The Podcast
Breaking the Cycle
Redefining Recovery for Domestic Violence Survivors
Hosted by Alana Moore
“Surviving is not the same as healing.”
Breaking the Cycle is a podcast about what happens after a survivor walks out the door. It is about the part of the story that emergency shelters were never designed to address, and the part that most people never talk about.
I am Alana Moore, a survivor, a UC Berkeley graduate in Social Welfare, and the founder of The Souza Foundation. I spent fifteen years in an abusive relationship that left me an 89-pound shell of my former self. After escaping, I got into therapy, enrolled in school, and eventually turned my lived experience into a research question that became my honors thesis.
What I found confirmed what I already knew from the inside: surviving is not the same as healing, and our systems were built for one but not the other.
Inside The Conversation
The Story After Survival.
Each episode brings together survivor voices, practitioners, and research to examine why the current domestic violence response model stops at crisis intervention—and what genuine long-term recovery actually requires.
The realities that shape recovery.
We talk about housing instability, financial abuse, trauma bonding, coercive control, the architecture of abuse, and community-based programs that are doing something different. We talk about what works, what does not, and what survivors say they actually needed but could not find.
Research that belongs beyond a thesis.
This podcast grew out of academic research, but it was never meant to remain there. The evidence, survivor testimonies, and practitioner wisdom in these conversations deserve a wider audience. Transformation begins when more people understand what survivors are living through and what it takes to meet them where they are.
Who This Is For
A Conversation For Everyone Who Believes Recovery Must Go Further.
Breaking the Cycle is for survivors, for people who love survivors, for practitioners who serve them, and for anyone who believes that a thirty-day shelter stay was never meant to be the finish line.
Reclaim. Restore. Rise.