Reconnecting With Your Feelings After Abuse: How Abuse Hijacks Your Emotional Processing and How to Retrain and Reconnect to Your Healthy Feelings

After abuse, emotions can stop making sense.

Sometimes they are too big for the situation you are in. Sometimes they are absent altogether. Sometimes they appear hours or days after the moment that should have sparked them.

You may have tried to tell yourself to "just be in the moment," but the connection still wasn't there. You may have tried to force yourself to feel happy, but the joy remained muted. You may even be smiling on the outside while feeling flat underneath. These efforts often fail because the emotional system itself has been disrupted.

What actually helps.

Reconnecting With Your Feelings After Abuse provides a step-by-step guide to rebuilding your ability to process emotions in a healthy way. It explains how emotional processing works under normal conditions, how abuse hijacks that process, and how the protective interruptions you built to survive continue to interfere with emotional flow long after the abusive environment has ended.

The book shows what happens when the emotional processing cycle remains broken, including emotional dysregulation, dissociation, delayed responses, and overwhelming emotional surges. It then guides you through a clear, five-step reconditioning process that supports the gradual restoration of emotional stability, continuity, and trust in your internal signals.

Written from lived experience, this book offers survivors something rare: a clear explanation of what happened to their emotional system, and a grounded pathway to rebuild it without destabilisation or self-blame.