My Story, My Way: Who Am I, Anyway?

By Zoe Reilly

Many adult survivors of domestic abuse describe childhood homes that felt both familiar and frightening. Safety was inconsistent, protection uncertain, and the atmosphere volatile, unpredictable, and overwhelming. In such environments, children often learn to comply, stay quiet, and make themselves small because that feels safer.

A young survivor, told me they had been nicknamed “miserable” when in truth they are not miserable at all — they are silent. Silence becomes survival. Always scoping out the route to safety. Quiet feels like the only safe place to be.

In homes marked by conflict, children may witness adults throwing objects, experience physical harm, or step between fighting adults to protect younger siblings. These truths are not about blame; they are realities shared by countless survivors.

Survival Before Safety

Exposure to domestic abuse teaches survival long before it teaches safety. Fight. Flight. Freeze. Fawn. Survivors often learn them all.

• Fight – Arguing or snapping back, not from aggression but from fear of being attacked.

• Flight – A heightened radar for danger, reading atmospheres like books, predicting shifts before they occur.

• Freeze – Cement-feet, sweating palms, pounding heart, the inability to move or speak.

• Fawn – Becoming experts at soothing, calming, and appeasing others. What begins as survival can later be channelled into professional practice — de‑escalating high‑risk situations, protecting others, and keeping environments safe.

These behaviours are not manipulation; this isn’t an unwillingness to behave. They are survival strategies.

Shadows of Survival

Survival leaves shadows: shame, guilt and confusion about worth and identity.

Survivors carry these burdens daily, children who believe they weren’t lovable enough to avoid harm, adults who believe they weren’t “good enough” to deserve safety.

The shame never belonged to them.

Misdiagnosis and misunderstanding are common, such as “borderline personality disorder” are sometimes applied, yet trauma itself drives constant questioning and over thinking: What did you mean by that? Are you annoyed with me? Am I enough? How can I be better?

Normalising Chaos

Those patterns can continue into adulthood. Staying in a marriage or relationship that is abusive- physically, sexually, economically, and emotionally. Entering into further abusive relationships, marked by control, manipulation, and the same underlying dynamics of power imbalance because we know no better.

Not because we want. But because trauma normalises chaos. It whispers that this is the best you can hope for.

Healing began with unpicking those beliefs. With the slow, painful realisation that more was deserved, even if it had never been received. And when kindness finally appeared, it felt confusing, frustrating, even frightening.

The path I have chosen is to help healing for those who have not known peace, for those that repeat patterns of abuse to others perhaps, or even to themselves.

I am here to amplify the voice of the victims and survivors regardless of age because if we don’t here the stories of those who have suffered harm, we cannot root out domestic abuse and sexual violence at its core.

So… Who Am I?

I am a survivor.

am an activist. A feminist. A guide for women, children, young people, and survivors.

I am the voice calling from the end of the tunnel:  Telling you where the known obstacles are, and how to manoeuvre them. To tell others what this means for you, and to give you the microphone when you are ready to tell us how you navigated your way out .

I know the pitfalls, the traps, the fear. I know the way around the danger because I have lived it and worked alongside those who have lived it too.

It isn’t easy. It isn’t clean. But it is possible.

And allowing people to say  this is  my story, my way — is how I begin.