Why Fall Feels Dangerous When You’re Healing From Abuse

There’s a verse tucked into Ecclesiastes that used to feel like poetry to me, but now feels like a warning label: “To everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under heaven.” In this season of my life, I hear it as a time to plant and a time to uproot, a time to keep silent and a time to speak, a time to embrace and a time to refrain from embracing.

I didn’t understand until I was well into my healing that seasons aren’t just weather. They’re emotional terrain. And for me, fall is the season he comes back.

Why This Happens

Abuse recovery specialists have a name for this kind of resurfacing: an anniversary reaction, a well-documented response that tends to cluster around seasons and moments carrying emotional weight. An anniversary. A birthday. The start of the holidays. It doesn’t matter which one: he knows, on some level, when you’re most likely to be tired, lonely, or nostalgic, and he times it accordingly.

When the Good Memories Make It Harder

Here’s the part that’s harder to say out loud than the part about his timing: some of those seasonal memories really were good. There was a version of this relationship, maybe even a whole season of it, where you loved him and things seemed to be working. Fall might carry a specific memory – a bonfire, a certain festival, an activity, or a song that came on in the car. Grief doesn’t check whether the thing you’re grieving was safe. It just knows something is gone, and it aches.

That ache is where the danger lives. Not in him, exactly, but in the loneliness that makes his presence feel like relief instead of risk. That same loneliness can just as easily point you toward someone new, someone whose red flags register as comfort instead of warning, simply because your nervous system already knows how to survive that kind of relationship. Loneliness has a way of making both options look like company, when what your heart is actually asking for is safety.

God is not asking you to pretend the good memories weren’t real. He’s asking you to bring the ache to Him instead of back to the person who caused half of it.

“See, I am doing a new thing! Now it springs up; do you not perceive it? I am making a way in the wilderness and streams in the wasteland.” Isaiah wrote that to people who kept looking backward at a life that had hurt them, and God’s answer wasn’t “forget it happened.” His answer was “look at what I’m doing that you haven’t noticed yet.”

Questions Worth Sitting With

Some questions worth sitting with this week, maybe with a journal or just in a quiet car ride: 

• What season does this show up in for you? Have you ever told anyone?
• When the loneliness hits, what do you tend to reach for first: a person, a distraction, or God?
• What would it look like to let a friend know in advance that a certain time of year is hard for you?

You Don’t Have to White-Knuckle This Alone

Fall (or whatever your season is) doesn’t need to feel like a countdown to something you’re bracing for, and you don’t need to white-knuckle it alone. The Safe Again Workbook walks through exactly this kind of nervous system response: why old patterns resurface, and how to build something steadier in their place. It’s free, and it’s a gentle place to start.

Lord, You know the season I’m walking into, and You know what tends to resurface in it. Where I’m tempted to reach backward for something that hurt me, reach me first. Where I’m lonely, remind me that You’re already there. Help me guard what You’ve worked so hard to heal. In Jesus’ name, amen.