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Usman Balami once commanded hundreds of Boko Haram jihadists in attacks on police stations and banks. Now serving time at a prison complex in northern Nigeria, he says he is a changed man. “In the past, I would have loved to die as a martyr,” said the 34-year-old, after changing out of a yellow goaltender’s jersey following a morning soccer match. In a nearby room, a group of former insurgents strung together beaded necklaces in a jewelry-making class.

About 100 miles away in another government facility, Fatima Bukar prayed that she could move on as well. Each day at midnight, the hour in which she believes God is listening most intently, she rises in the hostel where soldiers are keeping watch over hundreds of women rescued from Boko Haram. The group held Ms. Bukar and her daughter hostage in a forest clearing for nearly five months. “I pray that Allah can turn them back into good people,” said the 27-year-old. “If not, Allah should destroy them.”

Boko Haram has become Nigeria’s collective trauma. The insurgency has swept thousands of boys and men into its ranks, often at gunpoint. It has snatched several thousand more girls and women, many of them raped nightly for months. Continued fighting has left more than 25,000 people dead and more than one million people without homes, Ms. Bukar among them.

Now, in these two high-walled camps, survivors from both sides of the conflict are coming to terms with the scars of the six-year insurgency that has redefined their lives. It is the start of a long reckoning for Nigeria. The conflict rumbles on across the country’s northeast, with suicide bombings killing scores each week. But there are tentative signs of a healing and a shift in government policy.

Thousands of hostages have escaped or been freed after the Nigerian army raided the forests where Boko Haram once held sway. Two months ago, meanwhile, Nigeria began to offer weary Boko Haram fighters safe passage in exchange for prison sentences with the kind of psychosocial counseling Mr. Balami attends. The question for the government of newly elected President Muhammadu Buhari is what to do with this mass of young people who have either been failed by the state, or at war with it. Already, hundreds of Boko Haram members are in detention, said Fatima Akilu, the Director of Behavioural Analysis at the Office of Nigeria’s National Security Adviser. Forty-seven more have taken up the government’s safe-passage offer.

“They get tired,” she said. “More and more of them want to defect. So this is actually prime time.” Ms. Akilu was a London psychologist, counseling homeless teens and writing children’s books, until a Nigerian counter-terrorism general, impressed with a newspaper editorial she had written, called to ask her to design a programme to draw Nigerian terrorists back into society.

For two years, she travelled to countries including Algeria and Saudi Arabia with similar programmes. Most of those nations had more money to spend. Nigeria’s caseload is particularly grim. In Ms. Bukar’s camp, some women have become psychotic or mute. Loud noises put several on edge. Many have lost children or husbands. Several saw the deaths occur. None of the 309 former hostages in this camp report being raped, but women in other camps testify to that horror. Many gave birth to captors’ children.