Tallinn University
School of Humanities
Juhendaja: Sameena Mulla, PhD
Tallinn 2019
In this thesis I will argue that healing from sexual and domestic violence is a meaning-making
process focused on reinstating the agency of the self through the tripartite reconfiguration of
its embodiment, cognitive-discursive identity, and relation to the world. I will delineate how
the women seeking healing are conceived as liminal beings in between ‗victim‘ and
‗survivor‘, the process of healing is imagined as a passage through liminality, and ‗the new
self‘ is the imagined outcome of therapy within the context of the nonprofit center where I did
my fieldwork.