Coach Nia Renée On Dating After Abusive Relationships [Excl.]
‘The Goal Isn’t To Prove You Can Survive Anything’ — Coach Nia Renée’s Powerful Message To Those Healing From Domestic Violence [Exclusive]
Every October, advocates, survivors, and communities across the country unite under a shared cause: Domestic Violence Awareness Month. The month-long observance is a reminder to have the conversations many families, friends, and workplaces still avoid. It’s also an opportunity to look beyond the visible bruises and recognize the emotional, psychological, and generational wounds that often go unseen.
For Coach Nia Renée, a certified life coach and survivor-turned-advocate, those hidden wounds are where awareness must begin. “Domestic Violence Awareness Month means so much to me, for many reasons,” she told MadameNoire. “A lot of people don’t realize that childhood trauma, child abuse, is also categorized under domestic violence as well. That’s one of the things that I have been spotlighting this month—talking about my story and the things that I went through in my childhood.”
Renée’s perspective comes from both lived experience and professional training. After enduring abuse in her own home growing up, she recognized how that early environment shaped the relationships she attracted as an adult. Her turning point came when she realized she could no longer live inside that cycle. “I just wanted to share my story on a bigger stage,” she said. “And I wanted to be able to help other people.” Today, Renée helps women move from survival to self-trust. In conversation with MadameNoire, she shared her insights on the less visible forms of abuse, why survivors often stay longer than outsiders understand, and how both survivors and their supporters can begin the process of real healing.
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The Red Flags Loved Ones Should Look For
When asked how friends and family members can recognize that someone might be in an unsafe relationship, Renée said changes in behavior can offer quiet clues. “If they are very isolated, if they start to become very distant, if they get very quiet, if they are constantly making up excuses for their significant other—why their significant other might be behaving a certain way—those are red flags,” she said.
She added that the people who insist they’re fine often aren’t. “The people that say that they’re fine, but you know deep down that they’re not fine, are ones to really pay attention to.”
For those on the outside, patience and compassion matter most. “We try to extend grace as much as we possibly can until we can get them to see and understand, like, this is not a safe relationship for you,” she said.
Why Leaving Isn’t Easy
Renée said one of the most common misconceptions about domestic violence is that survivors can simply walk away. “It can be very difficult to leave these relationships,” she told MadameNoire. “On average, it takes seven times to leave an abusive relationship.”
She explained that part of what makes it so difficult is how the cycle of abuse becomes addictive. “When we are in abusive relationships, we become addicted to the chaos,” she said. “We become addicted to what’s called the negative and positive reinforcement in abusive relationships.”
The pattern, she said, often looks the same: tension builds, conflict erupts, apologies follow—and for a brief moment, things feel like they did in the beginning. “They get upset about everything that you do,” she said. “And then all of a sudden, they’re nice to you, and they’re being sweet to you, and they’re being that person that they saw them being in the beginning.”
That “good side” can keep survivors holding on. “They latch on to the positivity and the high hopes that that person can go back to being the person that they were in the beginning—but the person that they were in the beginning was someone that was mirroring them,” she said. “It becomes an addiction, and it can be very difficult to unwrap yourself out of that.”
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Rebuilding Your Sense of Self
When asked what healing looks like after leaving an abusive relationship, Renée said it starts with giving yourself permission to grieve. “You need space to grieve the relationship that you thought you had, the relationship that you actually were in, and then you need to grieve the loss of that relationship,” she said.
She emphasized that therapy played an important role in her own recovery. “I went to therapy. I had a psychotherapist and a talk therapist, and I saw both of them twice a week for about a year and a half to really work through a lot of the things that I had experienced in my relationships in general,” she said.
Through that process, she developed a framework that she now shares with clients: acknowledge, rediscover, and rebuild. “Being able to acknowledge and accept what you’ve endured, rediscover who you are now, and not try to get back to the person that you were before that relationship—because that person was susceptible to manipulation,” she said.
She also spoke about the importance of reconnecting with intuition. “We betray ourselves in these relationships,” she said. “We ignore our gut feelings, we overlook some signs that our body is telling us that we need to pay attention to. So we have to repair that relationship that we have with ourselves in order to be able to move forward.”
Dating Again After Abuse
When the conversation turned to dating after leaving an abusive partner, Renée said the body often knows the truth before the mind does. “Don’t go with what’s happening up here,” she said, gesturing to her head. “Go with what your body is telling you. Do you have anxiety in your chest? Do you keep shaking your leg? Are you moving your body away from the person? Are you stressed? What are the signs that your body is telling you?”
She also stressed the importance of setting boundaries early and clearly. “Be very clear about your boundaries in the beginning, very early on, so that you can weed out people,” she said. “With my husband, within two weeks we were having very deep conversations. I was telling him that I don’t like violent communication. I’m not a violent communicator. I don’t do screaming or yelling. If we can’t have a conversation the way that you and I are sitting here and having a conversation right now, when disagreements arise, then this isn’t the relationship for me.”
She warned that rushing intimacy or attention can be a red flag in itself. “Rushing the relationship—that is something that we tend to do,” she said. “Love bombing is something to pay attention to. Love bombing is when someone showers you with so much affection and attention and gifts, and then it very quickly wears off. Taking things at your own pace, and not the speed that they want to go at, is key.”
