For the Cycle Breakers: What It Means to Stop Repeating What Hurt You

Written by Sarah Benitez-Zandi MSW, LCSW

For a long time, I described my work in pieces.

Trauma therapy.
Complex PTSD.
EMDR.
ART.
Somatic therapy.
Couples therapy.
Family therapy.
Perinatal mental health.
Parenting support.
Family-of-origin healing.
Nervous system work.

All of those pieces were true.

But recently, I realized they were never separate.

There has always been one thread connecting everything I do:

I work with cycle breakers.

People who are trying to stop repeating what hurt them.

People who are starting to notice the patterns they inherited, survived, adapted to, or learned.

People who find themselves thinking:

“I don’t want to become the version of myself I had to become to survive.”

“I don’t want to parent the way I was parented.”

“I don’t want to keep having the same fight in my relationship.”

“I don’t want my trauma to keep making decisions for me.”

“I understand where this came from, but I still don’t know how to stop doing it.”

“I want this to end with me.”

That is what cycle breaking means to me.

It is not about blaming our parents, our families, our partners, or ourselves.

It is about getting honest about the patterns that live inside of us; in our bodies, our relationships, our parenting, our conflict, our shutdown, our anxiety, our anger, our perfectionism, our people-pleasing, our overfunctioning, and our fear.

And then learning how to choose something different.

Not perfectly.

Not overnight.

But intentionally.

Cycle Breaking Is Personal and Clinical Work

This work is deeply personal and deeply clinical for me.

When I first came into this field, I thought I would work in child welfare.

I wanted to help families like mine.

Families where there was pain, disconnection, trauma, untreated mental illness, unmet needs, survival behaviors, and patterns that kept repeating.

When I say “families like mine,” I mean families where one child may get labeled as aggressive, defiant, difficult, or “the problem,” when underneath that behavior there may be pain, dysregulation, unmet needs, and a nervous system that never learned safety.

I mean families with a parent trying to survive untreated mental illness, single parenting, limited support, and their own unresolved wounds.

I mean families where one parent is absent. Sometimes by choice, sometimes because of their own limitations, sometimes because they simply could not show up in the ways a child needed.

And I mean children who learn very early that survival requires becoming whatever the environment demands.

Some children fight.

Some children flee.

Some children fawn.

Some children disappear into achievement.

Some become the “good one,” the “responsible one,” the “strong one,” the one who studies, works, performs, stays busy, and tries not to need too much.

For me, school became a way out.

I studied. I worked. I pushed. I tried to build a life that was different from the one I came from.

And like so many cycle breakers, I also participated in the dysfunction in the ways I needed to survive.

I fawned.
I fought.
I fled.
I learned how to not be fully present.
I learned how to keep going.

That is what survival does.

It helps us get through.

But survival can become a pattern long after the danger has passed.

When Helping After the Damage Is Not Enough

When I began to understand the child welfare system more deeply, something became very clear to me:

So often, systems come in after the damage has already been done.

They name the harm.
They document the harm.
They assign responsibility.
They intervene when things have already reached a breaking point.

And while that work can matter, I realized I did not want my work to only begin after a family was already in crisis.

I started to feel like I was more a part of the problem than the solution.

And that was not okay with me.

I did not want to keep participating in systems that created more families like mine without helping heal the wounds underneath the patterns.

I wanted to interrupt the cycle earlier.

Before the same pain gets passed down.
Before survival becomes personality.
Before the body decides that chaos, disconnection, overfunctioning, shutdown, or emotional intensity is the only way to stay safe.
Before a child becomes an adult who has no idea why they feel so reactive, numb, anxious, angry, guilty, or alone.

That is where my work began to shift.

And that is where Trauma Wise Healing was born.

Cycle Breaking Is Not Just Insight

Many cycle breakers have done a lot of insight work.

They may understand their childhood.
They may be able to name the trauma.
They may recognize the family pattern.
They may know they are triggered.
They may understand why they people-please, shut down, explode, overfunction, avoid, chase, withdraw, or feel responsible for everyone else’s emotions.

But knowing where a pattern comes from does not always mean the body knows how to stop doing it.

That is one of the hardest parts of trauma healing.

You can understand something intellectually and still feel hijacked by it emotionally.

You can know your child is safe and still feel rage or panic in your body.

You can love your partner and still shut down during conflict.

You can know a boundary is healthy and still feel like you are doing something wrong.

You can understand your parents had their own pain and still grieve what you did not receive.

You can know you are safe now and still feel like your nervous system is living in the past.

This is why cycle breaking has to be more than insight.

It has to include the body.

It has to include the nervous system.

It has to include the places where trauma is not just remembered, but repeated.

Parenting Can Bring the Past Back With a Vengeance

As a parent myself, I have seen another side of healing from family-of-origin wounds.

There is the healing you do as the child, as the son, the daughter, the adult child trying to understand what happened, what was missing, what hurt, and what you had to become.

And then there is the healing that gets activated when you become a parent.

Because sometimes the pain you thought you had already worked through comes back with a vengeance when your child reaches the age you were when something happened to you.

Or when you look at your child and realize just how young you were.

Just how vulnerable you were.

Just how much you needed.

And suddenly, you are not only grieving what happened.

You are trying to reconcile how a parent could allow certain things to happen.

How a child could be left alone with that much fear.

How needs could be missed so completely.

How pain could be minimized, denied, or normalized.

And this is where a lot of cycle breakers struggle.

Because we are often told, “They did the best they could.”

And maybe they did.

But sometimes that sentence needs a comma, not a period.

They did the best they could, and it still was not enough.

Both can be true.

We can hold compassion for what our parents carried and still tell the truth about what we needed.

We can understand the context and still name the impact.

We can choose not to blame and still choose not to repeat.

That is cycle breaking.

What Cycle Breaker Therapy Can Look Like

At Trauma Wise Healing, cycle breaker work is not about forcing yourself to “get over it” or trying to think your way into a new pattern.

It is about helping your body, brain, and relationships experience something different.

This work may include EMDR, ART, somatic therapy, nervous system education, attachment work, parts-informed work, couples therapy, family therapy, perinatal mental health support, or longer-format trauma intensives.

But the deeper goal is the same:

To help you stop living from the old survival map.

To help you understand what your nervous system learned.

To help you notice the moment before the old reaction.

To help you build capacity for boundaries, connection, repair, grief, anger, softness, and choice.

To help you become the version of yourself you have been fighting so hard to become.

Not the version shaped only by survival.

Not the version who has to disappear, perform, please, fight, flee, or carry everything alone.

A version with more clarity.

More steadiness.

More connection.

More choice.

Grounded in 10 Is Also Shifting

This is also the next chapter of Grounded in 10.

When I first imagined the podcast, I pictured it as a space for short, accessible nervous system resets.

Something practical.
Something grounding.
Something you could come back to in the middle of a hard day, after a difficult interaction, during a moment of overwhelm, or when your body felt like it was carrying more than your mind could explain.

And that is still true.

But now, Grounded in 10 is also becoming a space for cycle breakers.

A space for trauma-informed education, nervous system healing, somatic practices, relationship patterns, parenting triggers, boundaries, rupture and repair, family-of-origin wounds, and the embodied work of choosing something different.

Some episodes will teach.

Some will reflect.

Some will guide you through short somatic practices you can use in real time.

Because cycle breaking is not just something we think about.

It is something we practice.

In our bodies.
In our homes.
In our relationships.
In the moments where we want to react the old way, but pause long enough to ask:

What else is possible here?

You Do Not Have to Break the Cycle Alone

More than anything, I want the people who find this work to feel seen.

I want you to know you are not alone.

I want you to know that your patterns make sense.

I want you to know that the version of you who survived deserves compassion, not shame.

And I want you to know that survival does not have to be the end of the story.

You do not have to break the cycle by yourself.

With the right support, the right tools, and the right kind of healing, change is possible.

Not perfect change.

Not overnight change.

But real change.

The kind that begins in small moments.

A pause.
A breath.
A boundary.
A repair.
A different response.
A moment where you notice the cycle and choose not to hand it forward unchanged.

That is where healing begins.

And that is the work I am here for.

For the cycle breakers.

For the ones who are ready to stop repeating what hurt them.

For the ones who are trying to build something different.

For the ones who are saying:

This may have started before me, but it does not have to keep going through me.