Programme for Women Survivors of Domestic Violence

This was the first programme offered at the Centre. Most of the women who seek help at the Centre are survivors of domestic violence. Women in a situation of on-going domestic violence, who have decided to change their lives, contact Animus. With the help of a psychotherapist, they take time to study their traumatic experience and their behaviour as victims, and plan concrete steps and decisions The main method of work with them is psycho-dynamic psychotherapy. In a long-term plan clients reconsider their past and integrate their traumatic experience in building new non-violence-based relationships.

The programmes are directed at women:

• Whose husbands or partners use physical violence - beating, kicking, choking, etc.
  
• Who suffer sexual violence in their homes - who are forced to have sex at a time and in a way that they do not like.
  
• Who suffer emotional violence - control, jealousy, blame, abuse, humiliation, threats, offences, isolation, and limitation of their contacts with relatives and friends, economic dependence, and abuse of their children.
  A psychotherapist can help a woman:
  
  
• Express and share her feelings
  
• Clarify her experience of domestic violence - the forms of violence, the concrete mechanisms of abuse with power and control, the risk to her health and to her life
  
• Explore her own resources for coping with the situation
  
• Discuss her plans and fears
  
• Talk about the possible choices and decisions concerning the future
  
• Explore the emotional consequences of the violence suffered
  
• Survive the trauma caused by violence

Programme for Women Survivors of Sexual Violence

Programme for Women Survivors of Trafficking in Women