Dr Niyati on Post-Traumatic Growth, Self-Trust, and Rebuilding After Abuse

Why healing after abuse is not a return to the past, but a journey towards greater authenticity, freedom, and wholeness.

What you’ll find in this article:

• Why healing after abuse is not about returning to who you were before, but becoming someone new

• The small but powerful shifts that begin rebuilding self trust and identity

• Why creativity, movement, yoga, and embodied practices can play an important role in recovery

• Gentle ways to reconnect with your body when it feels unsafe, numb, or unfamiliar

• How survivors can begin healing without pressure, perfectionism, or needing to “move on”

• Dr. Niyati’s closing message for anyone who is doubting themselves or struggling to keep going

---

Welcome back to Expert Insights and to the third and final part of my conversation with Dr. Niyati Kadakia, Associate Clinical Psychologist and author of the Substack newsletter Maitri: Empowerment, Reinvention, and Post Traumatic Growth.

In Part 1, she explored the wider cultural, familial, and social systems that shape women’s experiences of abuse and influence how they understand themselves within relationships. In Part 2, she moved into the internal experience of abuse itself: the confusion, trauma bonds, self doubt, and the difficult realities of leaving and rebuilding after prolonged harm.

In this final part of our conversation, Dr Niyati turns our attention to healing.

For many survivors, healing can feel like another impossible standard to live up to. There is pressure to move on, to feel grateful, to become stronger, or to return to the person they once were. But as Dr. Niyati explains, healing is rarely a return. It is a becoming. A gradual process of reclaiming voice, identity, self trust, pleasure, creativity, and the freedom to exist as your authentic self.

We discuss what those first steps can look like when you feel overwhelmed, why healing is as much about the body as it is about the mind, and how practices such as movement, creativity, yoga, and self expression can help survivors reconnect with parts of themselves that were silenced or pushed aside for years.

What I appreciate most about Dr. Niyati’s perspective is that she does not present healing as a destination or a neat transformation. She speaks honestly about grief, fear, setbacks, and the courage it takes to build a life that no longer revolves around survival. Throughout this conversation, there is a deep respect for the complexity of recovery and a quiet belief in the human capacity to grow beyond what once seemed impossible.

If the first two parts of this series helped you understand what happened to you, I hope this final conversation helps you imagine what is still possible.

You describe healing as “a becoming” rather than a return. What does that look like in practice?

I think many people imagine healing as returning to who they were before the trauma, before the marriage, before the loss, before the abuse. But in my experience, healing is rarely a return. It is a becoming.

Profound experiences - especially prolonged relational trauma - change people. The goal is not to erase what happened or return to an earlier version of the self, but to slowly integrate the experience in a way that allows for greater agency, authenticity, clarity, and aliveness. This aligns closely with research on post-traumatic growth, which suggests that struggle can sometimes lead to deep psychological transformation, shifts in identity, meaning, relationships, and priorities (Tedeschi & Calhoun, 2004).

And clinically, what I often see is that healing initially looks very unglamorous. It looks like:

• Learning to trust your own perception again

• Setting a boundary without apologizing

• Resting without guilt

• Feeling anger without collapsing into shame

• Making decisions without excessive fear

• Learning how to exist without constantly monitoring someone else’s emotions.

For many women, especially those raised within highly relational or collectivist systems, healing also involves disentangling identity from conditioning. It can involve asking questions they were never allowed to ask before: What do I actually want? What feels true to me? and, Who am I outside of obligation, performance, or survival?

Importantly, healing is not only emotional or cognitive. It is often physical and embodied as well.

Many survivors of chronic control or relational trauma become deeply disconnected from their bodies, desires, sensuality, instincts, or sexuality. Particularly in cultures where women are taught to suppress desire, prioritize duty, or experience their bodies primarily through service to others, reclaiming embodiment can become a profound part of recovery. I often see women slowly reconnecting to pleasure, movement, creativity, sensuality, attraction, rest, joy, and desire - not necessarily through sexuality alone, but through feeling alive inside themselves again.

That process can feel both liberating and frightening because authenticity often requires grieving the version of self that was built around survival and social approval.

Over time, I often see women become more embodied, more internally anchored, and less psychologically organized around fear, approval, or external validation. Not harder. Not colder. But clearer.

And importantly, healing does not mean the person never feels grief, fear, or pain again. It means those experiences no longer completely define the architecture of the self.

So when I say healing is “a becoming,” I mean that many survivors are not going back to who they once were.

They are slowly becoming people who can live with greater truth, self-trust, embodiment, freedom, desire, and psychological wholeness than they may ever have experienced before.

What are some of the first shifts that begin to happen when someone starts rebuilding their sense of self?

One of the first shifts I often see is that the person slowly begins moving from survival toward self-awareness.

When someone has lived for a long time within control, chronic criticism, fear, or relational instability, much of their psychological energy becomes organized around adaptation:

• Monitoring others

• Preventing conflict

• Staying emotionally safe

• Maintaining harmony

• Minimizing their own needs

So in the beginning, rebuilding the self is often not dramatic. It is subtle.

A woman may begin noticing:

“I actually do not like being spoken to this way.”
“I am exhausted.”
“I do not agree.”
“I want something different.”

Those moments may sound simple, but psychologically they are significant because the person is beginning to reconnect with their own internal experience rather than organizing entirely around external expectations.

In many South Asian and collectivist contexts, women are often socialized to derive identity through roles: daughter, wife, mother, caretaker, or peacemaker.

So when recovery begins, there is often an uncomfortable but important shift from role-based identity toward a more authentic sense of self.

Clinically, I often see women begin experimenting with very small acts of autonomy like, setting a boundary, saying no, resting, taking up physical space differently, wearing something they genuinely like, returning to creativity, reconnecting with friendships, or expressing anger without immediately collapsing into guilt.

And I think the body is important here too.

Many survivors initially experience themselves almost entirely through tension, vigilance, or numbness. So part of rebuilding the self often involves reconnecting physically through movement, breath, desire, sensuality, creativity, or simply learning what safety feels like in the body again. Research on trauma and embodiment shows that healing is not purely cognitive - it also involves restoring connection to the nervous system and bodily self (van der Kolk, 2014).

Over time, these small moments accumulate into something larger: self-trust.

And I think that is one of the earliest and most powerful signs of healing: when a person slowly begins believing that their thoughts, feelings, instincts, needs, and desires deserve to exist alongside everyone else’s.

For someone who feels overwhelmed in their healing, where would you suggest they begin in a way that feels manageable and safe?