I find it helps to share your experience with others but I dont think a therapist is necessary as long as your friends are good listeners and understand the issues you are discussing

For the last two years I have been in cognitive processing therapy. Rather than rehash the abuse of the past, we deal mostly with the present. I also deal daily with PTSD, so this type of therapy does wonders for me in dealing with the aftereffects of abuse. It has made me understand the feelings that I have and validates them.

"rehashing" what has happened to you is only helpful if you have buried it so deep that it has the probablility of exploding on you one day. Once your abusive relationship is "out of the closet" (so to speak) then rehashing what happened doesn't really do anything. It is much more important to focus on how it might have altered your present and look to the future.

I agree whole heartedly with what you've and others have said. Talking will do no good,if you're just rehashing a painful situation. I've rehashed FOR years and only when I started looking for ways to get over certain issues did talking to others help. Now I recount verbal and emotional abuse from my mother for years as events,instead of emotional triggers.

My abusive relationship is several years in my past. When I left I just turned my back on it and walked away, never dealing with it; nor with the mindset in me that tolerated it. Many years later wat revpatty talked about happened. My past came bursting out into my present and I was having nightmares, flashbacks, panic attacks. Talk therapy allowed me to remember the truth of the situation instead of the jumble of emotions and reactions that it had become in my mind because all I had done was try to bury it. I couldn't remember without reliving everything. Once I got through that (and it took several months by the way) I was able to move forward. I could see my past with empathy for the "me" that was living it but also with an informed distance that my therapy gave me. Once that happened Cognitive Behavioral Therapy has been doing me the most amount of good. I am able to look at my past and deal with it as almost a detached observer and learn how to act and, almost more importantly, *react* in a healthy manner. My triggers sometimes take me by surprise but now I have tools to get through the moment and it has made all the difference.

Counseling with someone experienced with abuse and domestic violence is making all the difference for me.

I was in a group where people were abused really bad it made things worse for me, got more depressed.I had to let go that me and my parents will ever have a healthy relationship and today I am ok with it, I havent seen them in 6 yrs now and my life is a whole lot better.For me journaling worked better. When you share about it you have to be able to dump it and leave it there not take it with you, sometimes that is very hard to do.Just keep journaling it tell it get's out of you're head, and then move on and don't take it back.

I used to live in the same province as my family and inlaws. I found moving FAR away from them all has really helped in self discovery and recovery of past verbal/emotional abuses from pretty much all of them. I tried *working* things out with them but got tired of it all. *I* decided one day to just up the family(we had two very young children at that time)and move us all across country. I did it for two reasons. One to get away from all the family members that were toxic to me. Two I knew out here,without a college education if I ever decided to leave my partner(who's a covert abuser) that I would have lots of well paying jobs/benefits available at my disposal. I was tired of feeling helpless back home. I couldn't even begin to discover who I was or what I wanted in life with the environment I was in. My relationship with my partner is 95% better than it was back home. I realized it wasn't only me who felt the toxicity from family,it was my husband as well. We're currently still working on a few issues-unfortunately there are things he did to me back home that still haunts me today.

Part of my healing process is writing down what I'm feeling when I'm stressed over something(helps me to clarify underlying historical issues). I find talking *doesn't* help me any. I'm just spewing out what seems like a broken record.