26th September 2026
Where we are starting
Today we are going to talk about how you reclaim your sleep after years of abuse, and in particular after abuse where your sleep itself was attacked. We will start with what was done to your sleep and why it is so hard for you now. Then we will look at what you are most likely going through at night. After that we will work through the things you can do to get your rest back, and we will be honest about which of them help you cope and which are the deeper work of getting well.
Sleep is where your body repairs itself, and it is where your mind settles and makes sense of what has happened to you. It also restores your clear thinking, your steadiness, and your ability to hold yourself together through the day. Without sleep, the fear and the memories have nowhere to go, so they stay raw and keep dragging you back down. Sleep is where your mind begins to work through them, and that is the start of healing. This is why getting your sleep back is one of the most important parts of your recovery. It is what gives you the strength to rebuild everything else.
What was done to your sleep
For many men who have been through this, sleep was one of the things the abuse went after directly. Sleep deprivation is a recognised form of abuse, and a serious one, even though it leaves no mark that anyone can see.
She may have kept you awake for hours, starting arguments late at night that went in circles and would not end. She may have woken you as soon as you drifted off, again and again, so that a full night became impossible. She may have made you pay the next day for having slept at all. In the worst of it, she may have attacked you while you were asleep, so that you woke to pain or to shouting in the dark.
Out of all of that, your body drew two lessons, and it learned them the hard way, night after night, for years.
- The first lesson is that resting gets you punished. Every time you let your guard down enough to rest, something bad followed, so your body came to treat rest itself as dangerous, as the thing that brings trouble.
- The second lesson is that sleep is when you are most at risk. Sleep is the one time you cannot see what is coming, cannot react and cannot defend yourself, and she used exactly that, coming at you when you were least able to protect yourself. So your body learned that going fully to sleep is the most dangerous thing you can do.
These two lessons are the root of why you cannot sleep now. They are accurate conclusions your body reached from what was really happening to it. Your body was right to draw them. It will hold onto them until it has real reason to let them go.
Why you still cannot sleep now that you have left
You have left, you are safe, and the sleep still does not come. This confuses a lot of men, because they expected that getting out would be enough. There are two reasons it is not.
- The first reason is that your body learned the lessons that sleep is dangerous far too deeply to simply drop them in a night or two. Your thinking mind knows that she is gone, that the door is locked, and that nothing is going to happen to you now. Your body has not caught up with what your mind knows. It spent years being proven right that rest and sleep were dangerous, and it needs a great deal of real evidence, across many nights, before it will believe that the danger has passed. So it keeps you in a light, half-alert sleep, ready to wake and defend yourself, because that is what kept you alive.
- The second reason is that while the abuse was happening, you could not afford to stop and deal with any of what was being done to you. You were surviving, and surviving took everything you had. Now that you are safe, your mind finally has room to process what it could not before, and it does that work at night, when there is nothing left to distract you. So the memories and the fear come back at the very point you expected relief. This is your mind finally doing the work it could not do while you were still in danger, and that work is part of getting better, even though it does not feel that way.
What you are living with has a name. Years of prolonged, inescapable abuse commonly produce what is called complex trauma, and badly disrupted sleep is one of its central features. That name matters. It means your broken sleep is a known and expected part of a recognised condition, rather than a personal failing or a lack of discipline, so it is something that can be understood and worked on.
For now, getting to sleep may mean exhausting yourself until your body simply gives out, because that is the only way it will let go of the watch it is keeping.
You might lie there exhausted with your mind racing, because once the house goes quiet there is nothing left to hold the thoughts down, and they rise up and begin to loop.
The nightmares may put you back with her, or replay what was done to you, and you may come to dread going to sleep because of them.
And you may wake in the small hours of the morning in a cold sweat, heart pounding, certain that someone is in the house. This is one of the most frightening parts, and one of the most common.
You may avoid your bed altogether and sleep somewhere else. For me, that place was the couch. During the abuse I was not allowed a bed. I was made to sleep on the couch for years. The couch was also where I felt safest, because there I was not lying beside her, and I was away from the wet patch she left on my side of the bed from the wet towel she would put down before I got in. So the couch became the place my body knew how to sleep, both because it was the only place I was allowed and because it was the one place I felt safe.
Long after I had a bed of my own again, I still slept far better on that couch than in a proper bed, and the bed still felt wrong. Part of that is the bed carrying the memory of what happened there. And part of it is that my body learned to sleep on the couch for all those years, so a normal bed is unfamiliar ground, and you do not settle easily in a place you do not know.
All of this is your body and mind doing exactly what those years trained them to do.
Why the usual sleep advice will not help you
When you go looking for help with sleep, you will find the same advice everywhere. You will be told to cut out caffeine, to keep your screens off before bed, and to stick to a strict bedtime. That advice is written for a person who is fundamentally safe and simply has some poor habits, and it misses your situation completely.
Your problem is not a bad habit. Your problem is that your body does not yet believe the night is safe. No bedtime routine will fix that on its own, because you are not dealing with a discipline problem. You are dealing with a safety problem. If you try the standard checklist and it does not work, you can end up feeling that you have failed at even this. The checklist was never built for what you are facing.
Most of the steps in this article will help you cope and start sleeping again, and some are the deeper work of getting well. The ones you can take on your own will carry you through the nights and get you resting. The deep repair is done with proper help, which we come to at the end.
How to create the conditions for sleep
The approach that works here is the same one given to soldiers who come home from a war zone and cannot sleep. A soldier who has spent months in a place where he could be attacked at any moment comes home to a safe house and a comfortable bed, and he still cannot sleep, because his body is still on guard, still scanning the dark, still ready for a threat that is no longer there. The help he is given is aimed at making his sleeping place feel secure, so that his body can stop scanning and stand down. Your situation is the same. Your war was fought in your own home, and your body learned the same lesson, that sleep is when the attack comes. So the work ahead is the same, which is to make your nights safe, night after night, until your body believes it.
There are four conditions to set each night, and you are the one who controls every one of them.
1. Secure the house
The first is to secure the house. Lock the doors and the windows, and check them, so that you know for certain that the whole place is closed and there is no way in. This is the outer layer, the building itself accounted for before you do anything else. Knowing the house is locked gives your body the first piece of the evidence it needs, which is that nothing can reach you from outside.
2. Set up the bedroom for safety
The second is to set up the room you sleep in so that you can settle in it. Leave a low light on, or keep a lamp within reach, so that you can see the room instead of lying there straining to make out what is in the dark. Put on some steady background sound, a fan or white noise, so that the ordinary noises of the house settling at night have a plain and constant sound over them, and a creak does not read as a footstep. Where you can, sleep so that you can see the door, with your back to a wall, in the spot that feels most defensible, so that nothing can come at you from behind and you are not lying there watching the room.
It may seem safer to keep something within reach that you could defend yourself with. Do not. Avoid having any weapon at arm's reach of the bed, because it makes the night more dangerous rather than safer. A man who wakes from a nightmare in a panic, still half in the dream and certain that someone is in the room, is in no state to be reaching for a weapon. And men going through what you are going through are at a raised risk of harming themselves, which a weapon by the bed makes far easier in a bad moment. Your safety comes from the locked house and the room you can see, and that is where you should let it come from.
The last part of setting up the room is to give your body the setup it already knows how to sleep in. During those years your body adapted to a particular way of sleeping, and that setup is what it now reads as normal. It is the same for a soldier who slept on hard ground for long enough. He then struggles to settle in a soft bed, and he may sleep better on the floor. The soft bed is perfectly comfortable. His body simply learned the ground, so the bed feels strange to it. For me, the setup my body knew was being wrapped up in a doona. A long while after I got out, I lay down and wrapped myself in a doona on my bed the same way I used to on the couch, and I had the best sleep I had known in years, because I had given my body back the thing it recognised. Start with whatever setup your body learned, and use it the same way every night. Then, in small stages, bring that setup into your bed, so that the bed slowly becomes a place your body knows, rather than unfamiliar ground it cannot settle in.
3. Wind down the hour before bed
The third is to build a wind-down for the hour before you get into bed. What you want in that hour is something calming, non-threatening, and just active enough to hold your attention without stirring you up. Two things people reach for do the opposite of that.
- The first is alcohol. Do not drink yourself to sleep. It may knock you out, and it wrecks the quality of the sleep you do get and leaves your night more broken, which is the opposite of what you need.
- The second is your phone. Do not doomscroll yourself into exhaustion trying to get to sleep. The phone does take your mind off your own thoughts, and it does it in a harmful way, by feeding you a stream of high-emotion content that keeps your mind wired and scanning. That is the very state the abuse held you in, so scrolling recreates the feeling you are trying to get away from, and it does more harm than good. Put your phone on silent or turn it off, and put it out of reach.
What you want instead is a physical book you have already read many times. A familiar book asks nothing of you, it holds no surprises, and it gives your mind a known and safe track to run along instead of the loop.
4. Nervous system reset
The fourth is to bring your body down as you lie down. By the time you get into bed your body may still be running high, so you bring it down on purpose. This is a skill, and it is one that soldiers are trained in, because a body on high alert does not switch off by itself. The techniques below are the ones they use.
- The first is box breathing. You breathe in slowly for a count of four, hold it for four, breathe out for four, and hold for four, and you repeat that until your heart slows and your body starts to settle. It works because slow, steady breathing tells your nervous system that the danger has passed, which is the signal your body needs before it will let you sleep.
- The second is to work through your muscles, tensing each group and then letting it go, from your feet up to your head. You cannot rest while your body is clenched tight, and deliberately tightening and then releasing each part is how you get it to let go.
- The third is a guided practice called yoga nidra. The name puts some men off, so know that the army uses it, under the name iRest, with soldiers recovering from service. It is a recording that talks you slowly down into deep rest, one step at a time, and all it asks is that you lie still and follow the voice. Being led through it is easier than managing the breathing and the muscles yourself when you are exhausted and wired, so it is a good one to reach for on the hardest nights.
None of these four will convince your body on the first night. They work by repetition. The first nights only take the edge off, and across many nights, as you set the same conditions and nothing bad happens, your body slowly comes to believe that the night is safe. That belief is the real goal, and it is built one ordinary, uneventful night at a time.
How to manage disrupted sleep
Even with all of that in place, your sleep will still be disrupted for a while, so you need to know what to do when it is.
When a thought or a memory arrives in the night, and it will, a lot of what surfaces is real and important. It may be a detail you need for court, or something you will want to raise with your therapist. But the middle of the night is the wrong time to deal with it. So when it comes, capture it and set it down for the morning. Write a single line on a pad by the bed, or say a few words into a voice note, just enough that you have it and are not holding it in your head. Then leave it there to pick up when you are rested, as part of your court file or your next session. The hard part is the discipline. You do not start working on it now. You do not lie there turning it over, you do not reach for your phone, and you do not get drawn into going through it at two in the morning. You park it, and you deal with it far better after you have slept.
When you wake in the night in a cold sweat, convinced that someone is there, the first thing to do is to wake all the way up, because you cannot settle a mind that is still half caught in the dream. Then bring yourself firmly into the present. Turn on the lamp you kept within reach, look around the room and name what you can see, and tell yourself the plain facts, that it was a dream, that it is over, that you are here, that the year is what it is, that the door is locked, and that you are safe now. Slow your breathing down on purpose, and if your heart is racing, cold water on your face will help slow it. If your body woke certain that someone had broken in, get up and check the locks, because seeing that they are secure gives your body real proof instead of empty reassurance. Do not lie there watching the clock, because counting the minutes only winds you up, so turn it away from you where you cannot see it. If a fair stretch passes and you are still wide awake, get out of bed instead of fighting it, go to another room, keep the light low, and do something dull and calm until you feel sleepy again, then go back to bed. Lying there wrestling with it only teaches your body that the bed is a place of dread.
How to move beyond coping to getting well
The steps so far get you through the nights. Getting well takes more than that, and there are four things that do the work.
1. Morning walks
Get outside into the morning light every day, as soon as you can after you wake. Your body has an internal clock that decides when you feel awake and when you feel tired, and morning light is the main thing that sets it. When you get that light early, your body starts the clock for the day, and that is what makes you feel sleepy at the right time that night. You have to go outside to get it, because outdoor light is far stronger than anything indoors, even on a grey day. Sitting by a window is not enough. Go for a short walk while you are out there, so that you get the light and some movement together, and the movement helps burn off the tension that feeds the nightmares. This matters most on the days you work from home, when you might not otherwise leave the house at all. On those days, if you stay inside, there is nothing to mark the start of the day, you drift, and your sleep suffers for it. A short walk in the morning light gets the day going and sets you up to sleep that night.
2. Improve your health
Eat well and train hard. Cut out the junk and the takeaways, because a body that is already run down cannot recover on rubbish. Get to the gym, or run, or lift, or whatever suits you, because hard exercise burns off the tension and the pent-up stress that drive the nightmares and the wired nights, and it tires your body in the honest way that helps you sleep.
3. Stay connected
Stay connected to people, and above all to anyone who understands what you have been through. Cutting yourself off makes all of this worse. The research on returning soldiers is clear that the men who stayed connected to others who understood slept better, and the men who isolated slept worse. This helps more than your mood. Being around people who understand means you are not carrying it all on your own, and you rest more easily when you are not. You do not need to explain yourself to everyone. You do need a few people in your corner who understand, whether that is one good friend, a men's group, or others who have come through the same thing.
4. Professional help
See a coach or a therapist. Everything else here gets you sleeping, and this is the part that does the deep repair. Teaching your mind and body that the danger is over, and treating the nightmares directly, is done with a professional who understands this kind of abuse. The better you sleep the more you are able to do that work, so the sleep and the therapy pull in the same direction. You should not try to carry this on your own, and getting help is how people come back from something this serious.
Getting your sleep back is taking your life back
Your sleep was taken from you deliberately, as a way of wearing you down and keeping control of you. Getting it back is one of the most direct things you can do to undo what was done to you. Rest gives you back your clear head, your steadiness and your strength, and those are the things that let you rebuild everything else. Every night that you sleep a little more soundly in your own bed is your body slowly learning that the danger is behind you and that you are safe now.
Reclaiming that rest is taking back a part of your life that was stolen from you, and it belongs to you.