Therapy for Adults Who Experienced Sexual Abuse by a Family Member
If this page is hard to be on, take your time.
There's no timer here, and nothing you have to do. I'm Logan Brantley, a licensed clinical social worker, and working with adult survivors of sexual abuse by a family member is one of the areas of my practice where I have specialized experience — including years as a Child Advocacy Center therapist. I see clients over secure video in California, Illinois, Texas, Virginia, Maryland, and Washington, D.C.
If you're in crisis right now: call or text 988, any hour. The National Sexual Assault Hotline is 1-800-656-4673, free and confidential. I'm not able to provide crisis response, and you deserve immediate support.
When the harm came from inside the family
Abuse by a family member carries a weight that other harm doesn't: the person who hurt you and the place that was supposed to be safe were the same place. That tangles everything — loyalty with fear, love with anger, holidays with dread. Many survivors spend years managing that tangle silently, often while the family keeps functioning around them as if the record were clean.
If you still have complicated feelings about the person — including love, including grief — nothing is wrong with you. The feelings are complicated because the situation was. You don't owe anyone a simpler story, including yourself.
And if part of you is still asking whether what happened "counts": that question is one of the most common things survivors carry in the door. We can hold the question together. You don't need a verdict to deserve support.
What therapy looks like — and what it never requires
Stabilization comes first, always. Before any processing, we build steadiness: internal resources through guided imagery, a felt sense of safety in your body, and a pace your system agrees to. The deeper work — Brainspotting, somatic parts-work, expressive arts — begins only when you're resourced for it, and it never requires narrating what happened. Your story stays yours, told or untold.
This is slow work by design. My door stays open for as long as it takes, and "healed" is not a deadline here. What we're building runs past the processing anyway: a sense of self you trust, boundaries that hold, and a life where what happened is something that happened to you — not the architecture of who you are.
On telling your family — or not
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I hold no agenda about confrontation, disclosure, estrangement, or reconciliation. Some survivors tell; some never do; some change their answer over years. All of those are legitimate ways to survive a situation you didn't create. My job is to help you find the position you can live in — and to help you hold the boundaries it requires, whatever the family makes of them.
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Before this practice, I spent years as a Child Advocacy Center therapist and family advocate — sitting with children and families in the immediate aftermath of exactly this kind of harm. That work is why I understand both sides of the silence: what it protects, and what it costs. Sexual assault recovery is a core specialty of my practice, and my training — Brainspotting, somatic parts-work, expressive arts at the doctoral level, guided imagery — was assembled with this work in mind.
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No. As an adult survivor, what you do with your own history is entirely your decision, and therapy with me carries no agenda about it. We work on what you need — which may or may not ever involve the people who were there.
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You don't need a verdict to begin, and you won't be cross-examined here. Minimizing is something survivors learn inside families that needed the harm to stay small. We can work with the uncertainty itself — it's part of the injury, not a disqualification.
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No. Brainspotting and somatic approaches process trauma without requiring the story out loud, and expressive arts speaks when words won't. Some survivors eventually choose to tell; many do deep, complete work without ever narrating it. Your pace, your telling, your call.
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I see clients over secure video in California, Illinois, Texas, Virginia, Maryland, and Washington, D.C. Sessions are $160, $200, or $250 on my equitable three-tier model. Superbills provided; I partner with Thrizer. The first 20-minute consultation is free — and it can just be a conversation. You don't have to share anything you're not ready to share.