Domestic violence is most often understood through the language of trauma. We talk about fear, hypervigilance, anxiety, post-traumatic stress, safety planning, and recovery. All of those conversations are necessary. Yet in my work with survivors of domestic violence, I have repeatedly encountered another experience that receives far less attention: grief.
Domestic violence does not belong to one gender, sexual orientation, race, culture, or socioeconomic class. Although patterns and prevalence of victimization differ among populations, abuse can occur within any intimate relationship. Individual stories may be very different, but the losses that accompany abuse can cross many of those boundaries.
The grief associated with domestic violence is particularly complicated because often there has been no death. There may be no funeral, no ritual, and no socially recognized moment when others gather and acknowledge what has been lost. Yet a survivor may experience profound losses: safety, trust, identity, relationships, financial security, time, connection to family or community, and perhaps most painfully, the future they once imagined for themselves.
This kind of grief can be difficult to explain to other people. A survivor may have successfully left an abusive relationship, obtained legal protection, completed court proceedings, secured housing, or begun rebuilding their life. From the outside, these events can look like victories. And they are.
But victory and grief are not mutually exclusive.
Sometimes it is only after the immediate crisis has ended that there is finally enough emotional space for grief to emerge.
What Happens After Survival?
During an abusive relationship, survival often requires intense attention to the immediate environment:
Is it safe to say this? What mood is my partner in? What happens when I get home? How do I protect the people I love? How do I get through tonight?
Life can gradually become organized around anticipating and responding to another person’s behavior. There may be little psychological space available to recognize, much less grieve, what is being lost along the way.
Then something changes. The survivor leaves. Court proceedings end. A restraining order may be granted. A new home may be established. Friends, family members, and even helping professionals may understandably expect relief.
And relief may certainly be there.
But so may grief.
The person who spent months or years focused on surviving can suddenly encounter a deceptively simple question:
Now what?
That question deserves our attention.
The survivor may now have to discover who they are when survival is no longer their primary task. The relationship may be gone, but so may the life they believed they were building. The legal process may have ended without producing the sense of justice or closure they expected. Years cannot be returned. Trust does not automatically reappear. And the identity that existed before the abuse may no longer fit the person who emerged from it.
This is where I believe our understanding of domestic violence recovery needs to expand. Healing cannot only mean reducing the symptoms of trauma. Sometimes we must also create space for survivors to grieve what was lost while discovering who they are becoming.
Finding Language for What I Was Seeing
Long before I had the language to describe it, I was seeing grief in my work with survivors.
I saw it in the person who had achieved the outcome they had spent months working toward yet did not feel the relief they expected. I saw it after court proceedings ended, when there was no longer another hearing or legal milestone to prepare for. I saw it in questions about lost years, changed relationships, disrupted families, and identities that no longer felt familiar.
At times, what I was witnessing did not fit neatly within the language of trauma alone.
My continued education in grief and loss gave me a framework for something I had already been observing. Concepts such as ambiguous loss and disenfranchised grief gave me language for losses that are real and consequential but may not be readily recognized by society—or even initially recognized by the person experiencing them.
Ambiguous loss is particularly relevant to domestic violence because so much can be lost without disappearing completely. A family may still exist, but in a different form. A former partner may remain present because of shared children. A home may still physically exist while no longer representing safety. Relationships with friends or relatives may continue but have been fundamentally changed. Even one’s former sense of self may feel simultaneously present and inaccessible.
There is also grief for things that never physically existed but were nevertheless very real psychologically: the marriage or partnership someone believed they would have, the childhood they imagined for their children, the future they planned, or the person they expected themselves to become.
These losses can also become disenfranchised. Society does not always give survivors permission to grieve an abusive relationship. Well-intentioned people may respond with statements such as, “You’re out now,” “You’re safe,” or “You should be happy it’s over.”
But leaving an abusive relationship does not erase attachment, history, hope, or loss.
A survivor may simultaneously know that leaving was necessary and mourn the person they once loved. They may grieve the relationship they actually had while also grieving the relationship they kept hoping it would become.
Those experiences are not contradictory.
Human beings are capable of experiencing relief and grief at the same time.
The Search for Emotional Justice
The legal system can provide important protections, consequences, and boundaries. But there is another kind of resolution that no court can guarantee.
I have come to think of this as emotional justice.
A survivor may understandably hope that a legal outcome will finally make the other person understand the harm they caused. Perhaps there will be an apology, accountability, remorse, or simply an acknowledgment that says, “What happened to you was real, and it was wrong.”
Sometimes that acknowledgment never comes.
A favorable court decision can establish a legal reality, but it cannot compel insight, remorse, or empathy. When emotional healing becomes dependent upon receiving those things from the person who caused the harm, the survivor’s recovery can remain tethered to that person long after the relationship itself has ended.
This creates another important transition in recovery: moving from “I need you to understand what you did to me” toward “I understand what happened to me, and I get to decide what happens next.”
That shift does not excuse the harm or eliminate the need for accountability. Instead, it begins returning ownership of the survivor’s future to the survivor.
From “Why Me?” to “Now What?”
Post-traumatic growth does not mean that trauma was somehow beneficial or necessary. Nor does growth require gratitude for suffering. Rather, it recognizes the possibility that people can develop new meaning, priorities, relationships, strengths, or understandings of themselves while rebuilding a life after trauma.
For survivors of domestic violence, that rebuilding may involve grieving an earlier identity before constructing another.
The questions may begin as:
Why did this happen to me?
How did I allow this to happen?
Who was I before this relationship?
And eventually:
Who am I now?
That may be one of the most important questions we can make room for.
Recovery does not necessarily mean returning to the person someone was before domestic violence. Time and experience have changed them. Perhaps the goal is not to return at all. Perhaps it is to integrate what happened into a larger life story without allowing the experience to become the entirety of that story.
When Words Are Not Enough
My work with horses has given me another way to think about this process.
Equine-assisted work can create opportunities to explore trust, boundaries, communication, connection, and agency without relying exclusively on conversation. A horse does not know a person’s diagnosis, court history, socioeconomic status, or the label of “victim” or “survivor.” The interaction occurs in the present moment.
For someone whose boundaries have repeatedly been violated, simply establishing and maintaining a boundary can become meaningful. For someone who has learned to constantly monitor another person’s emotional state, interacting with a horse can create opportunities to notice what is happening internally as well as externally. Trust does not have to be discussed only as an abstract concept; it can be explored through relationship.
Importantly, the therapist does not need to tell the survivor what an interaction with a horse means. The meaning belongs to the individual.
That distinction matters.
Recovery from domestic violence should not be another experience in which someone else tells the survivor what to think, what to feel, or who they are supposed to become. Therapy can instead provide the conditions in which people begin discovering those answers for themselves.
Holding the Story
My education did not suddenly teach me that survivors of domestic violence experience grief. It gave me the language to describe something I had already been seeing.
That distinction has been one of the most meaningful parts of my own educational journey.
Education at its best does more than provide credentials or introduce theories. It changes the questions we ask. It gives us another lens through which to examine something we thought we already understood. Sometimes it even gives a name to something that has been sitting directly in front of us.
I now find myself asking different questions.
Not only, “What happened to you?”
But also, “What did you lose?”
“What are you still grieving?”
And perhaps most importantly:
“Who do you want to become now?”
There may never be a moment when every loss is restored or every injustice receives the acknowledgment it deserves. Healing does not require erasing the past. It means helping people build lives in which the past is part of their story without being allowed to write every chapter that follows.
As a therapist, I have always believed that holding someone’s story is a privilege. My education has deepened my understanding of what that privilege requires: listening not only for the trauma that is spoken aloud, but also for the grief that may not yet have a name.
And sometimes, giving that grief a name is where a new story begins.