The women I see arrive at very different points on the same road. Some are fluent — they can name every dynamic in the family they came from, cite the research, and tell you the year it started. Some are still in the part where the whole thing is fog, and the only clear fact is exhaustion they cannot account for.

Neither is a prerequisite. What brings them here is the same underneath: harm that was repeated, relational, and hard to escape. Childhood abuse. Neglect no one intervened in. Developmental trauma laid down before there were words for it. Years inside a relationship that taught them to distrust their own account of it. It leaves a specific residue — the vigilance that never fully switches off, the sleep that will not come, the thing that started as the only reliable way to get to sleep, the sense of being simultaneously too much and not enough, the body that runs the arithmetic on a mood before anyone has spoken.

None of that is a character flaw. None of it is evidence that you have failed to try hard enough. It is what a nervous system does after it has been asked to survive something for a long time.

You do not have to arrive with the whole thing figured out, or even well-worded. You have to be believed accurately, and then met at the layer where the harm actually settled. That is the work.