
Prolonged sleep deprivation is not just unpleasant. It is risky. After enough nights without sleep, emotional regulation drops, cognitive function suffers, and physical resilience starts to fray.
In that context, support is not about dependency.
It is about harm reduction.
It is about getting someone through a period their body should never have been pushed into in the first place.
We also spoke about grounding techniques, including EFT.
Afterwards, I realised I had been instinctively tapping my collarbone during acute stress long before I knew it had a name.
That recognition stayed with me.
There was something strangely moving about realising my body had been trying, quietly, to regulate itself even when I felt furthest from myself.
EFT is not a cure. It is not enough on its own. But sometimes the smallest acts of regulation matter, because they remind you your body has not completely abandoned you, even when everything else feels unsafe.
Moral Injury
There was another dimension to all of this that I could not fully name at the time, but which makes complete sense to me now.
Moral injury.
The damage was not rooted only in the abuse itself. It was also rooted in the repeated institutional failures that followed. Failures that sat in direct conflict with the professional, ethical and safeguarding standards I work within every day in my own role.
When systems tasked with protection become sources of harm, the injury is not only personal.
It becomes institutional.
Something deeper gets damaged. Not just trust in people, but trust in what the system is supposed to mean.
That is part of why police contact became so triggering. It was not only about the original abuse. It was also about the collision between what should have happened and what did happen.
It was about knowing, professionally and morally, that this should not have unfolded the way it did.
That kind of rupture leaves its own wound.
Why Survivors Get Judged for Their Mental Health
Looking back now, I can see why so many victims end up being judged for their mental health.
Not because they are inherently unwell.
Not because they are weak.
Not because they are unstable in any simple sense.
Because abuse causes damage, and systems often respond badly to the damage they helped deepen.
In my case, domestic abuse caused the initial injury. Police failures compounded it. Re-traumatisation intensified it. Family court prolonged it.
Once that damage became visible, there was a terrible risk that I became the problem in the eyes of others.
My exhaustion could be scrutinised. My distress could be noted. My anxiety documented. My sleep loss pathologised. My attempts to explain treated as too much.
Instead of asking, “What has happened to her?” the world starts asking, “What is wrong with her?”
That is the cruelty of it.
So when I look back on those days now, I do not see weakness.
I see injury.
I see the predictable outcome of cumulative trauma with nowhere safe to settle.
It was not an inability to cope with everyday stress. It was not a long-standing mental health condition waiting to surface. It was not resistance to treatment. It was not depression wearing the wrong name.
It was a body that had been asked to survive too much for too long.
What broke in me was not resilience.
It was the illusion that I could keep carrying all of it and remain untouched by it.
When Will Rest Feel Safe Again?
In the end, the question underneath all of it was not, can I cope?
I had coped.
For months. For years, in many ways.
Through abuse. Through police failures. Through fear. Through family court. Through parenting. Through work. Through sleeplessness. Through repeated retellings. Through silence.
The real question was simpler, and sadder.
When will rest feel safe again?
That is what trauma takes in the end.
Not always your ability to function. Not always your ability to survive. Often what it steals first and longest is your ability to feel safe enough to truly rest.
Recovery from PTSD does not happen through therapy alone.
It requires safety.
It requires accountability.
It requires the harm to stop being recreated by the very systems that should have reduced it.
Until that happens, many survivors remain suspended between endurance and exhaustion.
Not because they cannot cope.
Because rest still does not feel safe.
A Note From This Week, Two Years On
I want to add something here that was not part of the original entries, because the gap between then and now is part of what this piece is trying to hold.
This week, I have been in contact again with the woman from the Royal British Legion who supported me during the period described above. She is the person who heard what others had not heard, and who made the call that led to my first CMHT appointment.
Speaking to her again brought the memories back in the way that voices sometimes do.
Voices carry time.
A sentence from someone who was present at the worst of it can reopen the room you were in when you last heard them speak.
The timing was not accidental either.
Last week marked the anniversary of my first ABE interview, the point at which a profound mental decline began. Yesterday was two years since the second.
I am not ready to write about the second one yet.
I do not think I have to be ready to mark every date that has caused profound harm. I remember them all. But the timing has to be set by my ability to go back there, relive it and, hopefully, like every other passing date I write about, close the door on it.
What I noticed, though, is how differently I moved through it this time.
A friend sent me a message last week that put into words what I had not managed to say myself:
“This year you are coping better than last year. Last year you just went quiet. This year, you are aware. Can name it. Articulate it. That’s a massive step up.”
I sat with that message for a long time, because she was right.
Last year, I went quiet.
This year, I can name it.
That, in one sentence, is what recovery from this kind of injury can look like.
It is not the absence of pain. It is not dates passing unnoticed. It is not triggers losing their grip completely.
It is the return of language.
The return of awareness.
The capacity to recognise what is happening while it is happening, rather than only afterwards, once the silence has already swallowed the weeks you lost.
I thought about those dates again today. I acknowledged them. I let them be what they were.
And I kept moving.
That is not the same as being healed. I know that.
Healing from something that is still, in places, ongoing is not a straight line. It is more like learning to carry the same weight with a different grip.
But it is a step up.
And for anyone reading this who has been where I was in August 2024, silent, sleepless, carrying something nobody around you has the full picture of, please know this:
The silence is not the end of the story.
The naming will come.
The articulation will come.
The capacity to recognise a date, feel it land, and still know who you are on the other side of it will come.
It does not arrive on a schedule.
It does not announce itself.
One day, you simply notice that you can name what is happening to you.
And sometimes, the person beside you, the one who has been watching more carefully than you realised, will notice first.
Accountability & Experience: My West Mercia Police Story
A survivor’s reflection on ABE interviews, police failures, and coercive control — and what the system still needs to understand
What victims of coercive control are entitled to in the UK
Victims of coercive control in the UK have a legal right to give a statement, to be supported during ABE interviews, and to have post-separation abuse recognised under the Victims’ Code. These rights are not discretionary. However, in practice, they are often inconsistently applied, delayed, or overlooked entirely.
Content note:
This post discusses police failures in coercive control cases, institutional retraumatisation, and suicidal crisis. If you are currently in crisis, please reach out to Samaritans on 116 123, free, 24 hours a day. You can also text SHOUT to 85258.
A note on disclosure
Everything stated in this post is my documented lived experience, drawn from contemporaneous records, emails, diary entries, and evidence compiled at the time, or clearly identified as my personal perspective. I am a private individual exercising my legal right to freedom of expression under Article 10 of the Human Rights Act 1998. I am sharing my own story in the public interest, as a survivor, a nurse, and an advocate. I have not stated anything I do not believe, at the time of writing, to be true and evidenced.
If you are an officer named in this post or a future post and you believe anything stated is inaccurate, you are welcome to contact me directly via the site.
The Day I Forgot to Remember
There was a time when every date mattered. Every anniversary of every incident that contributed to the life I’ve been living since leaving a domestic violence relationship, I carry them all. Not through choice. The abuse that followed my leaving was enabled by the one organisation that should have protected me from it. Those dates became triggers I couldn’t escape, no matter how much time passed.
But this morning, I woke up, and I didn’t remember.
I didn’t remember until I was sitting at my desk, adding a patient feedback from the morning clinic to my NMC revalidation paperwork, typing in today’s date without thinking. And then it registered.
April 10th.
Two years.
Maybe that’s progress. Maybe that’s just what survival looks like when you’ve built a life that refuses to be defined by the days that tried to destroy you. Life is different now. Not easier. Not healed. Just different.
Two years ago today.
Two years ago today, 730 days, I sat through my first ABE interview.
I acknowledged the trigger. I know myself well enough now to name what is happening when it happens. I had taken half a day’s annual leave, but once work had finished, I couldn’t leave. I cleared my room, because that is what my nervous system does when it needs to make order of the physical space while the internal one becomes overwhelming, and I have stopped apologising for it. I turned it outward, the way I always do, because doing something for other people is what keeps me here on the hardest days.
My patients today had no idea what today was. My colleagues had no idea. I held it together, I did my job, I held the mask on through every appointment, and that is something no one will ever take from me. They tried to make sure my life didn’t matter. They did not succeed. I am not the person their failures tried to create. I am the person I built from the wreckage of them.
This is the truth about that day. Two years on, I am ready to tell it properly.
The five months before
Before I tell you about the room, I need to tell you what it took to get there.
For five months, West Mercia Police had effectively denied me the right to give a statement. Not through any formal decision. Through neglect, inaction, and the conduct of individual officers who had failed or refused to do their jobs. Through what I now understand is formally recognised as victim-blaming. Through a pattern of behaviour that did not just fail me in isolation, but created the conditions for everything that followed.
A victim’s right to give a statement is not a courtesy. It is not discretionary. It is a legal right enshrined in the Victims’ Code. And for five months, that right had been withheld from me.
The consequences of that did not stay within the walls of a police investigation. They bled into every other arena of my life. Without a formal record, without a statement, without the investigation being progressed as it should have been, the family court proceedings continued in a vacuum, and in that vacuum, the abuse continued by another means. My children were placed at further risk. And the person responsible deployed what is now well documented in the research as DARVO: Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim and Offender. Textbook. Documented. And made significantly easier by five months of institutional inaction that handed him exactly the space he needed to operate in.
I had a retired Detective Sergeant of the same force in my family. He was the one who first opened my eyes, in the weeks after my initial disclosure, to what the police should have done and had failed to do. I felt I had already asked too much of him. I had a separate aunt, also a retired officer from the same force, who guided me in making the formal complaint against the first officer. After January, I stopped asking. I withdrew from all of them. They were cc’d into nothing further. They knew nothing more. They still don’t understand that I am not the niece and goddaughter I once was.
I was completely alone in this. Not because there was no one. Because I could not bear to keep asking people who had already given so much, and because i was already someone who never asked for help, and when pushed to accept i did with guilt of putting on others, so i stopped, that version of me that was pushed to accept any help had been systematically dismantled over four years of being told she didn’t deserve it.
This is not incidental. The failure of West Mercia Police to act was not a process error with no consequences. It was the open door through which the continuation of abuse walked.
During those five months, my body was failing under the weight of it.
I was going dizzy. Holding on to walls and door frames. Collapsing under my desk when triggers hit without warning, and they were everywhere, in letters, in emails, in the sound of certain words in certain tones. For months, I could not open correspondence from my solicitor, because with every letter came a new accusation, a new document, a new version of my own life authored by the person who had spent years systematically dismantling it. My nervous system had learned that opening those envelopes meant pain, and so it refused. My colleague had to read the Cafcass report to me. I could not do it alone.
I had lost over five stone. Four dress sizes. I had been running on adrenaline and legislation and very little else for months, and it showed in everything: my body, my face, my hair falling out, vomiting every meal, my wardrobe, which by that point consisted of my nursing uniform and hand-me-downs from my teenage son.
I am neurodivergent. I say that here, in this section, because it is directly relevant to what I am about to describe, not as an explanation, and not as an excuse, but because it is the reason the evidence existed in the form that it did. My neurodivergence is not a weakness. In this process, it was the only thing holding it together.
By the time the 10th of April arrived, I had already disclosed the full details of what I had lived through to seven West Mercia officers. In person. From the beginning. Every single time, because the person before had either failed to record it, failed to act on it, or failed to understand it. Seven officers. And beyond the police, I had disclosed to multiple other organisations: Cafcass, social services, legal teams, schools, and domestic abuse services. Each time, a different room. The same wound opened. Starting from scratch.
My children
There is something that sits beneath everything I have described, and I cannot do it full justice here. But I will not omit it.
My children were victims too. They had lived in the same house, breathed the same air, grown up inside the same environment of control and fear. They had been emotionally and psychologically abused. They had been neglected. They had been threatened. They had been physically pushed into walls. And for a significant period, their existence as victims had not been formally recognised, because the officers dealing with my case had not treated it as the serious, separate matter that it was and on initial disclosure, failed to event document it, amongst other things..
According to my records and the subject access records, it took the NSPCC pushing me to chase it before PC Finch passed the crime relating to my children was over to the PVP, after being informed he had done so a month before it was recorded in January 2024. When it was recorded, it happened within minutes of a routine email update, as though it were an administrative afterthought rather than the formal acknowledgement that my children had been living through abuse. Without that external pressure, I do not believe it would have happened at all.
The children’s investigating officer was DC Rhian Davies. When I met with her for the second time at Shrewsbury police station to provide a statement regarding my children, I was referencing events from a document I had taken. This was the start of my own written statement. After asking what I was pulling the information from, I recall her stating, “that’s coercive control”. I can still see her sitting in the chair opposite me, flicking through the pages. According to my records, she asked whether she could share it with her inspector. I agreed. She later confirmed via email that she had done so, and following a chase, confirmed that her supervisor had subsequently made contact with PC Finch’s supervisor.
The officer who eventually came to address my initial complaint surrounding PC Rolls and the lack of action on breaches of my non-molestation order, who arrived on the 9th of March 2024, and subsequently, following our local MP submitting a complaint on my behalf surrounding the coercive control investigation, was unaware of any of this. He had no knowledge of any email, no knowledge of my children’s case, and no knowledge of me, prior to receiving the complaint. He acted on my disclosure. He was the first person to do so.
I want to be clear that I am raising a question, not making an allegation. DC Davies came from the same department to which I was eventually handed over. The information I had provided had been passed up a chain of command within that department. It had reached a supervisor. And yet the officer who ultimately acted, the one who listened, the one who progressed the case, had no idea any of it existed before the complaint landed on his desk.
I don’t have an explanation for that. What I have is a documented record, and a question that has never been adequately answered: if the information reached the department, and the department was already involved through DC Davies, why was nothing done? Why did it take a formal complaint and the involvement of an MP?
My boys gave their own ABE interviews in March 2024. I had been in that building. I knew what those rooms asked of a person. And my children, one of whom is autistic and could not disclose in the way the system recognises as standard, were asked to sit in those rooms and give their own accounts of what they had lived through.
I had sat outside that room while my children did what I was about to do.
That experience is its own specific, devastating thing, and I am still finding the right language for it. What I will say is that by the time I walked into that building for my own interview in April, my body already knew what that place meant. I had already been there as their mother.
The only person who listened
The only officer in this entire process who had treated me with honesty and genuine care was Conrad Smith, who held the rank of Sergeant at the time.
I will refer to him throughout this post as Sgt Smith, as that was his rank during the events described.
He had come into my life exactly one month before the ABE. One month. He had worked with me to go through the timeline chronologically, the way it had actually happened, from the beginning, and for the first time in five months, I had been allowed to process rather than just perform.
For the first time, someone in that uniform had sat across from me and actually listened. And for the first time in five months, something that felt like faith was beginning to form, not in the police, not in the institution, not in the uniform, in him. In one person who had chosen to do his job properly, in a case where almost everyone before him had chosen not to.
I had told him plainly, more than once: I cannot be passed over to someone new. I cannot go through this from the beginning again. He knew about the dizziness. The collapsing under my desk. The inability to open letters. He knew what each transfer had cost me, not because I had told him, but because he had seen it, every time I relived a part of what I had been through. And he had heard it from the people around me, family, friends, colleagues, early help workers, who had told him, in person, in short summaries they had emailed to him for gathering statements, in their own words, that I was not the person I had once been. Since disclosure, they had feared for me. More than once. And he knew that too.
He reassured me that the officers taking over would look after me. That he would still oversee the case. That the complaint side would continue to be dealt with, though that had not been a priority up to that point, given the volume of information I had continued to provide.
And then he handed me over. Not because he chose to. Because the system decided his rank meant he shouldn’t be doing that job.
My new officer in charge was PC Jess Davies. Investigating Officer Number 4. She confirmed that he would remain involved in an oversight capacity and that the complaint element would still sit with him. It was something. But it wasn’t the same. And I think anyone who has ever experienced a breakdown in trust, in any context, understands why.
I am a nurse. I understand continuity of care. I understand what it costs a patient when you break it, particularly in complex cases, particularly where trust has been damaged, particularly where the relationship between the professional and the person in their care has taken significant time and significant pain to build.
We do not reassign a patient mid-treatment simply because of a clinician’s grade. We consider the case’s complexity. We consider the history. We consider what a transfer will cost the person at the centre of it. We ask whether the system’s administrative convenience is worth more than the human being’s ability to continue.
The police made a different calculation. And I was the one who paid for it.
I did not feel comfortable that my new officer in charge fully understood the extent of what I had been through, or what it had cost me to get to this point. And I did not feel reassured with the officer who would be conducting the interview. Two more people. Two more times, sitting in the home where the abuse had taken place, reliving it from the beginning, before I had even set foot in that interview room.
By that point, it had become something close to autopilot, the history of what I had lived through leaving me at speed, dates and events and details firing out one after another, because I had learned that thinking, truly thinking, while I was doing it was more than my mind could hold. It was safer to list. Safer to recite. Safer to keep moving than to stop and feel what I was saying. Because if I stopped and felt it, I wasn’t sure I would be able to start again.
The day came, and a third officer was present to observe. I hadn’t met her, but something about her felt genuine, and in a room where I was scanning every surface for safety the way people with PTSD do, that mattered. But she wasn’t asking the questions.
I was also walking in fully aware that the officers present were close colleagues of the officers whose failures had denied me this statement for five months, officers about whom I had been forced to file a formal complaint. I am not suggesting that it influenced what happened. I am saying I carried that awareness in through the door, and that it cost energy I did not have.
The emails sent in the early hours
In the days before the ABE, while my children slept, I sat at my kitchen table in the early hours of the morning and wrote to the officer who would be conducting my interview.
Not once. Across multiple nights.
The first email went out at 1:53 in the morning on the 6th of April, four days before the interview. In it, I laid out everything she would need to know about interviewing me. Not because anyone had asked me to. Because I knew, from everything I had already lived through in this process, that if I didn’t do it, it would not be done.
I cited the College of Police guidance on investigative interviewing. I cited Section 20 of the Equality Act 2010, the legal duty to make reasonable adjustments for disabled people, and I broke it down, applied it to my situation, and explained what I needed. I told her I sit on one foot and change positions due to an injury from my RAF service, and that if I looked like I was about to stand up or walk out, I was just moving position. I told her I divert from questions in emotionally heightened environments, that I sometimes can’t get words out, that I occasionally create words or mispronounce them and that this is not a sign of instability or inability. I told her to remind me to drink, because my blood pressure had been through the floor for months.
I told her what I needed to help with recall. I asked her to bring me back to where we were if I trailed off. I asked her to confirm whether I was allowed to reference the previous officer’s failures, because those failures were a direct part of the continuation of the abuse and the psychological harm I had suffered.
I wrote: “I NEVER use or even say the word ‘disabled’, because I don’t see having a neurodiversity as a disability, it’s given me an awful lot, however, every piece of legislation seems to class it as one. So given none of it has been followed so far, I am going to follow in line with it.”
I wrote: “I can not risk anyone else being so horrific within their role, and I will no longer expect anyone to have any understanding regarding difference, or anyone reacting to situations.”
And at the end, I wrote: “Tell me what to wear… please.”
I had no clothes. My wardrobe was my uniform and my son’s hand-me-downs. I was asking the officer conducting my ABE what to wear to the interview because I had nothing, was alone, and didn’t know what a person was supposed to look like when they walked into that room.
She did not reply to that question. Or to most of the others.
Then, the following night — at 2:27 in the morning on the 7th of April — I sent a second email. Six attachments. A full 77-page coercive control statement. A document titled “The Beginning and The End.” A document called All Faith Lost, a diary of entries from the time. A breakdown of evidence-based points under the statutory guidance. A timeline, seventy pages long, nowhere near finished, finances not yet touched. Evidence, built by me alone, across months, because no one else was going to build it.
Among the documents across both emails was the police’s own guidance on neurodiversity, sent to the officer preparing to interview a neurodivergent victim, days before she sat across from her.
I ended that second email with this:
“I am trying my best to break down the damage that was done. It has left me with a constant fear that mistakes or just pure incompetence will result in more harm, and I am struggling to step back. I have lived this every day and most nights since the reality that if I didn’t prove what he did, then no one would. I just hope you nor Jess think that I am overstepping, or that I don’t value your time and help.”
At 2:27 in the morning, I was apologising for sending too much evidence.
I was apologising for being thorough. For caring. For doing the work that no one else had done.
In the same email, I felt compelled to write, unprompted: “NO REQUIREMENT FOR A SUPPORT PERSON!! I have full capacity and understanding!! I assess capacity professionally!!” I was asserting my own mind before anyone had questioned it — because enough people already had.
Preparing to walk in
Sgt Smith replied in the morning, after reading what I sent him. The same documents were sent to the officer conducting the interview. He said it was very comprehensive. He said he was concerned about the impact reliving it would have on me. He said, “Do you have someone who can be there with you when you get home? You’ll need time to decompress.”
He was the only person who asked that question.
The officer who would spend four hours with me did not ask it. There was no IDVA present. There was no trauma-informed debrief arranged. There was no welfare protocol in place after that had all closed due to lack of crime being recorded, despite the MARAC hearing in January, five months on, and all the other services had done all they could to protect and help my children, other than the police.
The morning of my ABE, a letter from PC Finch arrived, dated December 2023. It arrived on the 10th of April 2024, four months late, on the day I was due to walk into that room and give the most important statement of my life. The second officer, who had failed to allow me to give a statement, had the crime record disclosed. Whose failures had been part of the five months of inaction that had cost me everything described in this post. And on that morning, of all mornings, a letter arrived to remind me of exactly that.
The timing was not just inconvenient. It was destabilising. I was already running on nothing, blood pressure through the floor, four years mapped across mind maps built alone in the early hours. And this letter was addressed only to my middle child. Not to my eldest, my autistic son, pushed into walls, threatened, psychologically dismantled in the same house, whose neurodivergence meant he could not disclose in the way the system demands. He had also sat an ABE the month before. He was made invisible again by the same officer who had not recorded what he should have on the morning I was preparing to try to make it all visible.
I responded at 2:32 that afternoon, less than three hours before the ABE, questioning the timing, questioning Jonathan’s exclusion, and attaching the NAS Police Guide on neurodiversity, a guide to trauma bonds, and the Justice Guide to SpLDs. The following morning, the officer replied, acknowledging the delay, noting his familiarity with neurodiversity, and that he found the guides useful. A victim had sent an officer his own organisation’s neurodiversity guidance on the day of her ABE. He was reading it the morning after.
I had spent the nights before building mind maps. Not notes, mind maps, the way my neurodivergent brain actually retains and recalls information, the way I got through my degree and every qualification since. Each map centred on a different aspect of coercive control, with examples branching from each node, drawn from WhatsApp histories, photographs, diary entries, and specific memories, all organised, evidenced, and mapped back to the statutory guidance.
I had started making video diaries. Not written records, videos of myself talking directly to the camera, because I was so frightened of what I was walking into that I needed a version of me to exist outside of it. Proof, somewhere, that this person was real, and that she had tried.
I had gone through four years of abuse and broken it down, piece by piece, into each recognised category, because I knew that with both my neurodivergence and the trauma later diagnosed with PTSD, I had developed, I was scared that my recall under pressure would vanish. By that point, I shouldn’t have worried. I remember every date for the four years and now the years following. But after five months of retraumatisation, I feared the impact on my ability to string the sentences together in an emotionally heightened environment. So I did what I always do: I built a system. I had made the chaos navigable.
I had also phoned my grandma earlier. My safety person.
I don’t know exactly what broke in me that day. I had been shutting the world out for months, not because I didn’t need people, but because I had so little capacity left and I was terrified of what it would cost me to let anyone see how bad it had become. My grandma was someone I didn’t want to worry. She didn’t know the full extent of what I had been living through, because I hadn’t told her. I hadn’t wanted to put that on her.
But I phoned her, and I broke down completely.
She was frightened for me. That was the thing I hadn’t expected, not just her sadness, but her fear. She had known something was wrong, but hearing it, hearing me in that state in the days before this interview, frightened her in a way I hadn’t anticipated. I had been carrying it so quietly, so privately, that the people who loved me most had only been seeing the edges of it. And in that phone call, some of the edges came away.
By that point, if I am honest, I barely knew who I was outside of that uniform. The nurse was still intact. The rest of me had been stripped back to something much more fundamental.
So I went as the only other version of myself I still recognised: a mother. A person who had spent five months fighting to keep her children safe, who had to get through this to show them that you do not give up, that you do not lie down, that abuse does not get to win.
My children had lived through what I had lived through. They had sat in that same building and given their own accounts. The least I could do was walk into that room and give mine.
I had developed a mask by then. Anyone who has lived through prolonged coercive control understands what I mean: the controlled exterior, the professional composure, the face that tells the world you are coping and reveals nothing of what is underneath. I had worn it for so long it had become automatic. The problem was that I needed to take it off in that room, and I did not feel safe enough with those officers to do it.
I did everything I could to keep from crying. Not to show weakness. Maybe that was wrong. But I was not safe enough to be anything other than armoured, and I think that needs to be said clearly in a world that tells victims they must perform their trauma convincingly enough to be believed.
The room
The ABE suite is a normal house on a normal street. Two sofas. A kitchen. A layout designed to feel domestic, to feel safe. And I mean this genuinely, with the right people, the right training, and the right understanding of what a survivor carries through that door, it could be exactly what it is trying to be. A sanctuary. It deserves to be.
It wasn’t that for me that day.
According to my records, when I arrived in that room on the 10th of April, the interviewing officer confirmed she had not had the chance to read the documents I had sent her. Not the timeline. Not the evidenceable points. Not the breakdown of mandatory statutory criteria. Not the police’s own neurodiversity guidance, sent across two nights in the early hours of the morning to the officer preparing to interview a neurodivergent victim who had spent those nights making sure she had everything she needed.
I sat with my files and paper work as if i was prepared for a clinical meeting, but it softened to points where i held a cushion held against me and my fidget rings turning in my hands. There were cameras, one positioned on me, one on the whole room, and a recording room directly behind me where I knew another officer was watching. I want to say something about that to anyone approaching an ABE who is frightened of being filmed: once I started talking, I stopped noticing the cameras entirely. You are too present in what you are saying to be conscious of the lenses. That part is more manageable than you fear it will be.
What is not manageable — what no one prepares you for — is what it does to your body.
My blood pressure had been critically low for months. We had to stop at times, despite trying to fight through it, because I could see stars at the edges of my vision and felt myself starting to go. I had developed a habit of tapping my shoulder when I was reliving, an automatic response I had found without understanding why. I didn’t learn until much later that it was a recognised form of trauma therapy. My body had found its own way to regulate without anyone guiding it, because no one was guiding it. It was doing everything it could to keep me upright in a room where my mind was being asked to go to the worst places it had ever been.
And then came the moments I still carry.
According to my records, the Home Office guidance on coercive and controlling behaviour was misquoted during the interview, the same guidance I had spent months building my entire case around, cross-referencing, evidencing, and sending to the officer days before. It caused confusion at the exact moment I needed absolute clarity.
Which should be captured on the official ABE recording, I repeated the information I had been told before starting the abe that nothing that happened after I left the relationship was relevant, that post-separation abuse did not count. That is factually and legally wrong. Post-separation coercive control is explicitly recognised in the statutory guidance. I said so at the time. I was told I was incorrect.
I also want to address something I left that room carrying, because I think it matters for anyone trying to understand what coercive control actually looks like.
I was directed to focus on consequences. On what happened when I did or didn’t comply. I understand why that framing exists — it forms part of how coercive control is evidenced. But coercive control is not simply “he will hit you if you do x, y or z.”
For most victims, and certainly for me, the consequences were not primarily physical. They were profound, sustained, and relentless psychological harm. If I took our child somewhere alone, I would be accused of snatching them. If I questioned anything, he would return drunk, or on drugs, or with hours of silence designed to make me feel responsible for his state, and me, knowing my child was with him in that state, unable to do anything. And by the end, the consequence was threats to take his own life. Every few minutes. Relentlessly. Until the weight of managing that became its own form of imprisonment. That is coercive control. That is what I was trying to evidence in that room. And that is what the framing of consequences, applied too narrowly by someone who had not read the guidance, does not capture.
I left that interview feeling like I had done something wrong. Like the mind maps I had built, the WhatsApp histories broken down by category, the images, the dates, the memories painstakingly mapped against each area of the statutory guidance, because my neurodivergent brain and developing PTSD meant my recall under pressure was not reliable, were somehow the problem. Like the way I had organised, evidenced, and prepared was being viewed as the behaviour of someone difficult, rather than someone who had spent months compensating for everyone else’s failures.
I left feeling like I was the one in the wrong.
I was not the one conducting the interview.
Four hours. Eighteen months of a four-year timeline. And at the end of the first session, I was told no more time was allowed, and that we would have to come back and do it again.
During my second ABE, worse came.
More of the room. More trauma to face.
More than six months after that day, my fifth officer in charge, another reassignment, another person handed my case as though it were a file rather than a life, came to see me with her sergeant. According to my records of that meeting, she told me the footage from that day had been very difficult to watch.
Very difficult to watch.
I want to sit with that. Trained officers found it difficult to watch.
Imagine what it was to live.
After
Sgt Smith had asked that morning whether someone would be there when I got home. I had told him yes.
There was no one.
I didn’t want anyone to worry about me. The people closest to me, including those who had professional knowledge of exactly what had gone wrong in this case, had been kept at a distance since January. I had withdrawn from all of them. They didn’t know what day it was. They didn’t know what I was walking into. They still don’t know the full extent of what happened in those weeks. I couldn’t bear to keep being the person who asked for help from people who had already given everything they could. So I said yes, someone would be there, and I drove home alone.
I sat in my car for a long time before I went inside. The sky had changed colour. I don’t know how long I sat there.
Sgt Smith phoned to check on me. Not the officer who had conducted the interview. Conrad rang at 11 pm. I couldn’t speak about it in depth, I started talking about other things, I think I even spoke about motorbikes, to try and change the subject. According to my records, the message relayed back to him that evening was that I needed to focus on the consequences of the abuse for the next session. That I needed to think about that, to prepare, to come back ready to go through it in those terms.
I was sitting on the sofa when he rang. My middle son was asleep upstairs. I sat down on the sofa, fully dressed, coat still on. And I could not move.
I did not take the coat off. I did not lie down. I sat upright on the side of the sofa, in the dark, through the entire night. Numb. Empty. Hollowed out in a way I still don’t have adequate language for. Not sleeping, but not present either, the kind of state where your body has simply stopped responding to normal instructions because it has nothing left to give. The kind of state that is not dramatic or visible or legible to anyone who hasn’t been there. It just looks like someone sitting still. It is so much more than that.
Sometime in those hours, as the world outside stayed dark and quiet, I wrote this:
When you reverse the cards how do you explain the internal battle, the torment, the pain, the suffering, the flashback, the grief, the loss, the guilt, the triggers, the numbness, the lies, the hows, the why, the isolation, the trauma, the void, the emptiness, the psychological damage, the choices no longer under your control, the fight, the changes, the tears, the panic, the nothingness, the you who once was isn’t…
You don’t. You don’t ‘move on’ ‘find peace’ ‘let it go’ ‘take care of yourself’ ‘calm down’ ‘it will be fine’ ‘you’re free now’
Living life with post-traumatic stress is an impasse. A void. A constant battle, days of reliving, paralysed by the haunting. This is not a choice made consciously. It is a product of harm inflicted upon a person.
No reaction is wrong. What is wrong is that so many people choose to disappear rather than live in the torment they have endured.
Be kind. Don’t judge. Don’t compare. Understand.
As the light began to come through the curtains in the morning, I got up.
I put my uniform on.
And I went to work.
At some point during that day, I needed to speak to one of the GPs about a patient. A small, routine thing. He looked at me and said of course, anything I needed, the words stung, “anything for you, trusted me completely.”
And that was it. That was all it took.
I had to walk out of that room.
Not because of anything terrible. Because of something kind. Because he knew who I was, what I did, and how I showed up for people, and in that moment, his simple, genuine trust in me was more than I could hold. I walked back down the corridor to my room, empty, numb, and beyond any level of traumatised I had ever experienced before. I knew, walking that corridor, that I would never be the same person I had been before the 10th of April 2024. I knew it with a certainty that had settled into my bones overnight on that sofa.
I was right. I wasn’t. But I would not allow what I was living through to touch the people who needed me. Not then. Not ever.
I sat at my desk between patients and wrote an email to myself, from my NHS address to my personal account, at 4:56 in the afternoon. A record. A timestamp. Proof that something was happening to me on this day.
Today I am scared.
I wrote about receiving another letter from him via a solicitor during my shift. I wrote about not being able to see the point of anything. I wrote that the only thing I could think of to spend money on was taking the boys somewhere nice so they would have some happy memories to remember me by. I wrote that I had so little left in me.
My patients had no idea. My colleagues had no idea. The mask was worn through every appointment. And then I sat at my desk and wrote that email to myself because there was nowhere else to put what was happening inside me.
What happened in the days that followed is documented. In diaries, in timestamps, in records that exist as evidence of exactly how close to the edge I was. I am not sharing all of it here; some of it belongs in the book, where it can be held properly. What I will say is that the distance between that sofa on the night of the 10th and where I ended up five days later is not complicated or ambiguous. It is a straight line. It begins in a building, with an officer who had not had the chance to read the documents sent to her across two nights in the early hours of the morning, including the police’s own guidance on neurodiversity, while I sat opposite her trying not to faint, trying not to cry, trying to hold on long enough to give a statement that two other officers had already decided I didn’t deserve to give.
What should have happened
I am a nurse. I understand trauma-informed care. I understand what it means to meet a person where they are, to hold space without re-injuring, to recognise when a body is in physiological crisis and respond accordingly.
A neurodivergent victim presenting for an ABE with documented history, displaying symptoms of PTSD (I was diagnosed less than six months later), history of collapsing under stress, five months of having her statement withheld, and detailed preparation emails sent across two nights in the early hours, including the police’s own neurodiversity guidance, the College of Police investigative interviewing guidance, and a breakdown of her legal rights under the Equality Act, that person requires an IDVA. A specialist advocate. An officer who has read the case file. An officer who has read the guidance she is applying, including the guidance sent to her by the victim herself. An officer who has not recently been a close colleague of the officers the victim has been forced to formally complain about.
She should not have needed to be handed off to a new officer in the final weeks before the interview, after explicitly stating she cannot manage another transfer.
She should not spend two nights in the early hours preparing the officer for the interview she is about to give.
She should not arrive in that room to be told those documents had not been read.
She should not be told, after four hours, that she needed to not do it the way she had been doing it.
And she should never, not once, not in any version of a system that claims to support victims, have to build her own case file, source her own guidance, and educate her own interviewing officer, to compensate for the failures of the people she is trusting with her life.
That house could be a sanctuary. With the right people, the right preparation, and the basic professional obligation of reading the evidence sent across two nights in the early hours of the morning, it could be exactly what it is trying to be. I hope that one day it is.
What trauma-informed ABE practice should look like:
Before the interview:
Victim’s legal rights under the Victims’ Code fully explained and upheld
IDVA or specialist advocate offered and arranged
Interviewing officer reads all submitted materials before the interview
Reasonable adjustments identified and implemented (Equality Act 2010)
Neurodiversity accommodations discussed and put in place
Medical needs acknowledged (e.g., blood pressure monitoring, breaks)
Post-separation abuse recognised as part of the investigation
Continuity of care maintained wherever possible
Officer assigned who is not a close colleague of officers subject to formal complaint
Welfare plan arranged for after the interview
During the interview:
Guidance applied correctly (Home Office guidance on coercive control, College of Policing investigative interviewing)
Victim’s preparation materials and evidence structures respected, not dismissed
Physiological distress recognised and responded to appropriately
Multiple sessions scheduled from the outset if complexity indicates
Victim’s communication style and needs accommodated
After the interview:
Welfare check conducted (not just a phone call)
Support person or IDVA contact confirmed
Clear communication about next steps
Follow-up arranged
Victim not left alone in crisis
This is not an aspirational list. This is the baseline standard of care that should be afforded to every victim giving an ABE interview.
What came after — and what I will not omit
There is something else from this period that I will not omit, because to omit it would be to tell an incomplete truth.
The one officer in this entire process who had genuinely helped me, who had rung at 11 pm when no one else did, who had read what I sent, read a 77-page statement, hundreds of pages of timelined events, all documents I created due to the trauma I had endured by his colleagues, who had asked if someone would be there when I got home, later faced criminal allegations of misconduct in public office. Those allegations were connected to his work on my case. They hung over him for fifteen months. A huge part of the proceedings against him had direct links to many involved in my own case.
I fought endlessly to ensure the truth was heard. The criminal allegations were dropped.
He was subsequently dismissed from the police service for gross misconduct. By that point, I understood he no longer had the strength to fight it.
I am not in a position to set out the full account here. That account, documented, evidenced, and told in full, will come in the book. What I will say is that what happened to him, and the timing and context of what was alleged against him, is a profound part of this story. A part that the women who come after me deserve to know.
The system did not just fail me. It then turned on the person who didn’t, and was closely supported by those who did.
Two years on
I sat at my desk. I acknowledged the trigger. I cleared my room. I wrote this blog tonight because writing for other people is what I do when I don’t know what else to do with myself.
My patients today had no idea what today was. My colleagues had no idea. I did my job. I held it together. I did what I have always done.
And something no one will ever take from me, not the officers who failed me, not the system that retraumatised me, not the person who spent years trying to convince me my life didn’t matter, is this: they did not turn me into the person their failures tried to create.
I am still here. I still care. I still get up every single day and fight for other people, because that is who I am. It is who I was before any of this. It is who I will remain.
I am a different person now. Harder in some ways. More guarded. More certain about what I will and will not accept from the systems I move through, both personally and professionally. I still withdraw. I still have days when it comes back without warning, like today, like this morning, like a CPD log, an anniversary, and a room that needed clearing. But I understand now why I am the way I am, and I have stopped treating my own survival instincts as character flaws.
Things don’t get better with time. They change. You change.
I went through absolute hell. I would do it again to keep my children safe.
The difference now is that I go into that fight as the person I have become, not the person I was. I didn’t know much then.
I know a great deal now. And my drive in life, the thing that gets me out of bed on the days that are hardest, the thing that sat me at that kitchen table in the early hours of the morning building evidence for an officer who would not have the chance to read it, remains exactly what it has always been.
To protect others. In whatever form that takes. For as long as I am here to do it.
I’m not staying quiet. Not about any of it.
I share this because silence protects systems, not survivors. Every woman/man who sits at their kitchen table in the early hours, building evidence that should have been built for them, deserves to know they are not alone, they are not wrong, and the system’s failures are not theirs to carry.
Resources and support
If you are preparing for an ABE interview or experiencing failures in your investigation:
I am slowly working through a full memoir of my experience, with these officers, with this process, with everything the timelines and the diaries and the 2:27am emails represent. It is not easy to write. It is not a comfortable thing to write.
What I have shared in this post covers a handful of days out of years of documented, evidence-based experience. Those handful of days alone have taken me 730 of them to be ready to put into words publicly. Some of it will take longer still. Some of it I am not ready for yet.
But I am working through it, as time allows, because the full account, not the fragments, not the blog posts, but the complete and honest truth of what happened to me, to my children, and to the one officer in this process who actually did his job, deserves to exist properly. For me. For my children. And for every woman sitting at a kitchen table in the early hours of the morning, building a case that someone else should have built for her.
It will come. In the meantime, this is what today gave me.
If you are approaching an ABE interview, you are entitled to an IDVA or specialist advocate. You are entitled to have post-separation abuse included. You are entitled to have neurodivergence accommodated. You do not have to prepare alone.
If you are in crisis right now, please contact Samaritans on 116 123, free, 24 hours a day. You can also text SHOUT to 85258.
Accountability & Experience: My West Mercia Police Story
It began at a kitchen table, in the middle of a life that felt too dark, too loud, and too fractured for easy answers. It began in conversations with my children, in moments when I needed words that did not seem to exist anywhere else. Words honest enough for pain, but gentle enough to carry hope.
I am a Specialist Nurse Practitioner with postgraduate study in the psychology and neuroscience of mental health. I know the evidence. I know the therapies. I know the clinical frameworks that support healing. But the truth is this: while I was still living through sustained trauma, none of that knowledge could fully reach me.
That is not because those therapies do not work. They do. I believe in them, and I recommend them with confidence. But when the body is still trapped in survival, healing does not always begin with structured processing. Sometimes it begins somewhere quieter. Somewhere instinctive. Somewhere outside language.
For me, one of those places was a lay-by.
For over a year, I returned to the same place again and again. Not because it fixed anything. Not because it was magical. But because it gave me a pocket of stillness when everything else felt unbearable. It gave my body a chance to breathe.
At the time, I did not know the language of grounding, sensory regulation, trauma responses, or nervous system overload. I only knew that something about that space helped me stay here.
Sometimes I slept there. Many times, my little girl slept there with me. We would look up at the stars. She grew up believing that when someone leaves, they become a star. It was her way of holding loss. In time, it became mine too.
That lay-by held more than silence. It held grief, fear, exhaustion, and the desperate effort of trying to stay functional in public while quietly unravelling in private. I have stood in that field in rain, ice, and darkness. I have sat in the grass just to feel something real beneath me. I have gone there in uniform, in the middle of the night, trying to regulate myself enough to return to a life that did not feel safe.
At the time, nobody knew.
It was only later, after more study, training, and reflection, that I understood what I had already been doing. I had been grounding myself. I had been using nature as regulation. I had been using the cold air, the silence, the openness of the sky, and the feel of the earth beneath me to stabilise a body that had been pushed too far for too long.
The body often finds ways to survive before the mind has language for what it is doing.
That truth sits at the heart of Not Broken.
This is not a book built on platitudes or polished clichés. It is not about pretending pain becomes beautiful. It is not about bypassing trauma with positivity. It is about survival, grief, family upheaval, and the slow process of finding words for experiences that once lived only in the body.
Not Broken began as a therapeutic story for children — a way of speaking gently into the confusion trauma leaves behind. Over time, it became something wider: a collection of stories and reflective tools for those trying to make sense of darkness without being consumed by it.
The title itself carries the message I needed most.
The stars do not disappear during the day. They are always there. You just cannot see them until it is dark enough.
That is not a slogan. It is not false comfort. It is the simplest truth I know about recovery. In the darkest periods of life, there are often strengths, capacities, and forms of hope that remain hidden until we need them most.
Almost two years later, I drove that same road again.
This time, I was not driving in panic. I was not bracing for impact. I was not trying to outrun a life that felt unsafe. The place had not changed, but I had. My body no longer responded as if I were still trapped in the same emergency.
That is what recovery can look like.
Not dramatic. Not neat. Not a perfect before-and-after. Just a quiet physiological shift. The road is still the road. The memories are still the memories. But your body no longer believes it is still living there.
That night, all three of my children got out of the car and stood beneath the stars. Quietly. Gently. With the kind of understanding that does not need much explanation. They knew why that place mattered. They had lived through enough to understand.
And that is why this book exists.
It exists for the people who are functioning outwardly while falling apart inwardly. It exists for those who feel frustrated that healing has not yet “worked,” when the truth may be that they are still in survival mode. It exists for anyone who needs language that is compassionate, grounded, and real.
I chose to publish this book under my own name for a reason. I am a nurse, a mother, and a survivor. Trauma does not discriminate. It reaches professionals, carers, clinicians, parents, and people who look as though they are coping from the outside. I believe honesty matters. Not for performance. Not for sympathy. But because silence protects stigma, and truth dismantles it.
Not Broken is not the story of everything that happened to me. It is the story of what I built from it.
If something brought you here, then perhaps this book is meant for you. If you are searching for words, for comfort, for understanding, or simply for proof that survival is possible, this book was written with that in mind.
The stars are already there. Sometimes we just need help finding them.
NAAVoices was not created from certainty, but from lived experience and professional insight. As I migrate earlier work from the original platform, this post has been reviewed and approved for transfer. It remains true to its original context, with only minor clarity edits where needed. Some moments do not require rewriting to remain honest.
27 February 2025
It is only when I look back over the past six months that I realise just how different our reality could have been without acceptance, love, and a willingness to put a child’s needs first.
This post is rooted in reflection, personal growth, and the quiet clarity that sometimes only comes with time. Looking back has brought me a little peace. It has also helped me join the dots.
Although I remember many of the moments that led to my child identifying as female from such a young age, I sometimes wish I had written more down. But in another sense, perhaps what mattered most was not documenting every detail, but allowing freedom, expression, and acceptance to lead the way. That is what allowed her to shine.
I have kept the heart of this post true to how it was originally written. Since then, those around us have worked hard to use the correct pronouns, and we continue to do our best to support her in every way we can. I wrote the original draft four months before my four-year-old was able to fully express the depth of how she felt. It has been a journey. It has not been perfect. At times, I have wondered whether I should have noticed sooner.
To my beautiful little one — you are the brightest star I have ever seen, now that you are free to be yourself.
Draft originally written on 10 August 2024
The post I was too scared of judgement to share
I have a four-year-old who, from quite early on, loved playing with dolls and adored Princess Poppy, just like her older brother once did. What began with small interests gradually became more consistent. It turned into a Frozen dress, and for 18 months she asked for one.
Growing up, there were three of us. I am the middle child, with an older sister and a younger sibling who does not use pronouns. We refer to them as “auncle”.
I have always believed that people should be free to be themselves. I have always recognised that stereotypes around gender, sexuality, and social roles can be restrictive, harmful, and deeply unfair.
As a parent, I have always tried to raise my children with the belief that everyone is equal, that no one is “better” than anyone else, and that kindness costs nothing.
I have never believed boys should only like blue, girls should only like pink, or that children should be boxed into certain toys, clothes, or interests.
That had already been clear with my older son, who once loved Princess Poppy costumes, dance classes, and hairdressing toys.
Although my ex-husband initially found some of it unusual, he never allowed his own views to shape or limit our son. That little boy is now 12 years old, over 5 foot 7, and would be mortified if he knew I had written this about him.
Now he is into rugby, the gym, running, and Xbox. I am incredibly proud of him for being exactly who he is, regardless of anyone’s expectations about gender or interests. He is funny, compassionate, and accepting of everyone.
This weekend, the older two were with their dad, and I took my youngest to a toy sale. Like most four-year-olds, she was full of excitement, pointing at everything she liked. Since she had been allowed to choose her own toys more freely, the house had become increasingly sparkly and pink. We had already bought a Barbie campervan and some Barbies, and that had not bothered me at all.
But when she asked for the Barbie Dreamhouse, I hesitated.
That hesitation was not about her. It was about what had been done to me.
What I realised in that moment was that four years in a toxic relationship had not only affected my identity, but had also changed the way I saw myself as a parent. It had created a version of me I did not recognise — one shaped by anxiety, fear, and the constant pressure of anticipating judgement.
For a split second, I questioned my own instincts. Was it okay to buy it? What would people think?
That was not who I truly was. But the fact those thoughts appeared at all told me just how much damage had been done.
Why should it be wrong for a four-year-old to want a doll’s house?
The man running the stall was with his daughter, whose toys were all pink and glittery. He seemed to notice my discomfort, though it had nothing to do with him or his stock. I had simply frozen.
At that point, I was off work. I had finally admitted I needed help for what I had been through and was trying to learn how to live with PTSD.
I had never had an issue with dolls, dresses, babies, or Frozen. But over time, I had been made to feel that these things were wrong if they did not fit someone else’s beliefs.
That same day, the gentleman at the stall spoke openly about how, when he was younger, he used to dress as a girl and how his family had questioned what that meant. It struck me deeply.
I felt ashamed that I had allowed fear to creep into something that should have been simple.
Just two weeks earlier, I had gone to a solicitor’s office to collect a parcel for my child. She wanted to wear her Elsa dress. Instead of simply letting her, I found myself trying to persuade her to wear “regular” clothes because I was frightened it would somehow be reported back to my ex.
I was scared that allowing her to wear a dress would lead to more accusations, more scrutiny, more control.
And that is what it always came back to: control.
My ex had controlled my life for so long that even after I had left, I still panicked about what he might say, what he might do, and whether I would somehow be punished for allowing my child to be herself.
I had spent so long living under someone else’s judgment that I had started to question my own values.
For four years, I felt as though I had lived with two versions of myself. One was the woman constantly bracing for threats, fear, and fallout. The other was the version of me that still existed at work — the one who was grounded, compassionate, professional, and clear on what was right.
Looking back now, I know that version was the real me all along.
The fear was never my identity. It was the effect of abuse.
When a patient walks through my door, I do not see labels first. I do not assess someone’s worth based on gender, identity, relationship status, work, or appearance. Every person is entitled to dignity, safety, and respect. Nobody has the right to strip that away.
That day, my child and I left the sale with the Barbie Dreamhouse and the biggest smile I had seen in a very long time.
On the way home, I said, “Yes, you are my beautiful little boy.”
And she replied, “No mummy, I’m your beautiful little girl.”
This time, I did not correct her. I did not shut it down. I did not try to control what she was expressing.
Instead, I listened.
I had fought so hard to get control out of my own life. She deserved the same freedom — the freedom to tell me who she was, without fear.
So I said, “Yes, you are my beautiful little girl, if that is what you want to be.”
At the time, neither of us fully understood what that moment would come to mean. We did not yet know that this was more than role-play. There were many moments before and after it, many small signs and snippets that only make sense now when I look back.
Six months later, I had what felt like a completely different child — happier, more carefree, and more confident. She had begun wearing girls’ clothes to school and had been met with wonderful support from family and friends.
We are still finding our way. We are still learning. We are still navigating this path together.
But she is loved for who she is. She is wanted. She is accepted.
And perhaps most importantly of all, she is now confident enough to correct anyone — including me — when we get her pronouns wrong.
Understanding the Narcissist’s Cycle of Abuse – UK Evidence-Based Guide
Understanding the Narcissist’s Cycle of Abuse
Evidence-Based UK Resource • Knowledge is Power • Recovery is Possible
What is Narcissistic Abuse?
Narcissistic abuse is a pattern of psychological and emotional manipulation perpetrated by individuals with narcissistic personality traits. In the UK, this form of abuse is increasingly recognised within the framework of coercive and controlling behaviour, which became a criminal offence under the Serious Crime Act 2015.
Emergency Support:
If you are in immediate danger, call 999. For non-emergency support, the National Domestic Abuse Helpline is available 24/7 on 0808 2000 247 (free to call, including from mobiles).
UK Research Context:
Research from the University of Hull highlights that narcissistic abuse formulations of domestic violence are lesser known concepts and not commonly recognised in UK health care or mental health services. This gap in recognition can leave victims without appropriate support and understanding from professionals.
Understanding the Pattern
The cycle of abuse typically includes four main stages: Idealisation, Devaluation, Discard, and Hoovering. These patterns align with behaviours defined under UK law as coercive and controlling, including:
Isolating a person from their sources of support
Exploiting their resources and capacities for personal gain
Depriving them of the means needed for independence and escape
Regulating their everyday behaviour
📊 UK Statistics: As of March 2024, an estimated 3.9 million people aged 16 and over experienced domestic abuse in the last year (8.0% of the adult population), with 9.5% of women and 6.5% of men affected.
The Impact of Narcissistic Abuse
Research published in Issues in Mental Health Nursing emphasises that the effects on individuals who have experienced narcissistic abuse can be fatal or extremely debilitating, long-lasting, and that individual recovery can be a complex process. Common impacts include:
Social isolation: Withdrawal from support networks
Cognitive distortions: Difficulty trusting one’s own perceptions (gaslighting effects)
Important Context:
Whilst “narcissistic abuse” is commonly used in popular discourse, UK research suggests this term may be problematic. The behaviours described aren’t exclusive to narcissistic individuals and can occur in various forms of intimate partner violence and family abuse. What matters most is recognising the harmful patterns, not diagnosing the perpetrator.
UK Evidence and Research
Research Foundation:
This resource is informed by peer-reviewed research from UK institutions including the University of Hull, Edinburgh Napier University, University of Bristol, and data from the Office for National Statistics.
Prevalence in the UK
📊 Latest ONS Data (Year Ending March 2024):
8.0% of adults (3.9 million people) experienced domestic abuse in the last year
2.3 million women (9.5%) and 1.5 million men (6.5%) affected
26.1% of adults (12.6 million) have experienced domestic abuse since age 16
30.3% of women and 21.7% of men have experienced abuse since age 16
Coercive Control Statistics
Police Recorded Offences
There were 45,310 offences of coercive control recorded by police in England and Wales in the year ending March 2024. This represents a continued increase from:
43,774 offences in year ending March 2023
41,626 offences in year ending March 2022
33,954 offences in year ending March 2021
The rise in recorded coercive control offences may be attributed to improvements made by police in recognising incidents and using the law accordingly, rather than necessarily indicating an increase in prevalence.
Gender Differences in Narcissistic Traits and Abuse
Edinburgh Napier University Research:
A qualitative study published in 2019 found important differences between grandiose and vulnerable narcissism in domestic violence contexts:
Grandiose narcissists: Violence triggered by threats to self-esteem and challenges to perceived authority
Vulnerable narcissists: Explosive anger triggered by fears of abandonment
Both types: Exhibited covert and overt aggressive and violent reactions to narcissistic injury
Gender-Sensitive Assessment:
Research highlighted by the British Psychological Society reveals that vulnerable narcissism (but not grandiose narcissism) is a risk factor in female perpetrators. When using gender-sensitive assessments:
Vulnerable narcissistic features in women include manipulative tactics such as withholding intimacy and affection, playing the ‘mother card’, and making false allegations
Male violence is often exerted overtly and physically
Female-perpetrated narcissistic abuse is more likely overlooked as it deviates from stereotypical expressions of (male) narcissism
Analysis of Merseyside Police data found 95% of coercive control victims were women and 74% of perpetrators were men
Relationship Between Narcissism and IPV
Systematic Review Findings
A 2023 meta-analysis published in Trauma, Violence, & Abuse found:
Significant positive relationship between narcissism and intimate partner violence perpetration
Both cyber IPV and psychological IPV were significantly related to narcissism
No significant relationship found between narcissism and physical IPV specifically
Vulnerable narcissism showed stronger correlations with IPV than grandiose narcissism
Types of Coercive Control Behaviours
Merseyside Police Analysis (Barlow et al., 2018):
Common abusive behaviours used in coercive control cases included:
Use of technology (phone trackers, controlling social media usage, barrage of text messages, monitoring phone usage)
Sexual coercion
Monitoring behaviours
Isolation from support networks
Threats and intimidation
Financial abuse
Deprivation (depriving access to support)
Physical violence (present in 63% of coercive control cases)
Recognition in UK Healthcare
Healthcare Gap:
Research published in Issues in Mental Health Nursing argues that narcissistic abuse formulations should be at the forefront of multidisciplinary teams’ knowledge, particularly mental health nurses’, to enable victims to be directly supported or signposted to appropriate support services for timely interventions.
Psychotherapeutic Considerations:
Research in the British Journal of Psychotherapy highlights that whilst social media narratives about narcissistic abuse have exploded in popularity, those clinging rigidly to simplistic narratives often struggle to engage deeply in psychodynamic treatment. Professional therapeutic support requires nuanced understanding beyond popular psychology frameworks.
The Four Stages of the Abuse Cycle
Research from Edinburgh Napier University and international studies has identified consistent patterns in how individuals with narcissistic traits perpetrate abuse. Understanding these stages can help victims recognise what they’re experiencing.
1. Idealisation: The Honeymoon Phase
At the beginning of a relationship, the narcissistic individual creates an illusion of perfection, engaging in behaviours that make their target feel incredibly valued and special.
Key Behaviours:
Love Bombing: Overwhelming the target with compliments, extravagant gifts, and constant attention
False Intimacy: Claiming to be soulmates or expressing profound emotional connection very early
Mirroring: Adopting the target’s interests, values, and personality traits to create false compatibility
Future Faking: Making grand promises about the future together without genuine intent
Building Dependency: Making the target feel that the narcissist is their perfect partner
What to Look Out For:
This level of affection often feels “too good to be true” because it is. The goal is to hook the target emotionally and build dependence. Be wary of relationships that escalate extremely quickly or where someone seems too perfect. Healthy relationships develop gradually with mutual respect and realistic expectations.
2. Devaluation: The Cracks Begin to Show
Once the individual feels their target is securely attached, they shift into devaluation. Research shows this is when their true controlling nature starts to emerge, aligning with coercive and controlling behaviours defined in UK law.
Common Tactics:
Gaslighting: Manipulating the target into doubting their perceptions and reality
Criticism and Ridicule: Undermining self-esteem with frequent put-downs
Emotional Withdrawal: Withholding affection, approval, or attention as punishment
Creating Chaos: Using unpredictable behaviour to keep the target off balance
Jealousy and Possessiveness: Controlling social interactions, movements, or communications to isolate them
Triangulation: Bringing a third party into the dynamic to create jealousy and competition
Silent Treatment: Ignoring the target as a form of punishment
Projection: Accusing the target of behaviours they themselves exhibit
Research Insight:
Edinburgh Napier University research found that for those with vulnerable narcissistic features, explosive anger episodes during devaluation were often triggered by fears of abandonment, whilst those with grandiose features reacted violently to challenges to their self-perceived authority.
The Psychological Impact:
By this point, the target may feel confused, anxious, and desperate to regain the approval and affection once given in the idealisation phase. This further entrenches their dependence on the abuser.
3. Discard: The Sudden Exit or Emotional Abandonment
In the discard stage, the individual abruptly withdraws, either emotionally or physically, often leaving the target feeling blindsided and devastated.
How Discard Manifests:
Ending Without Explanation: May ghost the target or deliver a cold, calculated breakup
Emotional Coldness: Remaining in the relationship but showing indifference, contempt, or hostility
Seeking New Supply: Moving on to new targets to secure fresh admiration and attention
Blame Shifting: Making the target feel entirely responsible for the relationship’s failure
Smear Campaigns: Spreading false or distorted information about the target to mutual contacts
Why This Happens:
The individual discards their target when they no longer find them useful or when they crave the thrill of a new source of admiration. Remember: the discard reflects the abuser’s dysfunction, not your worth. Domestic abuse charity research emphasises that victims often internalise this rejection, but it’s a manipulation tactic, not a reflection of their value.
4. Hoovering: The Recycle Tactic
Even after the discard, the abusive individual may reappear through a process known as hoovering (named after the Hoover vacuum cleaner, as they attempt to “suck” the target back in).
Hoovering Tactics:
Promising Change: Swearing they’ll seek help or be the person the target initially fell in love with
Using Guilt or Pity: Claiming to be lost or broken without the target
Fake Remorse: Apologising without truly accepting responsibility for their actions
Breadcrumbing: Sending occasional messages to keep the target interested
Emergency Contact: Reaching out during holidays, birthdays, or claiming emergencies
Nostalgia: Reminiscing about the “good times” to trigger emotional memories
The Danger:
The hoovering phase reignites the cycle and gives the abuser further opportunities to continue their harmful behaviour. Research shows that each time the target returns, the cycle often becomes more intense and damaging. UK domestic abuse services report that leaving an abusive relationship takes an average of 7 attempts, partly due to these manipulation tactics.
Breaking the Cycle:
If you recognise these patterns, it’s important to establish “no contact” where possible and safe. Seek support from UK domestic abuse services who understand these dynamics and can help you develop a safety plan.
Recognising the Warning Signs
Based on UK research and clinical practice, here are the key indicators that you may be experiencing abuse within the narcissistic pattern.
Early Red Flags in Relationships
Women’s Aid and other UK domestic abuse charities identify these early warning signs:
Moving the relationship forward at an unusually rapid pace
Love bombing: excessive flattery, gifts, and attention that feels overwhelming
Idealising you as “perfect” or their “soulmate” very early on
Sharing very personal information too soon or expecting you to do the same
Pressuring you to commit or make major decisions quickly
Intense jealousy masked as “caring deeply” about you
Subtle criticism disguised as jokes or “helpful advice”
Monitoring your communications, whereabouts, or social media
Dismissing your boundaries or needs as unimportant
Isolating you from friends and family early on
Gaslighting: Recognising Reality Distortion
What is Gaslighting? Gaslighting is a manipulative tactic where the abuser makes you question your own memory, perception, and sanity. Research from the University of Hull emphasises this as a core component of narcissistic abuse.
Common Gaslighting Tactics:
Denying things they clearly said or did, even when you have evidence
Telling you you’re “too sensitive,” “overreacting,” or “dramatic”
Accusing you of making things up or being “crazy” or “mental”
Twisting conversations to make you appear to be the problem
Using your vulnerabilities or mental health against you
Trivialising your feelings and experiences (“you’re making a big deal out of nothing”)
Countering your memories with their own “version” of events
Telling others you’re unstable, creating doubt about your credibility
Using confusion and contradiction to keep you off balance
UK Legal Context:
Gaslighting behaviours fall under the coercive and controlling behaviour offence in the Serious Crime Act 2015, particularly where they serve to “regulate everyday behaviour” and cause psychological harm.
Emotional Manipulation Tactics
Based on Edinburgh Napier University research and UK domestic abuse literature:
Triangulation: Creating competition by involving a third party (ex-partner, new interest, family member) to make you jealous or insecure
Silent Treatment: Withdrawing communication as punishment, leaving you anxious and desperate to “fix” things
Projection: Accusing you of their own behaviours (e.g., accusing you of cheating when they are)
Word Salad: Confusing, circular conversations that go nowhere and leave you exhausted
Moving the Goalposts: Changing expectations constantly so you can never succeed or please them
Hoovering: Reeling you back in after discard with false promises
DARVO: Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim and Offender – claiming they’re the victim of your abuse
Financial Control: Restricting access to money, monitoring spending, or sabotaging employment
Technology Abuse: Using phone trackers, monitoring social media, barrage of text messages (identified in Merseyside Police research)
Signs You’re Being Isolated
Isolation is a key component of coercive control under UK law. Warning signs include:
They criticise your friends and family constantly, finding fault with everyone
Creating conflicts between you and loved ones
Monopolising your time and attention, becoming upset when you’re unavailable
Becoming angry, sulky, or punishing when you spend time with others
Gradually cutting you off from your support network
Making you feel guilty for maintaining outside relationships
Discouraging your hobbies, interests, and activities
Monitoring or controlling your movements and communications
Making excuses to prevent you from seeing others
Undermining your relationships by spreading false information
Why Isolation Matters:
UK domestic abuse research shows isolation is one of the strongest predictors of escalating abuse and difficulty leaving. It removes your support network and makes you dependent on the abuser.
How Your Body and Mind React
Research published in Issues in Mental Health Nursing highlights that narcissistic abuse can be “fatal or extremely debilitating.” Common responses include:
Physical Symptoms:
Chronic anxiety or feeling constantly “on edge”
Sleep disturbances, nightmares, or insomnia
Digestive issues, nausea, or loss of appetite
Persistent fatigue or exhaustion
Headaches, migraines, or muscle tension
Panic attacks or heart palpitations
Weakened immune system (frequent illness)
Emotional and Mental Signs:
Constantly second-guessing yourself and your decisions
Feeling confused or “walking on eggshells”
Significant loss of confidence and self-esteem
Difficulty making even simple decisions
Feeling responsible for the abuser’s emotions and actions
Losing touch with your own identity, interests, and goals
Depression, hopelessness, or suicidal thoughts
Hypervigilance – constantly monitoring the abuser’s mood
Difficulty trusting your own perception of reality
Seeking Help:
If you’re experiencing these symptoms, please reach out to your GP or a UK domestic abuse service. These are recognised trauma responses to abuse, not personal failings.
Coercive Control Indicators
Under the Serious Crime Act 2015, coercive and controlling behaviour is a criminal offence in England and Wales. You may be experiencing this if your partner:
Isolates you from friends, family, or other sources of support
Deprives you of basic needs (food, sleep, shelter)
Monitors your activities, time, or conversations
Controls aspects of your everyday life (what you wear, eat, where you go)
Takes your wages or controls finances
Repeatedly puts you down or humiliates you
Enforces rules and activities to humiliate or degrade you
Forces you to take part in criminal activity
Threatens to reveal private information or hurt you, children, or pets
Controls your access to contraception or forces pregnancy/abortion
Legal Definition:
The behaviour must be “repeated or continuous,” have a “serious effect” on you, and the perpetrator must know or ought to know it would have a serious effect. A serious effect means causing you to fear violence will be used against you, or causing you serious alarm or distress that substantially affects your day-to-day activities.
Types of Narcissistic Presentations
Edinburgh Napier University research and other UK studies identify different presentations of narcissistic traits. Understanding these can help you recognise manipulative behaviour in various forms.
Research Note:
UK academic research emphasises that narcissistic traits exist on a spectrum. Whilst Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD) is a clinical diagnosis requiring professional assessment, many individuals display narcissistic features that cause significant harm without meeting full diagnostic criteria.
Grandiose (Overt) Narcissism
This is the “classic” presentation most people envision when thinking about narcissism.
Characteristics:
Openly boastful, arrogant, and self-aggrandising
Expects special treatment, admiration, and constant attention
Domineering and aggressive in behaviour
Loud, attention-seeking, and socially dominant
Lacks empathy and doesn’t hide it
Exploits others without guilt or remorse
Reacts with rage when authority is challenged (narcissistic injury)
May be successful professionally due to confidence and ambition
Edinburgh Napier Research:
Grandiose narcissists in domestic violence contexts showed violence triggered by threats to their self-esteem and challenges to their perceived authority. Their reactions tend to be overt and explosive.
Vulnerable (Covert) Narcissism
Vulnerable narcissists are harder to identify because they present as introverted, sensitive, or victim-like.
Characteristics:
Plays the victim to gain sympathy and control
Passive-aggressive behaviour patterns
Chronically envious of others’ success or happiness
Hypersensitive to any perceived criticism
Martyrdom and self-sacrifice (with expectation of recognition)
Subtle manipulation through guilt and shame
May present as shy, anxious, or depressed
Explosive anger triggered by fears of abandonment
Sulking, silent treatment, and emotional withdrawal
UK Research Findings:
A 2023 meta-analysis found vulnerable narcissism showed stronger correlations with intimate partner violence than grandiose narcissism. British Psychological Society research revealed vulnerable narcissism is a risk factor in female perpetrators, with tactics including withholding intimacy, playing the “mother card,” and making false allegations.
Why It’s Dangerous:
Covert narcissists are often harder to recognise because their tactics are more subtle. They may appear vulnerable or wounded, making it difficult for targets to identify the manipulation. Their victimhood narrative can be particularly effective at garnering support from others.
Malignant Narcissism
The most dangerous form, combining narcissism with antisocial traits, aggression, and sadism.
Characteristics:
Deliberately cruel, vindictive, and destructive
Takes pleasure in others’ pain and suffering
Complete absence of remorse or conscience
Extremely controlling, possessive, and paranoid
May engage in physical violence or threats
Often exhibits criminal or antisocial behaviour
Manipulative and deceptive without guilt
May stalk, threaten, or seek revenge when challenged
Safety Warning:
If you’re dealing with someone showing these characteristics, your safety may be at serious risk. Contact the National Domestic Abuse Helpline (0808 2000 247) immediately to discuss safety planning. If in immediate danger, call 999.
Communal Narcissism
These individuals gain their narcissistic supply through appearing helpful, charitable, or community-oriented.
Characteristics:
Publicly generous but privately exploitative
Seeks recognition, praise, and status for “good deeds”
Uses charity and helping as a façade for superiority
Expects special treatment for their contributions
May work in helping professions, charity, or activism
Presents as selfless but underlying motive is admiration
Becomes angry if contributions aren’t sufficiently acknowledged
May use their “good person” image to deflect criticism
Important Clarification:
Narcissism exists on a spectrum, and individuals may display traits from multiple presentations. Only qualified mental health professionals can diagnose Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD). These descriptions are meant to help identify harmful patterns of behaviour, not to diagnose. UK research emphasises that what matters most is recognising the impact of abusive behaviours, not labelling the perpetrator.
Gender Considerations:
British Psychological Society research highlights that narcissistic abuse by women is often overlooked as it deviates from stereotypical (male) expressions. Female perpetrators may use tactics like withholding affection, manipulating through children, or making false allegations – forms of abuse that don’t fit traditional patterns but are equally harmful.
Self-Assessment: Recognising Patterns
This self-assessment can help you identify whether you might be experiencing abuse. This is not a diagnostic tool, but rather a guide for reflection based on UK research and clinical practice.
Please Note:
If you answer “yes” or “sometimes” to several of these questions, it may indicate you’re in an unhealthy or abusive relationship. Consider reaching out to a UK domestic abuse service for support and guidance.
Breaking Free and Recovery
Research shows that recovery from narcissistic abuse is possible, though it can be a complex process. Here’s evidence-based guidance for UK residents.
You Are Not Alone:
8% of UK adults experienced domestic abuse in the last year. Recovery is possible with the right support. Many people go on to live fulfilling, healthy lives after abuse.
Safety Planning
Creating a Safety Plan (UK-Specific)
If you’re planning to leave or have concerns about your safety:
Emergency contacts: Save the National Domestic Abuse Helpline (0808 2000 247) and 999 in your phone under different names
Important documents: Gather passport, birth certificates, bank statements, tenancy agreements – store copies with a trusted person or in cloud storage
Financial safety: Open a separate bank account they don’t know about; document financial abuse
Safe person: Identify someone you can stay with; pack an emergency bag and leave it with them
Evidence collection: Keep screenshots, save threatening messages, photograph injuries (this can support police reports)
Exit route: Plan how you’ll leave safely; consider timing when they’re out
Children’s safety: If you have children, contact social services for support; inform schools of the situation
Pet safety: Make arrangements for pets, as abusers often threaten or harm animals
Leaving Can Be Dangerous:
Research shows the period when leaving or immediately after is when risk is highest. Always contact domestic abuse services for professional safety planning support. The National Domestic Abuse Helpline can help you create a personalised safety plan.
Establishing No Contact or Grey Rock
No Contact Method
No contact means completely cutting off communication. This is the most effective method when possible:
Block their number, email, and social media accounts
Block their friends and family who may act as “flying monkeys”
Change your number if necessary
Avoid places you know they frequent
Do not respond to hoovering attempts
If you receive threatening communication, document it and report to police
Consider a Non-Molestation Order through UK courts if harassment continues
Legal Protection:
In England and Wales, you can apply for a Non-Molestation Order to prevent someone from harassing or threatening you. You can also apply for an Occupation Order to regulate who can live in your home.
Grey Rock Method (When No Contact Isn’t Possible)
If you share children or have unavoidable contact (e.g., workplace, legal proceedings), the Grey Rock method can help:
Keep all responses brief, boring, and factual
Don’t share personal information, emotions, or details about your life
Stay neutral in tone – don’t react emotionally to provocations
Limit communication to essential topics only (children’s needs, legal matters)
Use written communication (email, text) rather than phone calls when possible
Keep all communication for potential evidence
Don’t engage with emotional manipulation or baiting
Use parallel parenting rather than co-parenting if you share children
Example: If they ask “How was your weekend?” respond with “Fine” rather than detailing your activities.
Recovery Steps
Your Recovery Journey
Recovery isn’t linear, but these steps can help guide your healing:
Acknowledge the abuse: Recognise what happened wasn’t your fault and was a form of abuse
Establish safety: Create a safety plan and reach out to domestic abuse services
Cut contact: Implement no contact or grey rock method where possible
Seek professional support: Contact GP, therapist, or counsellor experienced in trauma
Reconnect with support network: Rebuild relationships with friends and family
Process trauma: Work through the abuse with professional support (trauma-focused therapy)
Rebuild self-esteem: Challenge negative self-beliefs instilled by abuse
Learn about healthy relationships: Understand what respectful partnerships look like
Rediscover yourself: Reconnect with your interests, values, and identity
Set boundaries: Learn to establish and maintain healthy boundaries in relationships
Practice self-compassion: Be patient and kind with yourself during recovery
Build resilience: Develop coping strategies and emotional regulation skills
Therapeutic Support
Recommended Therapies for Trauma Recovery
Research supports these therapeutic approaches for recovering from abuse:
Trauma-Focused CBT: Available through NHS; helps process traumatic memories and develop coping strategies
EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitisation and Reprocessing): NICE-approved for PTSD; particularly effective for trauma
Psychodynamic therapy: Explores patterns and helps understand the abuse experience
Group therapy: Connect with other survivors; many domestic abuse charities offer this
Counselling: Available through GP referral, IAPT services, or private practice
Accessing Therapy in the UK:
Contact your GP for NHS mental health referral. IAPT (Improving Access to Psychological Therapies) services are available across England. Many domestic abuse charities also offer free specialist counselling. Women’s Aid, Refuge, and local services provide trauma-informed support.
Legal Options in the UK
Legal Protections Available
Report to Police: Coercive control is a criminal offence; police can investigate and prosecute
Non-Molestation Order: Court order preventing someone from harassing, threatening, or using violence against you
Occupation Order: Regulates who can live in the family home and can exclude an abuser
Restraining Order: Can be issued by criminal courts to protect you after a conviction or acquittal
Clare’s Law (Domestic Violence Disclosure Scheme): Right to ask police if a new or existing partner has history of domestic abuse
Housing support: Local authorities have duty to help if you’re homeless due to domestic abuse
Legal aid: May be available for domestic abuse cases (evidence of abuse required)
Evidence of Abuse:
For legal proceedings or legal aid, evidence can include: police reports, GP records, photographs of injuries, threatening messages, witness statements, or letters from domestic abuse services supporting you.
Financial Recovery
Regaining Financial Independence
Open a bank account at a different bank in your name only
Check your credit report (free through Credit Karma, Clearscore, or MSE Credit Club)
Report any fraudulent activity or accounts opened in your name
Apply for Universal Credit if needed; domestic abuse exemption from benefit cap available
Contact MoneyHelper (government service) for free financial advice
Seek help from Citizens Advice for benefits, debt, and financial guidance
Consider a grant from Refuge, Turn2Us, or other charities supporting abuse survivors
Employment support available through JobCentre Plus with domestic abuse disclosure
Recovery Timeline:
Research indicates that recovery from narcissistic abuse is “a complex process” and varies greatly between individuals. Be patient with yourself. Many survivors report it takes 1-3 years to feel significantly better, but healing continues beyond this. You don’t have to do this alone – professional support significantly aids recovery.
UK Support Services and Resources
These UK-based organisations provide specialist support for people experiencing domestic abuse, including narcissistic abuse and coercive control.
Safety Warning:
If your abuser monitors your internet use, browse in private/incognito mode or use a safe device. Consider clearing your browser history. Most domestic abuse websites have a “quick exit” button.
🆘 National Domestic Abuse Helpline
Phone: 0808 2000 247
Available: 24/7, free, confidential
Run by Refuge. Support for women and children experiencing domestic abuse.
Website: nationaldahelpline.org.uk
👨 Men’s Advice Line
Phone: 0808 8010 327
Available: Mon-Fri 9am-8pm
Email: info@mensadviceline.org.uk
Confidential support for male victims of domestic abuse.
Website: mensadviceline.org.uk
🏳️🌈 Galop (LGBT+ Support)
Phone: 0800 999 5428
Available: Mon-Fri 10am-5pm, Wed 10am-8pm
Email: help@galop.org.uk
National LGBT+ domestic abuse helpline.
Website: galop.org.uk
🏠 Women’s Aid
Live Chat: Available on website
Email: helpline@womensaid.org.uk
Support, information, and refuge services. Survivor’s Handbook available online.
Website: womensaid.org.uk
🏠 Refuge
Refuge services and support across the UK.
Website: refuge.org.uk
Information about leaving safely, finding refuge accommodation, and recovery resources.
👮 Rights of Women
Legal Advice: 020 7251 6577
Available: Tue-Thu 11am-1pm, 2pm-4pm, 7pm-9pm
Free confidential legal advice for women on family law, criminal law, and more.
Website: rightsofwomen.org.uk
🌐 The Survivors Trust
Phone: 08088 010 818
Umbrella agency for specialist rape and sexual abuse services in the UK.
Website: thesurvivorstrust.org
💭 Samaritans
Phone: 116 123
Available: 24/7, free
Email: jo@samaritans.org
Confidential emotional support for anyone in distress or at risk of suicide.
Website: samaritans.org
👶 NSPCC (Children at Risk)
Phone: 0808 800 5000
Available: 24/7
Help for adults concerned about a child at risk. Children can contact Childline on 0800 1111.
Website: nspcc.org.uk
💷 MoneyHelper
Phone: 0800 138 7777
Free, impartial financial guidance from government. Support for financial abuse survivors.
Website: moneyhelper.org.uk
📞 Respect (Perpetrator Services)
Phone: 0808 802 4040
Support for people who are concerned about their own behaviour and want to stop being abusive.
Website: respectphoneline.org.uk
🏴 Scotland: Domestic Abuse Helpline
Phone: 0800 027 1234
Available: 24/7
Website: sdafmh.org.uk
🏴 Wales: Live Fear Free Helpline
Phone: 0808 80 10 800
Available: 24/7
Website: gov.wales/live-fear-free
Northern Ireland: Domestic Abuse Helpline
Phone: 0808 802 1414
Available: 24/7
Website: dsahelpline.org
👥 Victim Support
Phone: 08 08 16 89 111
Free, confidential support for victims of crime across England and Wales.
Website: victimsupport.org.uk
🔗 The Mankind Initiative
Phone: 01823 334244
Support for male victims of domestic abuse and domestic violence.
Website: mankind.org.uk
Additional Resources
Online Support Communities
Women’s Aid Survivors’ Forum: Moderated online community for women survivors
The Chayn: Open-source resources for abuse survivors (chayn.co)
Survivors UK: Support for male and non-binary survivors of sexual abuse
Recommended UK Books
“Why Does He Do That?” by Lundy Bancroft – Understanding abusive men
“The Body Keeps the Score” by Bessel van der Kolk – Understanding trauma
“Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving” by Pete Walker
“Healing from Hidden Abuse” by Shannon Thomas
“Psychopath Free” by Jackson MacKenzie
Finding Local Support:
Contact your local authority’s community safety team or search “domestic abuse support near me” with your city/town name. Most areas have local domestic abuse services offering face-to-face support, advocacy, and refuge services.
Remember:
You deserve to be safe, respected, and valued. Reaching out for help is a sign of strength, not weakness. These services are confidential and exist to support you, not to judge you.
The Mother They Created When They Failed My Children
At 34, I lost everything.
Not my job—work remained my only safe haven, the one place that still made sense when nothing else did.
What I lost was far more fundamental.
I lost my belief that people do the right thing.
I lost my trust in the world.
I lost my ability to understand how humanity functions.
Because when my children needed protection most, the world looked away.
The Breaking
My mental health collapsed for the first time in my life.
Not gradually. Not with the warning signs I could have prepared for.
It shattered, completely, devastatingly, in the face of a truth I couldn’t reconcile:
The systems designed to protect children don’t always protect children.
The people who should intervene don’t always intervene.
The world that promises safety doesn’t always deliver.
I stood face to face with the devil himself.
And nobody came.
Nobody protected my babies.
Nobody did the right thing.
And I couldn’t understand why.
How do people fail children? How do they see harm and turn away? How do institutions built for protection become instruments of further trauma?
I still don’t have those answers.
I’m not sure I ever will.
The Underestimation
What made it worse?
They treated me like I knew nothing.
Just another hysterical mother. Just another woman overreacting. Just another parent who didn’t understand “the process.”
I was dismissed. Patronised. Underestimated at every turn.
As if loving my children made me irrational. As if my fear for their safety made me unreliable. As if being a mother meant I couldn’t possibly understand the systems designed to “help” us.
They were wrong.
The Vow
But my three children were still watching.
Through my traumatisation, through my confusion, through my complete loss of faith in humanity, they were watching to see what I would do next.
And in that darkness, broken and alone, I made a vow that changed everything:
I will NEVER be that woman again.
The woman who believed people would do the right thing. The woman who trusted systems to protect her children. The woman who waited for help that never came.
I will NEVER wait for the world to save my kids.
Because I learned the brutal truth: it won’t.
The Rebuilding
So I stopped waiting.
And I rebuilt myself—not as the same person, but as someone entirely new.
I became educated.
If they were going to dismiss me as ignorant, I’d make sure I knew more than they did.
I earned qualifications while my world burned around me. I studied safeguarding frameworks, legal processes, and institutional procedures. I learned every system that had failed us, inside and out.
I became independent.
If I couldn’t trust anyone else to protect my children, I’d learn to do everything myself.
I built Nurse Against Abuse — the foundation that grew into NAAVoices — rising from the ashes of institutional betrayal.I created the resources I wish had existed when I needed them. I turned my shattered faith into actionable expertise.
I became the shield the world refused to be.
The Truth About Trauma
Here’s what they don’t tell you about surviving this kind of betrayal:
The triggers still come.
There are moments when I’m transported back to that version of myself—the one who believed, who trusted, who thought the world was fundamentally good.
I still don’t understand how people fail children.
Even with all my knowledge, training, and experience, I navigate these systems. I cannot comprehend how adults look at vulnerable children and choose inaction.
I remember the woman who believed in humanity.
Sometimes I grieve her. She was softer, more hopeful, easier to be around.
But she’s gone.
And honestly? She had to be.
Because that woman couldn’t protect my children.
This version can.
The Reality No One Wants to Say Out Loud
The world is not always safe.
Not everyone chooses to do what they should.
Not everyone will protect you.
When your children are at stake, trust must be earned, never assumed.;
But YOU—you can become everything your children need.
My 5-year-old needs a mother who will never break like that again.
My 13-year-old needs a warrior who fights without hesitation or fear.
My 15-year-old needs living proof that one person will never, ever give up on them.
That’s who I became.
Not because I’m special or extraordinary.
Because I had no other choice.
The Two Paths
Losing faith in the world at 34 gives you exactly two paths:
Path One: Drown in the grief of what you lost—your innocence, your trust, your belief in human goodness.
Path Two: Rise as something you have never seen in yourself before—forged in fire, built from betrayal, unstoppable in purpose.
I chose fire.
Now I have:
Expertise earned in hell
Knowledge forged from institutional failure
Strength built on broken promises from everyone else
Three souls who will never question whether their mother will give up
Because I always will.
The Problem We Don’t Talk About
Here’s what breaks my heart:
I shouldn’t have to use this knowledge for my own children.
No mother should.
I built expertise in safeguarding failures, legal frameworks, institutional navigation, complaint procedures, and evidence documentation; not because I wanted to, but because I had to.
And I’m not alone.
Too many mothers are being dismissed as hysterical. Too many are treated like we know nothing. Too many have to become experts in systems that should protect our children, just to be heard.
Not just for me.
For every mother who’s been underestimated. For every parent told they’re overreacting. For every family that has failed because of the very systems designed to help them.
Because until those systems change, we become the experts anyway.
We have to.
The Truth About Overcoming Betrayal
You don’t overcome betrayal by learning to trust again.
You overcome it by becoming so educated, so independent, so armed with knowledge that trust becomes irrelevant.
By building integrity so solid that you answer only to yourself.
By gaining expertise so deep that you don’t need anyone’s help.
By developing determination so fierce that other people’s failures can’t touch you anymore.
When you trust your own knowledge above all else— When you become independent enough to act alone— When your expertise makes you undeniable— When they can’t dismiss you anymore because you know more than they do—
Other people’s failures stop mattering.
Their underestimation becomes irrelevant.
Their dismissal loses its power.
Because you’re no longer waiting for the world to protect your children.
You became the protection.
The Promise
The world failed my children once.
I made absolutely certain it was the last time.
And now?.
Until the systems change?
We’ll document everything. We’ll learn every framework. We’ll master every process. We’ll build resources for each other. We’ll refuse to be dismissed.
We’ll protect our children—with or without the world’s help.
The Transformation
My children will never know the naive woman I was at 34.
The one who believed people were fundamentally good. The one who trusted institutions to function as designed. The one who thought loving your children was enough to keep them safe.
They know the fight she took on and the person she became as a result.
The woman who learned that sometimes the only person you can count on is yourself, so you’d better become someone worth counting on.
The Final Truth
At 34, the world broke me.
At 36, I became unbreakable.
Not for me.
For them.
For my 5-year-old, who deserves stability. For my 13-year-old, who deserves fierce advocacy. For my 15-year-old, who deserves unwavering protection.
Always for them.
And for every mother out there who’s been underestimated, dismissed, and forced to become an expert in systems that should have protected her children from the start.
You are not hysterical. You are not overreacting. You are not alone.
And you are far more powerful than they ever gave you credit for.
If this resonates with you, please share it. Because somewhere, another mother is being told she knows nothing, and she needs to know she’s not the only one who has had to become everything.
