Childhood sexual abuse (CSA) is a prevalent social and healthcare problem. The processes by which individuals heal from CSA are not clearly understood. The purpose of this study was to develop a theoretical model to describe how adults heal from CSA. Community recruitment for an on-going, broader project on sexual violence throughout the lifespan, referred to as the Sexual Violence Study, yielded a subsample of 48 women and 47 men who had experienced CSA. During semi-structured, open-ended interviews, they were asked to describe their experiences with healing from CSA and other victimization throughout their lives. Constructivist grounded theory methods were used with these data to develop constructs and hypotheses about healing. For the Sexual Violence Study, frameworks were developed to describe the participants' life patterns, parenting experiences, disclosures about sexual violence, spirituality, and altruism. Several analytic techniques were used to synthesize the findings of these frameworks to develop an overarching theoretical model that describes healing from CSA. The model includes four stages of healing, five domains of functioning, and six enabling factors that facilitate movement from one stage to the next. The findings indicate that healing is a complex and dynamic trajectory. The model can be used to alert clinicians to a variety of processes and enabling factors that facilitate healing in several domains and to guide discussions on important issues related to healing from CSA.

In this grounded theory study, a theoretical framework that depicts the process by which childhood sexual abuse (CSA) influences the sexuality of women and men survivors was constructed. Data were drawn from interview transcripts of 95 men and women who experienced CSA. Using constant comparison analysis, the researchers determined that the central phenomenon of the data was a process labeled Determining My Sexual Being, in which survivors moved from grappling with questions related to the nature, cause, and sexual effects of the abuse to laying claim to their own sexuality. Clinical implications are discussed.