Shame, Voice, and Healing: A Person-Centered Approach to Sexual Trauma

Shame, Voice, and Healing: A Person-Centered Approach to Sexual Trauma

Sexual abuse is not only a violation of the body. It is a rupture in a person’s sense of safety, trust, and belonging. It can reshape how someone feels in their own skin, how they relate to others, and how they move through the world. Survivors often carry shame, guilt, or mistrust, emotions that do not originate from them, but from what happened.

Therapy can be one place where this weight is slowly put down. Yet, contrary to popular images of “treatment,” counseling is not about finding quick solutions or providing step-by-step techniques. It is about relationship, presence, and trust. In person-centered, trauma-informed practice, the aim is not to ‘fix’ the person, but to be with them to create conditions where their own capacity for healing can re-emerge.

Understanding Trauma Responses

For survivors of sexual abuse, reactions such as hypervigilance, dissociation, shame, or numbness are common. These are not signs of weakness or pathology. They are natural responses to overwhelming threat.

The survival system. When abuse occurs, the nervous system activates for survival: fight, flight, freeze, or fawn. These states can linger long after the abuse ends, leaving survivors tense, apprehensive, or disconnected. Feeling on edge, an inability to concentrate, or a sudden feeling of “leaving the body” are not random; they are the nervous system’s attempts to keep safe.

The burden of shame. Many survivors describe carrying shame or guilt. Abuse often involves dynamics of secrecy, silencing, and blame. Over time, these external messages become internal voices. The survivor may struggle with thoughts like “It was my fault,” or “I should have stopped it.”.

This burden is often made heavier by unhelpful societal stereotypes and the ignorance of others. Too often, survivors are met not with compassion but with disbelief, minimizing, or well-meaning but harmful comments. These responses can deepen shame, encourage silence, and leave survivors feeling even more isolated. In some cases, they can be retraumatizing.

Therapy offers a very different experience. It provides a space where people are believed, where their reality is honored, and where their story is received with care rather than judgement. In that setting, shame can begin to shift, no longer reinforced by stigma or silence.

Impact on identity. Sexual abuse can deeply affect how a person relates to their own body, their sense of self and worth, as well as their feelings about intimacy. Survivors may feel alienated from themselves and from others, uncertain of how to trust again.

Intimacy can become complicated. Some people find themselves withdrawing from sexual contact, feeling shut down or disconnected. Others may notice patterns of seeking out sexual experiences more frequently than before, sometimes without understanding why. Both responses, and everything in between, are common ways the body and mind try to cope after such violation.

These shifts can leave survivors questioning themselves or feeling as though they are no longer the person they once were. Therapy offers a safe and affirming space to explore these experiences without judgement, to make sense of patterns that might feel unfamiliar, and to begin rebuilding a sense of connection to oneself and to others.

Person centered approach: Being Met as a Person

For many survivors, the deepest need in therapy is not for strategies or step-by-step tools, but for a relationship that feels safe and real. Abuse often leaves behind a legacy of betrayal, silence, or being dismissed. In that context, the experience of being listened to and taken seriously can be profoundly healing.

In the therapy room, this means being understood, having someone really hear the inner world without distortion or judgement. It means sitting with someone who is genuine, not hiding behind professional masks, and whose presence is steady and trustworthy. It means feeling accepted and valued as a whole person with all the feelings you bring.

This approach can be the soil in which healing can slowly take root. Survivors often describe that what helps most is not a technique, but the sense of being believed, accompanied, and recognized as worthy of care and respect.

Trauma-Informed Practice in Action

Person-centered therapy provides the foundation. Trauma-informed practice ensures that foundation is safe. It means recognizing not only how trauma can live in the body, but also how it reshapes a person’s view of themselves, their relationships, and the world around them.

Trust can feel fragile, so it matters that therapy is grounded in openness and collaboration, where the person’s choices guide the process.

Safety and pacing. Survivors often fear being overwhelmed by memories or emotions. Therapy takes this seriously. Pacing is about moving slowly, with awareness of how trauma has impacted the self and how someone presents in the world. Sometimes this means pausing when things feel too much, sometimes grounding in the here and now, and sometimes simply respecting silence. What matters most is allowing the person to go at their own rhythm, so they can feel safe enough to stay present in the process.

Choice and agency. Abuse removes control. Therapy can help the person restore it. Survivors are offered choice at every step whether to speak, to pause, to shift focus. Even small choices build a sense of agency.

Staying with what’s happening now. Dissociation or overwhelm are common after trauma. In therapy, this might look like the therapist gently noticing what’s happening perhaps a change in tone, silence, or a distant look and being curious about it together. This isn’t about pushing for details or forcing disclosure. It’s about helping the person feel seen in the moment and offering a way back to connection and safety.

Therapy and the wider context

Survivors do not suffer only in private. They live within a culture where sexual violence is surrounded by myths and silence. Victim-blaming narratives “Why didn’t you fight back?”, “Why didn’t you leave?” compound the original harm.

I work in a way that attends not only to individual wounds but also to the social context. Gender norms, cultural scripts, and systems of power shape how survivors are treated and how they see themselves.

In the therapy room, this can mean exploring the weight of societal disbelief or the silences that surround sexual abuse, and how these shape a survivor’s sense of self. It can also mean gently noticing the influence of culture, gender, or identity on their experience. Above all, therapy offers a space where someone can begin to question the messages they’ve internalized and gradually come to their own understanding and sense of assurance. Therapy should be a place where people’s experiences are taken seriously, their voice is heard, and the way they see and feel about things is honored.

Therapy is not about undoing what happened, but it can be about learning to live differently with what happened. It does not erase the past, but it can help reshape the present.

Over time, survivors may find:

• A lessening of shame and self-blame.

• Greater trust in themselves and in chosen relationships.

• Reconnection with body and identity.

• The possibility of belonging and connecting to themselves, and to others.

These shifts are rarely linear. There may be setbacks and pauses. But within a safe, consistent therapeutic relationship, survivors can begin to reclaim their voice, their choice, their right to exist fully as themselves, however they define that.

Conclusion

A person-centered, trauma-informed approach offers more than techniques. It offers presence. It offers a relationship grounded in empathy, authenticity, and respect. It offers a space where people are not “worked on” but accompanied as they begin to make sense of their story, reclaim their identity, and rediscover the possibility of belonging.

In the end, therapy is not about ‘doing’, but about being with.

Further Reading

If you’d like to explore more, these books and authors offer valuable insights into trauma and healing:

• Judith Herman – Trauma and Recovery

• Bessel van der Kolk – The Body Keeps the Score

• Babette Rothschild – The Body Remembers

• Carolyn Spring – Unshame (accessible, survivor-friendly)

These resources are not a replacement for therapy, but they can offer support, understanding, and language for what you may be experiencing.

Nadia Giannelou MSc, PGDip, MBACP