Therapy for Adult Survivors of Childhood Abuse in Madison, WI
For women who have been carrying it since they were too young to name it.
It started before you had words for it. By the time you understood what was happening, you had already been making sense of it the only way a child can. You decided what kind of person you must be. You learned how to keep yourself safe. You learned how to stop needing things. You grew up, and the lessons grew up with you.
You may not call it abuse. You may have spent years explaining it to yourself in ways that made it smaller. You may have wondered for a long time whether what you remember really counts.
It counts. And the way it has shaped you is real, even if no one in your life has ever named it out loud.
You don't have to tell the whole story. You don't have to start at the beginning.
It shows up in the parts of your life that have nothing to do with childhood.
You apologize before you ask for things. You read every face in every room. You can sense someone’s mood shift before they say a word, and you adjust before they ask you to.
You have made yourself smaller in ways most people would not even notice. You crave closeness and you brace for it when it arrives. You wait for the version of the person who showed you that love was not safe.
You wait for the moment that everything kind turns. Even with people who have never given you a reason to expect it.
You have been told you are too sensitive. Too anxious. Too dramatic. Too needy.
You have done your best to be the version of yourself that does not get told those things. The version of yourself that is easier.
None of this is who you are.
It is who you had to become.
What Therapy With Me Looks Like
i.
You don’t have to label your past to begin
I work specifically with adult survivors of childhood abuse, which includes physical abuse, sexual abuse, emotional abuse, and the long-term impact of growing up in a home where you were not safe. You do not have to label your experience or fit it into a category before we begin. We start with what is in your life now and work backward at whatever pace you can tolerate..
ii.
We move slowly
I will not ask you to start at the beginning. I will not press you to disclose specifics that your nervous system is not ready to surface. We move slowly because the patterns you are working with were laid down over years, and undoing them takes care.
iii.
We work beyond words, with what your body holds
I use EMDR therapy, which is particularly effective for the kind of layered, long-running trauma that begins in childhood. The work does not require a coherent narrative. It does not require you to remember everything. It works with what your body has been holding, even when the words are not there.
If you’ve been thinking about this, you can start hereHow EMDR Therapy Helps Adult Survivors of Childhood Abuse
Trauma that begins in childhood does not sit in your memory the way other experiences do. It is woven into how you read other people, how your body responds to closeness, how you understand yourself. It is harder to talk your way out of, because for a long time it was not separable from what you understood as normal. EMDR reaches the part of you where this kind of trauma actually lives. It helps your nervous system update the lessons that were learned too early. The hypervigilance softens. The bracing eases. The version of you that has been bracing since you were a child finally gets to rest. EMDR helps you stop running on those lessons in a life that no longer requires them.
You are not broken. You learned what you needed to learn to survive. What people often want to know
Frequently Asked Questions About Therapy for Adult Survivors of Childhood Abuse in Madison, WI
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Many adult survivors of childhood abuse have fragmented or partial memories. Some have very few specific memories at all. EMDR works with whatever you have, including body sensations, emotional patterns, recurring images, and gaps where memory should be. The work does not require a complete story to begin.
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Many of my clients are. Family relationships, especially when the person is a parent or sibling, are often complicated by years of patterns that are hard to walk away from cleanly. We do not require you to cut anyone off in order to do the work. We work with the actual circumstances of your life, including the relationships you are still navigating.
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Many survivors spend years uncertain about whether what they experienced counts. The work does not require you to label it before we begin. We work with the impact, the patterns, the body memories, and the relationships in your life now. If clearer language emerges over time, it emerges. If it does not, the healing still happens.
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No. EMDR therapy does not require any contact with anyone from your past. The work happens in the room with me, between you and your own nervous system. What you do or do not do in your outside relationships is your decision and not part of the protocol.
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Childhood trauma typically requires a longer course of therapy than single-event trauma, because there are usually multiple memories and patterns to address. Most of my clients in this work are with me for at least a year, sometimes longer. We move at the pace your system can hold, not on a timeline.
Still have questions? Other areas where this work overlapsMany of the women I work with are carrying more than one of these.
Trauma rarely arrives in tidy categories. If something on this page resonates but does not quite fit, one of these other doors may be closer to your experience.
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Therapy After Domestic Violence
Many adult survivors of childhood abuse find themselves in relationships that feel familiar in ways that are hard to name. If the patterns that started early have followed you into adult relationships that hurt, this work meets that.
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Therapy After Sexual Assault
Childhood abuse and adult sexual assault often coexist in the same life. If something happened to you as an adult that built on what you had already been carrying, the work can address both.
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Therapy for Survivors of Trafficking
Sometimes the harm that began in childhood continued into other forms of exploitation or control as you got older. If your experience runs deeper or wider than the language of childhood abuse can hold, this is the door for it.
If any of this sounds like the kind of work you have been looking for, I would be glad to talk
A free fifteen-minute call. No paperwork. No pressure. No requirement to explain anything before we even speak. Just a real conversation about what is going on and whether this feels like the right fit.