Breaking the Cycle: A Compassionate Guide to Supporting Survivors and Preventing Violence

by Jessica Anne Pressler, LCSW

There is a particular kind of silence that follows violence. It lives in the body long after the bruises have faded, in the nervous system long after the danger has passed, in the soul long after the relationship has ended. It is the silence of someone who has been told — by a person, by a system, by a culture — that what happened to them does not matter, or worse, that they somehow brought it upon themselves.

Violence — sexual, domestic, interpersonal — is one of the most pervasive and misunderstood crises in our communities. It crosses every zip code, every income bracket, every family structure. It does not discriminate. And yet, as a society, we continue to treat it as though it is a private matter, an individual failure, a shameful secret to be managed behind closed doors. It is none of those things. It is a community wound, and it demands a community response.

This is a conversation I believe we can no longer afford not to have.

For Survivors: You Are Not Alone, and You Are Not Broken

If you are someone who has experienced sexual, domestic, or interpersonal violence, I want to begin with what I know to be true: what happened to you was not your fault. The shame you may be carrying does not belong to you. It was placed on you by someone who had no right to do so.

Survivors often come to healing carrying an invisible weight — not just the trauma of what was done to them, but the layered grief of not being believed, of minimizing their own experience, of staying longer than they wish they had, of loving someone who hurt them. This is complex territory, and it deserves complex care.

Organizations like Peace Over Violence, based in Southern California, are doing exactly this kind of deep, multidimensional work. Their mission is to build healthy relationships, families, and communities free from sexual, domestic, and interpersonal violence. What makes their approach particularly powerful is that it is grounded in a trauma-informed framework — meaning they understand that healing cannot happen without first creating safety, and that survivors are the experts on their own experience.

They use the TRIUMPH model — Trauma Resilience Integration Using Multiple Pathways of Healing — which recognizes what we know from decades of research: there is no single road to recovery. Some people heal through talk therapy. Some through somatic approaches that help the body release what the mind has been holding. Some through peer support, through community, through art, through movement. Peace Over Violence offers counseling, crisis intervention, and advocacy services that honor this full spectrum of need. I will be attending one of their events this week in Los Angeles.

If you are a survivor and you have not yet reached out for support, I want to gently encourage you to do so. Not because you are broken — you are not — but because you deserve to have someone walk alongside you in this. Healing in isolation is hard. Healing in community is possible.

Understanding Those Who Cause Harm: Anger, Trauma, and the Roots of Destructive Behavior

This is the part of the conversation that makes many people uncomfortable. And I understand why. When someone has been hurt, the last thing anyone wants to hear is an explanation for their abuser's behavior that might be mistaken for an excuse.

So let me be clear before I say anything else: understanding is not excusing. Explaining the roots of violent behavior is not an absolution of it. Every person who causes harm is responsible for the choices they make. Full stop.

And yet — if we want to prevent violence, if we want to actually interrupt the cycles that pass pain from one generation to the next, we have to be willing to look honestly at what drives it.

Most people who perpetuate violence were themselves hurt. Not all, but most. They grew up in homes where anger was the only emotion that felt safe, where love and fear arrived together, where no one taught them how to name what they felt or ask for what they needed. Their nervous systems were shaped by chaos, by threat, by the chronic, exhausting work of surviving their own childhoods.

What I call the Traitor Within — those survival strategies we develop in childhood to protect ourselves from pain — can, when left unexamined, become the very mechanisms that drive us to harm others. The child who learned that anger kept people from getting too close. The teenager who discovered that control felt safer than vulnerability. The adult who never learned that it is possible to feel afraid and not act out of that fear.

This does not make violence acceptable, EVER. It makes it treatable.

For people who are struggling with anger, with patterns of control, with the impulse to harm — there is help. Batterer intervention programs, trauma-focused therapy, and somatic approaches that help regulate the nervous system can create genuine, lasting change. But only when someone is willing to look honestly at themselves. Only when someone understands that the patterns they learned to survive childhood are now destroying their adult relationships — and chooses, despite how terrifying that is, to do something different.

If this is you, or someone you love: the door to healing is open. Walking through it may be the bravest thing you ever do.

What Society Can Do: Prevention Before the Wound

We cannot arrest our way out of this crisis. We cannot fund enough crisis hotlines to catch everyone who falls. We have to begin earlier, and we have to begin differently.

Prevention starts with education. Healthy relationship education needs to be woven into the fabric of how we raise our children — in schools, in faith communities, in pediatricians' offices. Children who learn what respect, consent, and emotional regulation look like from a young age are less likely to either perpetuate or tolerate abuse as adults. This is not controversial. It is neuroscience.

Prevention means addressing the conditions that make violence more likely. Economic insecurity, housing instability, substance use, mental health crises left untreated — these are not excuses for violence, but they are risk factors that a compassionate society has a responsibility to address. When we invest in communities, we invest in safety.

Prevention requires us to examine and dismantle the cultural narratives that normalize harm. The stories we tell about gender, about power, about what it means to be strong — these are not neutral. A culture that equates masculinity with dominance and femininity with submission is a culture that makes intimate partner violence easier to commit and easier to minimize. Changing those narratives is slow work, but it is essential work.

Prevention looks like listening to survivors before they become statistics. It looks like believing people when they say something is wrong. It looks like not asking "why didn't she just leave?" — and instead asking "why did he feel entitled to stay?"

When Something Does Happen: Care, Not Shame

Even in a world with the best prevention efforts, violence will still occur. When it does, how a community responds matters enormously.

The first response must be safety and belief. A survivor who comes forward and is met with doubt, blame, or minimization is a survivor who will not come forward again — and who may not survive the next incident. First responders, healthcare providers, educators, and family members all need training in trauma-informed response. This is not optional. It is lifesaving.

Care must be holistic. Survivors need access to medical care, legal advocacy, safe housing, mental health services, financial resources, and community support — often simultaneously. A crisis hotline is a beginning, not an end. Organizations like Peace Over Violence understand this, which is why they offer wraparound services that address the full complexity of a survivor's needs.

Care must be ongoing. Trauma is not resolved in a single appointment or a six-week program. The nervous system heals at its own pace, and healing is rarely linear. Sustainable recovery requires sustained support — and a community that remains present long after the acute crisis has passed.

Care must include the children. Children who witness or experience domestic and interpersonal violence carry those experiences into adulthood. Intergenerational healing requires that we attend to the youngest members of affected families with the same urgency and tenderness we bring to adults.

We Are All Part of This

I have been doing this work long enough to know that violence does not live only in the homes of people we think of as "other." It lives in the families of therapists and judges and teachers and clergy. It lives, perhaps, in homes not unlike yours.

Which means this is not someone else's problem to solve. It is ours. Every one of us has a role to play — in how we speak to each other, in how we raise our children, in how we show up for the people in our lives who are struggling, in how we vote and advocate and demand better from the systems that are supposed to protect the most vulnerable among us.

We can do better. We have to.

Resources

If you or someone you know needs help, please reach out. You do not have to face this alone.

Peace Over Violence A leading Southern California-based organization offering crisis intervention, counseling, legal advocacy, and prevention education. 📞 24-Hour Crisis Hotline: (213) 626-3393 / (310) 392-8381 / (626) 793-3385 🌐 www.peaceoverviolence.org

National Domestic Violence Hotline Confidential support 24/7 for anyone affected by domestic violence. 📞 1-800-799-7233 | Text START to 88788 🌐 www.thehotline.org

RAINN – Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network The nation's largest anti-sexual violence organization. 📞 1-800-656-HOPE (4673) 🌐 www.rainn.org

Crisis Text Line Free, confidential crisis counseling via text, 24/7. 📱 Text HOME to 741741

Love Is Respect (for teens and young adults) Resources specifically focused on healthy relationships, dating abuse prevention, and support. 📞 1-866-331-9474 | Text LOVEIS to 22522 🌐 www.loveisrespect.org

National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) Mental health support, education, and advocacy. 📞 NAMI Helpline: 1-800-950-6264 🌐 www.nami.org

Futures Without Violence Prevention-focused national organization with resources for survivors, families, and professionals. 🌐 www.futureswithoutviolence.org

If you are in immediate danger, please call 911.

*The TRIUMPH model — Trauma Resilience Integration Using Multiple Pathways of Healing — was developed by Peace Over Violence in 2016, with support from Blue Shield of California.

Jessica Anne Pressler, LCSW, is a psychotherapist, hospice social worker, and author with nearly four decades of clinical experience specializing in trauma, narcissistic abuse recovery, and grief counseling. She is the creator of the Traitor Within jessicaannepressler.com.

DISCLAIMER: The contents of this website; blog, video, articles, media, social media, book, and references, are ONLY for informational and entertainment purposes. It is NOT intended as a psychological service, diagnostic tool, medical treatment, personal advice, counseling, or determination of risk and should not be used as a substitute for treatment by psychological or medical services. Please seek consultation by an appropriate healthcare provider. Call 911 if there is an emergency. Call or text 988, which is the National Suicide and Crisis Lifeline,

Call National Suicidal Prevention Hotline at 1-800-273-8255 to talk to someone 24/7 if needed. Call National Domestic Violence Hotline at 1-800-799-7233 to talk to someone 24/7 if needed.

Looking at, reading, listening to any information on my website, social media, YouTube, or book, and communicating with me by email or any other communication with me, you acknowledge and agree that we do not have a professional/client relationship. Use of this site and information associated with this site is solely at the visitor’s own risk.