I know it's painful, but nightmares and night terrors are a form of cleansing. Rest assured, your abusers do not have power over you when you sleep! It just feels like it.

As you heal, the nightmares and night terrors will get less and less and then go away. There's actually research on the nightmares of sexual abuse survivors that shows this.

There's also research that suggests we have more nightmares and night terrors when we're under stress. The holidays is often a stressful time for us, so perhaps that's contributing to this. Finding ways to ease the stress can perhaps help reduce them, so that's something to think about.

It also helps to view nightmares and night terrors as cleansing mechanisms. I was having nightmares very often for a while, but when I began to understand what they were really doing, it helped to ease the pain of them.