Sleep is the one thing you cannot do while standing guard. After living with someone unpredictable, your body learned to stay half-awake, and that setting does not switch off the night you get safe. Broken sleep after abuse is common, and it often gets worse before it eases. There is no schedule for it. What helps is real safety, a boring routine, and patience you do not feel.
During the day there is somewhere to put your attention. Work, children, the next task, the next thing to manage. At night all of that goes quiet, and the only part of you still running is the part that listens. That part learned its job in a house where the wrong footstep, the wrong tone of voice, or a door closing a certain way meant the next few hours were going to be bad. It learned that catching it early bought you warning time. Lying in the dark with nothing to do but listen is exactly the condition that part was built for, so it clocks in.
Your body is not refusing to rest. It is refusing to stand down before it believes the house is safe.
Here is the part almost nobody warns you about. While you were still in it, you slept the way people sleep in a war — badly, but you slept, because there was a morning coming that demanded something of you and your body took what it could get. Safety changes the assignment. When the threat is finally gone, your system stops spending everything on function and starts processing what it has been carrying. That processing tends to happen at night, because night is when you stop moving. So people often find the first nights in their own bed, behind their own lock, are worse than the last nights in the house they left. Sleeping worse after getting out is not evidence that you made a mistake.
Nightmares after abuse are often not replays. They are the same feeling wearing different scenery — you are back in a house that is not the house, arguing with someone who will not listen, unable to find a door. Waking from one can leave you frightened of a person you have not seen in a long time, and the fear will seem out of proportion to the dream, because the fear was never really about the dream. Some people get relief from writing a recurring nightmare down while awake, deliberately rewriting the ending, and reading the new version during the day. Some do not. Trauma-informed therapy has specific approaches for recurring nightmares, and it is a reasonable thing to ask a therapist about directly.
This page describes a pattern. It cannot tell you what is happening in your body, and neither can any other page. Plenty of things that wreck sleep have nothing to do with what you survived, and several of them are treatable in ways no coping strategy will match — breathing that stops and starts in the night, thyroid trouble, pain, medication effects, and more. If you snore heavily, wake gasping, fall asleep during the day, or have been running on almost nothing for a long stretch, take it to a doctor rather than filing it under trauma. Say plainly that you have been under sustained stress. That is useful context for them, and it is not the same thing as diagnosing yourself.
Not a switch. What people describe is one night that was slightly less bad, then a stretch of nothing, then two in a row. You fall asleep before you have finished bracing. You wake at the usual hour, listen, and go back down instead of lying there until the light comes. The listening does not disappear so much as it stops being in charge. There is no timetable for this, and anyone who hands you one is guessing. The most useful thing you can do is stop grading yourself every morning, because turning sleep into a test you can fail is one of the few reliable ways to make it worse.
Because sleep needs safety, and safety is what finally lets your system stop running on pure function. While you were in it, you slept the way you could, because morning demanded it. Once nothing is coming, the material you have been carrying gets processed, and processing tends to happen at night. Getting jumpier and sleeping worse after getting out is common, and it usually means something has started rather than something is failing.
That is a conversation for a doctor who knows your history, not for a website. Two things are worth saying anyway. If you are still living with someone who might hurt you, be very careful with anything that makes you slower to wake. And alcohol and cannabis are the most common self-prescriptions here; they often trade an easier first hour for a worse second half of the night, with a habit attached.
There is no honest number, and anyone offering one is making it up. Sleep tends to follow safety rather than lead it, so the things that move it most are often not sleep techniques at all — a door you control, no contact, money that is yours, a body that has stopped waiting for something. Some nights will be bad long after other things have improved. That is ordinary, and it is not a relapse.