Trauma-Informed Care for Survivors: Domestic Violence Awareness Month Support in Tewksbury, MA
Earlier this month, a 49-year-old mother in Reading, Massachusetts, was found dead of a gunshot wound in her kitchen. Her son, aged 13 years, was inside the house. The man of interest, who is 22, was spotted that evening heading toward Tewksbury in an automobile before being arrested in Vermont. It was alleged domestic violence but not “the typical domestic violence case,” said the Middlesex District Attorney. Hold that sentence for one second. Danger doesn’t always come like the way you imagined.
Tewksbury has learned this lesson the hard way. In 2019, 39-year-old Jennifer Kalicki died in an apartment on Archstone Avenue. Her partner was convicted of first-degree murder in 2023, and investigators uncovered a pattern of escalating abuse, including that he had convinced her to invoke the Fifth Amendment so earlier charges would be dismissed. The District Attorney said this kind of controlling behavior is “far too common.” Common. Not rare, not distant, and not happening to someone else.
October is Domestic Violence Awareness Month, and if you’re reading this because something at home doesn’t feel safe, you are not overreacting. You’re noticing. Let’s look at what an abuse looks like, what healing should feel like, and how trauma-informed care can offer a way forward for survivors.
The Five Types of Domestic and Family Violence
In Massachusetts, about one in three women (33.9%) and one in three men (31.7%) say they have experienced physical, sexual, or stalking intimate partner violence in their lifetime. Those numbers are your neighbors, your co-workers, and your classmates, and this is why awareness month exists. Abuse can also extend outside of couples to parents, siblings, and adult children. It rarely stays in one lane.
1. Physical Violence
Hitting, shoving, strangling, restraining, and using weapons all fall here. It’s the most visible, and the fear it leaves behind lasts longer than the bruises.
Guns increase the risk dramatically. The National Domestic Violence Hotline says that the presence of a gun in the home increases the risk of a woman being murdered by 500%.
2. Emotional and Psychological Abuse
Insults, gaslighting, threats, constant monitoring, and isolation from friends belong in this category. Nothing leaves a mark, so outsiders (and sometimes you) wave it off as “just an argument.”
It is control, though, and the controlling pattern is exactly what prosecutors pointed to in the Kalicki case.
3. Sexual Abuse
This involves pressure, coercion, reproductive control, and forced sex, even within a marriage or long-term relationship.
CDC indicated that 45% of female rapes and 29% of male rapes were committed by an intimate partner.
Consent is not revoked after moving in together and doesn’t transfer to anyone else.
4. Financial Abuse
Your abuser could be in control of the bank account; jeopardize your employment; hide assets; or have debts run up in your name. The objective is to make you dependent and make it seem like you can’t leave.
Survivors experience long-term effects after their release from the abuse, like economic and housing insecurity, according to researchers.
5. Digital and Technological Abuse
Keeping tabs on your phone, reading your messages, requiring a password, and threatening to post something online are all included.
The tools change, but the goal remains the same: to make you feel “supervised” everywhere you go. Follow that instinct if the device in your pocket feels like a leash.
What Trauma-Informed Care Really Means
Trauma-informed care raises a different question. Instead of “what’s wrong with you?” it says “what happened to you, and how do we keep you from being hurt again?” It is based on six pillars: safety, trustworthiness and transparency, peer support, collaboration and mutuality, empowerment, voice and choice, and attention to cultural, historical and gender issues. Think of each one as a promise. You will be safe. You’ll meet others who understand. Decisions get made with you, never about you. You set the pace.
Your body already speaks this language, too. Trauma tends to run on five survival scripts, the five F’s: fight, flight, freeze, fawn, and flop. Fawning, the instinct to please someone so the peace holds, is the one survivors judge themselves for most, yet it is simply a way of staying alive. Trust-Based Relational Intervention (TBRI) adds the five B’s, which show how trauma lands in the brain, biology, body, behavior, and beliefs. Its core idea is that behavior is “the language of unmet needs.”
The Importance of Trauma-Informed Care in Domestic Violence and Forrest Behavioral Health’s Support
The places that are supposed to help survivors can hurt them again. The coercion you fled can be replicated when a provider pushes you, interrogates you, or assumes control. That’s the point of trauma-informed care. Trauma-informed counseling is available at Forrest Behavioral Health in Bedford as part of substance use, depression, anxiety, and PTSD treatment. Trauma and coping often go hand-in-hand, and that’s important. Forrest isn’t a crisis line or a legal advocate, but it can be the place where the long work of healing happens.
Common Therapeutic Modalities Used Within This Framework
Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) can help you to recognize thoughts that come into your mind, for example, the one like “this is my fault.” The most impactful interventions for intimate partner violence (IPV) have been one-on-one, survivor-specific cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT).
Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT) builds skills to address the overwhelming feelings instead of being swallowed by them.
You can also try EMDR to help your brain process traumatic memories so they don’t play at full volume.
You have privacy in individual therapy. Group therapy, in contrast, provides you with the comfort of “me too,” and motivational interviewing lets you acknowledge your readiness rather than skip over it.
Treatment for psychiatric problems and medications can help calm your moods (like panic or insomnia) and help you control them.
Each of these at your pace in a trauma-informed setting.
Final Words
Healing is not always where we think it’s going, and danger is not always what we think. It might begin with a phone call, a private inquiry, or a first-time meeting with no pressure. Call Forrest Behavioral Health at (781) 570-5781 or check your insurance at forrestbh.com if you feel safe enough to give us a call. SafeLink (877-785-2020) & National Domestic Violence Hotline (800-799-7233) are available 24 hours a day. You are not overreacting, and you should be treated as an expert on your own life.
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