I’m just finishing Virginia Giuffre’s raw and unflinching autobiography Nobody’s Girl: A Memoir of Surviving Abuse and Fighting for Justice, and it’s made me reflect once again on the importance of healing trauma – and the enormous cost of leaving unhealed trauma to run our lives.
For those of you who don’t know, Virginia Giuffre was one of the young women abused and trafficked by financier Jeffrey Epstein and his associate Ghislaine Maxwell. In her deeply self-aware account, she doesn’t only describe what happened in those years — she lays bare the earlier wounds that shaped her vulnerability long before Epstein entered the picture.
Virginia endured sexual abuse in her own home from a very young age — a betrayal that shatters a child’s sense of safety at the roots. When that happens, it creates a psychological template: your body learns the world is dangerous, that your boundaries don’t matter, that exploitation is something to survive rather than something you can walk away from. By the time she encountered Epstein, she had already been raped multiple times as a teenager. That history made her an easy target for predators — because unhealed trauma leaves vulnerabilities that others can sense and exploit.
One paragraph that really struck me in her book was Virginia’s intuitive sense that Epstein himself might have been sexually abused as a child. “Maybe I’m wrong”, she writes, “but I’ve always believed that during his own childhood, he’d experienced some kind of molestation. If that is true, it doesn’t lessen the awfulness of Epstein’s crimes. But it may help explain them. I know that Epstein was emotionally broken, devoid of any ability to form deep connections to others. But whether he was born that way or abused in a manner that eroded his capacity for empathy, no one will probably ever know.”
This reflection also reminded me of my time working as a chaplain in a sex offenders’ prison. Reading through the case files of the men I supported confirmed what Virginia describes: most abusers had been abused themselves. It’s a vicious cycle – the kind of cycle that unhealed trauma repeats from one generation to the next unless someone chooses to interrupt it. And, like her, I don’t believe this excuses anything — not for a moment. But it does put things into context.
Furthermore, I recently watched a documentary about Ghislaine Maxwell and her complicated relationship with her father, the late media mogul Robert Maxwell. After what I learned there, I was no longer surprised that she became so powerfully drawn to Epstein — a man with a long history of sexually exploiting underage girls, openly rationalising his behaviour by claiming he had a “biological need” for multiple orgasms a day.
According to the documentary, Robert Maxwell had several affairs, her mother was quiet and compliant, and Ghislaine grew up in a climate where women were treated as objects rather than people. She probably came to see all of this as normal: that men don’t stay faithful to their wives, and that women exist primarily to please men sexually. Robert Maxwell was described by family friends as an “overbearing, narcissistic, and demanding father.” Court filings later alleged that he was emotionally and physically violent; one account even claims he struck her hand with a hammer when she was a teenager.
All of this, I believe, primed her to attach herself to a man who mirrored similar traits. Maxwell met Epstein shortly after her father’s death — a loss that devastated her — and it’s not hard to imagine how a familiar pattern could have felt like home, even if that home was deeply unsafe. What’s also striking is that both men died under circumstances labelled as suicide: her father at 68, Epstein at 66. The symmetry is unsettling.
And it’s precisely because many of us are unaware of these patterns that live in our unconscious minds that we find ourselves drawn to people who echo old dynamics. We mistake the familiar for the safe, and without healing, we keep walking into the same emotional rooms again and again.
Our primary caretakers and the experiences we have in early childhood set the blueprint for what we attract later in life, especially in our romantic relationships. A girl with an emotionally unavailable father will often find herself drawn to avoidant, unavailable men. A boy with an overbearing, controlling mother may be pulled towards women who unconsciously echo that same dynamic. And then the dance often continues for a lifetime.
But there is a way out of this. We don’t have to keep reliving the effects of unhealed trauma. We can break free of unhealthy, trauma-driven dynamics and begin to make choices that are no longer dictated by our unconscious wounds — the ones that try to convince us that the dysregulation we feel in certain relationships is love.
And that exit route is healing. Psychological and emotional healing — taking an honest look at our histories, our patterns, and the choices we’ve been making on autopilot. Often this only begins when something finally stops working: when we’ve been hurt one time too many, or when we find ourselves deeply unhappy in a relationship that keeps pulling the same old strings.
There are so many tools we can use as we start to heal: awareness, reflection, meditation, therapy, journalling, educating ourselves about trauma, bodywork, yoga…
Of course, healing long-standing patterns is not easy. Many of them began long before we were born and have been passed down through generations. And healing hurts — often for a long time — before things begin to shift. That’s why so many people avoid it altogether. But really, what is the alternative?
Healing is what the writer Joseph Campbell called the “Hero’s Journey.” Stripping away layers of conditioning and trauma asks for courage, patience, persistence, and faith — an unwavering faith in transformation and a quiet, firm belief that the light of inner freedom is waiting at the end of the tunnel.
And when that inner freedom finally lands — when you’re no longer unconsciously repeating the decisions your parents or grandparents made, but instead making your own, healthy choices from a place of authenticity — it feels like switching a TV from black and white to colour. Everything becomes brighter, clearer, sharper, more joyful. Your wings spread, and you start to fly again.
And that — healing — is what I would have wished for Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell long before they became the predators they were. I would have wished them an awareness of their own inner pain, so they could have sought help instead of inflicting it. How many girls could have been spared if Epstein had chosen to fill his inner emptiness with therapy, support, or spiritual practice instead of using other humans to soothe himself?
And how different might Maxwell’s path have been if she had worked through the wounds of her relationship with her father instead of aligning herself with a man who exploited minors?
Because the cycle only ends when someone decides to turn toward the pain instead of passing it on.
If you’re interested in trauma-informed approaches within justice, you might also like my recent post on restorative justice.