The Nightingale Safe Room
The Nightingale Safe Room offers a safe, respectful, and non judgmental environment where you can share your thoughts and experiences openly.
It may be right for you if you’re finding things difficult and don’t want to cope alone. Connecting with others who have faced similar challenges can bring reassurance, understanding, and practical insight.
Benefits of Peer Support
- Feel understood and help others feel the same
- Give and receive emotional and practical support
- Learn new ways to manage your wellbeing
- Build hope, confidence, and resilience
- Grow together within a supportive community
Advocacy Support
Advocacy Support provides practical assistance tailored to your circumstances. This may include help with housing, healthcare, financial matters, safety planning, and more.
Support includes:
- A needs assessment
- A personalised support plan
- Help accessing healthcare and services
- Referrals to specialist providers
- Safety planning
- Ongoing support sessions and check‑ins
Trauma Informed Therapy
We offer two structured therapeutic pathways for supporters:
Healing Steps (up to 12 sessions)
Focuses on stabilisation and coping in the present. You’ll learn skills and tools to manage day‑to‑day emotional difficulties.
Breaking the Silence (up to 20 sessions)
Focuses on processing trauma or vicarious trauma from past events. This pathway supports deeper exploration of painful memories and unhelpful thinking patterns. Stabilisation is recommended first, as trauma processing can feel destabilising if someone is already struggling.
Couple Therapy for Depression
(up to 20 sessions)
Couple therapy for depression provides a structured, evidence‑based approach for partners affected by depression linked to trauma. It focuses on understanding how depressive symptoms impact your relationship, improving communication, and rebuilding emotional connection.
Sessions offer a confidential space to examine the factors creating distance or distress, while fostering healthier patterns of interaction.
Supporting Him
There is no single right way to support a survivor. Everyone processes trauma differently and will share their story in their own time. The guidance below can help you support him while also taking care of yourself.
Listen to Him
A disclosure can be overwhelming, and you may have many questions. Allow him to speak at his own pace. He may have delayed telling you due to fear, shame, confusion, or a wish to protect you. What matters most is that he trusts you enough to tell you. Listening without pressure is a powerful part of his healing.
Believe Him
It may be difficult to accept that someone you care about has been harmed. You may want to find alternative explanations, but it is essential that he feels believed. Survivors do not invent these experiences. Let him know you are open to hearing whatever he chooses to share.
Support Him
Avoid questions that imply blame, he is not responsible for what happened. The perpetrator is. You may want him to report the abuse or seek professional support, but these decisions must remain his. After an experience where control was taken away, he needs to reclaim it. Offer steady, empowering support.
Reassure Him
Let him know you’re here for him and that he can talk when he’s ready. His openness may vary over time, which is normal. Healing is not linear. If you feel anger, reassure him that it is directed at the situation, not at him.
Be Kind to Yourself
Supporting a survivor can be emotionally demanding. Feelings such as anger, guilt, shock, or helplessness are common. You may experience vicarious trauma, which is the emotional impact of hearing about someone else’s suffering.
Prioritising your own wellbeing enables you to support him more effectively. Remember, you deserve support too.
