These days, it feels like the word “trauma” is everywhere—on social media, in everyday conversations, and especially in therapy rooms. But even as awareness grows, healing from trauma can still feel just as hard—sometimes even harder. Knowing what happened doesn’t always make it easier to move forward.

Week after week, I support clients suffering in silence. They hold their trauma inside and feel like they have no one to tell. This is often how survivors of traumatic and abusive families end up repeating cycles of abuse, dysfunction, and unhealed wounds, despite promising themselves they would “never” become like their parents (or other bad examples they were exposed to).

On any healing journey, the process can feel isolating and overwhelming. But this is especially true for survivors of traumatic families; survivors whose “safe place” was traumatic. For many people, it takes time to understand how their dysfunctional upbringing shaped their adult struggles, and that their experience was not normal. I know this from my clients, but also because I went through it, too.

As a teenager, I remember going to the school nurse, who had me fill out one of those papers where I circled responses to questions about the problems I had been trying to push away. Questions like how many hours of sleep I was getting, how I felt about myself, my anxiety and stress level, and other things of that nature. My responses revealed what I already knew: high anxiety and stress.

“Why are you so stressed?” the nurse scoffed, hurriedly shuffling papers around her desk. “What can a high school girl possibly have to worry about? You don’t have any bills or responsibilities. Life should be great for you!”

What could I say to that? I immediately felt ashamed.

Maybe she’s right, I thought, maybe there’s something wrong with me.

“Oh, I just have a bunch of tests,” I blurted out quickly. It seemed like a reasonable excuse. I was an honors student, so blaming my stress on school was a safe response. An easy out.

In truth, I always envied peers who expressed stress about a test or completing homework. For me, school was the least stressful part of my life. It was the one place where things were predictable. Safe. I longed for the “normal” stress my peers complained about. Any stress over a test or homework assignment paled in comparison to what I was dealing with at home.

I was too young to realize that what I was experiencing at home was abusive and traumatic, and that it was not normal. Still, I was old enough to know that telling the “truth” would make the situation much worse. So, I held it inside and unintentionally let it become a part of me.

There was no one safe for me to talk to. It was the early 2000s, and Mental health and therapy were still heavily stigmatized. People were much less inclined to talk openly about things like dysfunction or abuse happening at home, and I would have been too embarrassed to tell anyone anyway.

So instead, I did what I could to try to feel better, using the only things available to me at the time: food and relationships. Desperate for love from anyone who would have me, I took on the classic stereotype of anxious attachment. I was like a prisoner of war starved of food; I clung to whatever scraps I could get. Not surprisingly, many (if not most) of these relationships were unhealthy. Some were even abusive. But I kept repeating the same patterns, again and again, because chaos felt familiar, and I mistook that familiarity for safety.

At the time, I had no idea that my experiences at home were creating a blueprint for myself and future relationships.

Isolation is an experience that many survivors of abusive households know well. We turn to it for many reasons: feeling that no one understands, being scared to admit the truth of our experience, lacking understanding, on our part or by others, or the fear of an abusive situation getting worse. Isolation can often be the reason why we stay silent for so long.

As a young person, I lived with shame and isolation, and it kept me from recognizing how my chaotic home environment was shaping the person I would become. Only as an adult did the connection dawn on me. And I knew: If I had that experience, others likely did as well.

Survivors of traumatic families often adapt in ways that once ensured survival but later complicate adult relationships and self-understanding. For those who grew up without a safe place, healing often begins when safety is finally allowed to exist; not only physical safety, but the emotional safety that comes with acknowledgment and decreased isolation.

For many of us, healing begins when we start giving ourselves permission to take our experiences seriously.

Excerpted, in part, from my book The Cycle Breaker’s Guide to Healthy Relationships.