Welcome to Lisa’s Sanctuary
A sanctuary is more than a place. It is a feeling of safety, gentleness, and being able to breathe again.
Lisa’s Sanctuary was created as a safe and nurturing space for women who are healing from childhood abuse, domestic violence, coercive control, and post-separation abuse. It honours the quiet beauty of growth and transformation, represented by the butterfly, and the strength, wisdom, protection, and love of the matriarchal elephant.
After being asked the painful question, “Why didn’t you just leave?” many times, Lisa chose to turn her lived experience into something that could help others feel seen, understood, and less alone. Her book, Why I Stayed: A True Story of a Domestic Violence Relationship, became part of that healing mission, and Lisa’s Sanctuary was born.
Lisa’s Sanctuary exists to support, empower, and walk beside victim-survivors as they rebuild safety, self-worth, and hope. Through advocacy, education, holistic healing, and compassionate connection, Lisa’s work helps break the silence around abuse, create safer communities, and contribute to lasting change.
Healing Through Love is honoured to share Lisa’s message with our community. Lisa has kindly given HTL permission to share her videos and advocacy work, allowing more victim-survivors, families, and supporters to hear her message of safety, healing, and life after abuse.
Every enrolment, purchase, payment, or donation to Lisa’s Sanctuary helps support this mission. Contributions assist in creating safe, nurturing spaces where healing can begin, while also helping provide advocacy, support, and access to safe, affordable, long-term housing for victim-survivors and their children.
When you support Lisa’s Sanctuary, you are not only receiving a product, service, or resource. You are helping rebuild lives, restore hope, and remind survivors that healing is possible.
Lisa also shares her own healing journey as a victim-survivor of childhood abuse, coercive control, domestic violence, and post-separation abuse. Through her story, she offers a powerful reminder that life after domestic violence is possible, and that no survivor should have to walk the path alone.
Lisa is a Survivor turned Caseworker, Advocate & Educator who founded Lisa’s Sanctuary to support Survivors of Partner Abuse, Coercive Control and Post Separation Abuse. Lisa draws from her own lived experience, professional study and frontline casework practice to help Survivors feel safe, supported, empowered, and worthy.
Lisa’s Sanctuary: Survivor-Led Messages of Healing and Hope
If any of the videos do not load, you can watch all of Lisa’s Reels directly on Facebook.
Some of the videos on this page discuss domestic violence, coercive control, childhood abuse, trauma, and post-separation abuse. Please take care while watching. You are welcome to pause, step away, or return when you feel ready.
How do you get out of Survival Mode?
The process for getting out of Survival depends if you are safe but triggered and trying to regulate or unsafe and still trying to survive.
If this video does not load on your device, you can watch this reel directly on Facebook here.
Creating awareness and helping survivors understand the question, “Why didn’t you just leave?”
“Why didn’t you just leave?” is one of my favourite questions. So much so that I wrote a book about it to create awareness and explain why we can’t just leave.
If this video does not load on your device, you can watch this reel directly on Facebook here.
Because it doesn’t just stop when we leave
If this video does not load on your device, you can watch this reel directly on Facebook here.
A walkthrough of how I recognise, identify, and heal my own past trauma
Healing takes safety, understanding, support, feeling so uncomfortable, time, talking about it, dropping the shame, feeling it in your body, getting back up, self care, prioritising you, boundaries and looking after yourself but here’s one of the ways I heal mine when I recognise it
If this video does not load on your device, you can watch this reel directly on Facebook here.