Category: trauma

Daughter of Crisis

I grew up in a house where the air itself carried mood. The tension didn’t arrive, it accumulated. Like static, or damp. You didn’t always hear it in her voice. You felt it first. The way the cutlery drawer opened. The footfall across the lino. The time she took to answer when you spoke.

In the household of a divorced single mother and a teenage girl, my friends tried to protect me. They did their best. But when hypothyroid madness reveals coercive control and occasional physical violence, there is only so much anyone else can do.

Her circadian rhythm was inverted. She spent the night awake, listening to AM talkback radio filled with right-wing fundamentalist zealots. She slept during the day. I would come home from school to housework. Washing dishes. Making dinner. Feeding the dog and chooks. Then homework. She was nocturnal. I was trying to survive.

She wasn’t kind. Not always. Not in the cycle of abuse. Harm, remorse, promise. Repeat. She could be brutal, erratic, possessive. She could rage over crumbs, or fall silent for days. But no one explained why. There were no labels. No diagnoses. Just a quiet, continuous undercurrent of Serepax, one tablet three times a day, and warnings that lived inside me. Don’t push her. Don’t set her off. That’s just how your mother is.

I internalised it all. The weight. The guilt. The vigilance. I mothered my own mother. I built my personality around avoiding detonation. I built my armour around myself. Not always successfully. A single misspoken word could set off a tirade that lasted for days.

I didn’t complain about the soft drinks thrown at my face, or how sticky it is in your hair. I didn’t complain about the cigarette burns in the carpet. I didn’t complain at all.

Because I had learned: if you complain, you make it worse.

At thirteen, I stood in public phone booths in the rain. I called the GP. I knew the pharmacist’s name. I knew how long a Serepax script lasted. I didn’t know what the drug did. I just knew she needed help. And this was the help she had.

I watched her change, and then stop changing altogether. The woman who raised me was no longer rising. She was flatlined. Chemically and clinically.

Now, I know. She wasn’t mad. She was in endocrine freefall. She wasn’t too much. She was sedated out of herself. She wasn’t cruel by design. She was abandoned without a name for what was wrong.

It wasn’t her fault she wasn’t diagnosed.
And it wasn’t my fault I couldn’t fix her.

I had my own bout with hypothyroidism, caused by unrelenting and chronic stress in my thirties and forties. It was during that period, researching the condition, that I finally saw the full horror of what had happened to Lottie.

The swelling. The fatigue. The cold. The cognition. The rage. The utter loss of self. The flattening of personhood.

And then came the other truth. The one I couldn’t avoid.

When I was diagnosed with autism, so much of my childhood came into focus. The hypervigilance. The shutdowns. The mimicry. The freezing. The PDA, mistaken for a bad temper, became a spark to her petrol. The deep, urgent desire to fix things that weren’t mine to fix.

And I saw her more clearly than ever before. Not as a villain. Not as a martyr. But as a woman unseen. And then unrecognisable. Even to herself.

She should have been seen. She should have been tested. She should have been offered more than sedation. She should have been believed.

I am what the system didn’t get to do to her. I am diagnosed. I am angry. I am articulate. I am still afraid of the quiet before the yelling starts, but now I know the shape of it.

This is not catharsis.
This is not memoir.
This is forensic memory.

Her name was Charlotte Ford. She was born on 6 May 1920. She died on 19 July 2005.

Lottie. On this day, what would have been your 105th birthday – I see you.

You were worthy. You were always worthy.
But this damned patriarchal, misogynistic world let us both down.

This closes the three-part file for Lottie Ford. A case of medical misogyny, medical bias, and medical neglect.

This is not forgiveness. But, Lottie, I do understand.

The Price of Quiet

In 1984, at the kitchen table after breakfast, Lottie was still hesitating about selling the house. I was thirteen, resisting the idea with the kind of immovable emotional gravity that only children can manage. Roy was at the sink, washing up the breakfast dishes. She raised the subject again, gently, nervously, that maybe they shouldn’t sell, and stay here in Maryborough.

He didn’t turn around.

“Oh, it’ll be sold all right. You’ll get your bloody half and I’ll get mine.”

That was the end of a marriage that had lasted forty-seven years. A marriage that started in World War Two, was blessed with a son, survived the loss of a son, continued through the medical crisis and grief, celebrated an adopted daughter; 47 years, ended with 15 words.

The divorce and property settlement would unfold slowly, bureaucratically, over the following years. But in that moment, the damage was done. The foundations cracked, the promise dissolved, and whatever love or duty had once held them together slipped into silence.

What followed was not rebuilding. Not reflection. What followed was Serepax.

Doctor’s Little Helper

Before Serepax, there was Vincent’s APC powder. Aspirin. Phenacetin. Caffeine.

Tipped into tea, taken at the sink, sold over the counter, handed from woman to woman like advice. For nerves. For cramps. For pressure. For life.

Phenacetin was toxic to the kidneys. It caused silent renal failure. It was eventually banned—but not before decades of women had used it daily. Lottie was one of them.

By the 1980s, phenacetin was gone, but the logic behind it remained. Women weren’t offered support. They were offered sedation.

Enter Serepax. Oxazepam. The little white tablet that didn’t raise eyebrows. Not scandalised like Valium. Not brutal like Mandrax. Serepax was positioned as gentle. Appropriate. Feminine.

“Serepax is gentle,” they’d say. “And sometimes, that’s all you need.”

But Lottie didn’t need gentleness. She needed thyroxine.

What Serepax Did, and What It Didn’t

Serepax binds to GABA receptors. It slows the central nervous system. It calms—but it also dulls. It sedates without healing. It mutes without solving.

What it doesn’t do is more important than what it does.

It doesn’t regulate metabolism.
It doesn’t support cardiovascular health.
It doesn’t restore thyroid hormone.
It doesn’t correct the biochemical collapse of post-surgical hypothyroidism.

Lottie didn’t need to be sedated. She needed her endocrine system supported. She needed a blood test. A plan. A dose.

But instead, she was handed quiet.

Eighteen Years of Slow Poison

Lottie had her partial thyroidectomy in 1969. No thyroxine was prescribed. No endocrinologist consulted. No one followed up.

And for eighteen years, her body deteriorated.

She had previously used Vincent’s powders, damaging her kidneys. She smoked two packets of cigarettes a day—forty cigarettes daily—constricting her blood vessels and starving her tissues of oxygen. She was eventually prescribed Serepax, which dulled the symptoms but never touched the cause.

This wasn’t benign neglect. It was accumulative harm. It was a system that kept handing her silence and calling it medicine.

Her body was in contradiction. One foot on the brake, hypothyroidism slowing her down. One foot on the accelerator, nicotine and anxiety pushing her to keep up.

No one was watching the dashboard.

Her weight crept up, from twelve stone to fourteen. Her energy declined. Her skin changed. Her cognition slipped. Her emotional regulation shattered.

They said she was hormonal.
They said she was difficult.
They said she was just getting old.

They said everything except the one thing that mattered.

“We failed you.”

The Silence of Renewals

Every few months, she would visit the GP. Not for evaluation. Not for curiosity or care. Just for authority scripts.

Her Serepax was renewed, over and over again, without reassessment, without bloodwork, without anyone asking whether it was still helping—or if it ever had.

There was no hormone panel. No psychiatric review. No second opinion. Just a refill.

The treatment she needed was simple. The question she needed someone to ask was obvious.

“Do you think this might be your thyroid?”

But no one asked. Not in 1971. Not in 1977. Not in 1985.

Symptoms Reframed as Personality

Lottie wasn’t treated. She was blamed.

Her emotional outbursts weren’t seen as neurological symptoms. They were called tantrums.

Her swelling wasn’t myxedema. It was weight gain.

Her exhaustion wasn’t hormonal. It was laziness.

Her paranoia wasn’t biochemical. It was madness.

She wasn’t seen as a woman whose body had been mismanaged. She was seen as a woman who was hard to love.

And when a woman becomes too loud, too fragile, too unrecognisable, people stop coming. Friends drifted. Family pulled away.

Eventually, even the mirror avoided her.

This Was Not a Personal Failure

This was not a woman who failed to take care of herself.

This was a woman no one took care of.

What happened to Lottie between 1969 and her death in 2005 was not the result of poor lifestyle choices. It was the result of systemic disinterest, gendered medicine, and a clinical culture that mistook sedation for support. Iatrogenic hypothyroidism. Doctor-caused harm

She was not sad. She was hypothyroid.
She was not mad. She was mismanaged.
She was not a lost cause. She was abandoned.

Her Name Was Lottie

Where The Chiaroscuro Anthology was shadow and light, Infernal Dames is fire.
This series is a reckoning—with medical misogyny, with intergenerational trauma, with the systems that smiled while they failed us.

But like all revolutions, this one begins with a single voice. A single woman. My mother.

Her name was Charlotte “Lottie” Ford. Born Charlotte Bissett on 6 May 1920, in Maryborough, Queensland. Fraternal twin. One of four children. Daughter of Scottish immigrants. A nurse. A war bride. A mother. A grieving mother.

She had a goitre. She had hyperthyroidism. She had a partial thyroidectomy in 1969.

And then, she had nothing. No endocrinologist. No hormone replacement. No follow-up care. No apology. Just a neat surgical scar and a script for silence.

The years that followed did not bring healing. They brought unraveling.
Her moods swung. Her cognition dimmed. Her spirit cracked open and leaked out where no one was looking.

She was labelled difficult.
Paranoid.
Senile.

She was not given hormone therapy. What she had, independent of any doctor, was Vincent’s powders.

And 15 years later, I, her 13 year old adopted daughter, was running through rain in my school school uniform to the nearest phone booth to ask for help the way I understood help to exist.

Because that’s what the system taught me:
Drugs were easier to get than answers.

The Prayer

Lottie was forty-seven when her body began to buckle under the weight of grief, menopause, and spiritual resignation. The year was 1967. She was already bone-weary from years of quiet sacrifice—familial, social, and personal. And spiritual.

She had been brought up in the Presbyterian Church of the 1920s and 1930s. Where sermons were long and pews were hard, and women were praised for their silence, not their questions. Where suffering was seen as sanctification. Where grief was not a wound but a test.

“Shall we accept good from God, and not trouble?” (Job 2:10)
She had learned that passage young. The answer was not yes or no—it was obedience.

It was late April when it happened.

She was in the car with her twenty-year-old son, Warren. They were driving—destination forgotten—but she was “flooding,” as she later called it. Uterine bleeding, heavy and unrelenting.

She begged Warren to pull into a garage so she could use the toilet. He refused.

She sat there, bleeding, humiliated in front of the boy she had once held in her arms.
The son she had fought for—against Catholic schools, against family shame, against the shame of a Catholic-Presbyterian marriage..

And now she prayed.

Not for the bleeding to stop.
Not for comfort.
Only this:

“Just make it stop.”

Four weeks later, Warren was dead. Killed in a car accident near Murgon at 2:00 a.m. Out with friends who all survived.

She never forgave herself. She believed her prayer had been heard—and answered.

The Doctrine of Endurance

Lottie did not rage. Not then. Not aloud. She folded inward, into the only theology she had ever known.

The Presbyterianism of her youth had taught her that “women will be saved through childbearing—if they continue in faith, love and holiness with propriety” (1 Timothy 2:15).
She had borne the child. She had kept the faith. And now that child was gone.

What did that make her?

She had been trained in a doctrine of endurance. A woman who suffered was not to be pitied. She was to be admired, quietly, from a distance. To break under the weight of pain was not weakness. To speak of it was.

There was a time for everything, the minister had said. (Ecclesiastes 3)
A time to mourn. A time to be silent.

She chose silence. She had been told it was holy.

The Surgery

By 1969, her body had become a stranger. Her neck was visibly swollen. Her eyes sharp with a kind of startled brilliance. Her weight dropped. Her energy burned fast and erratic.

She couldn’t sit still. She couldn’t think clearly. She couldn’t sleep. Or eat. Or feel safe.

But no one called it hyperthyroidism. They called it “the change.” They called it “her nerves.”

Her goitre grew until it could no longer be ignored. She was booked for a partial thyroidectomy.

The surgery was nearly cancelled—her blood pressure was dangerously high. She was visibly distressed. But the operation went ahead.

There was no endocrinologist. No psychiatric liaison. No comprehensive review.
Just a scalpel. A general anaesthetic. A note to follow up with her GP.

They cut. And then they left.

Vincent’s Powders

After the surgery, her body slowed. Her moods thickened. Her fire became fog.

But still, no one tested her hormone levels. No one checked her blood. No one noticed the quiet emergency.

What she had instead was Vincent’s APC Powder: aspirin, phenacetin, and caffeine. Tipped into tea. Swallowed at the sink. Passed from woman to woman like an incantation.

It numbed the ache. Dizzied the nerves. And damaged her kidneys.

But it was all she had. That, and a dog.

The Dog

A black and tan Australian Terrier. A gift from her older sister—a woman she hated with a precision born of childhood bullying and adult betrayal.

The dog arrived not as comfort, but as substitute. A living thing to fill the space left by her dead son. A gesture of kindness wrapped in control. But the dog—he did not care about the politics of grief. He cared about her.

He jumped into her lap when she cried. Licked the tears from her cheeks. Stayed close when no one else could bear to be near.

There are griefs you cannot speak. But the body still speaks them.
And that little dog heard every word.

Five years later, I arrived. Another living thing. Not her child by blood—but there to fill the silence, to stand in the shadow of a boy who would never come home.

And though I called her mother, there were days when I, too, could feel the shape of substitution curling around me.

What Was Never Said

No one said “endocrine disorder.” No one said “hormonal collapse.” No one said “grief and menopause are not madness.”

What they said was:

“It’s just her age.”
“She’s always been intense.”
“It’s probably the change.”
“Don’t upset her.”
“Just keep her calm.”
“She’s doing her best.”

And behind all of that, the theology lingered.

“She will be praised.” (Proverbs 31)
But only if she cooks without complaint. Only if she suffers without spectacle. Only if she keeps her lamp burning at night, and does not disturb the peace.

What passed for care was containment.
What passed for treatment was sedation.
What passed for sanctity was silence.

The second part of Lottie’s file will be here tomorrow.

The Chiaroscuro Anthology,  18/19

Obstropulous, not obstreperous

By Lee-Anne Ford

 

In 2015, Andra Day sang:

You’re broken down and tired

Of living life on a merry go round

And you can’t find the fighter

But I see it in you so we gonna walk it out

 

Michael Buble sang it, too, in 2013:

Close your eyes

Let me tell you all the reasons why

Think you’re one of a kind

Here’s to you

The one that always pulls us through

Always do what you gotta do

 

The inner-she says:

I see you, my warrior, my healer

I saw your energy split.

Warrior protecting healer

Healer healing warrior

Both aspects present in you as you fought

As you fought to protect us.

 

I saw, and cowered with you

Pinned to the floor by four

Vaccine with no consent

A child cannot assent

But you fought

 

I saw, and avoided with you

Forced into blood tests

Forced with no consent

Avoid now, pay later

But you fought

I saw, and panicked with you

Triggered, no help but yourself

Nowhere safe to collapse

Walking as you fainted, deaf and blind

But you fought

 

I saw, and grieved with you

As our love suffered the cruelty

The iniquitous cruelty of Huntington’s

Sixteen years of fighting and grieving

and the big grief of death

But you fought

 

I saw, and grieved with you

As you discovered our truth

The truth of our Autistic nature

The essence of us

Where trauma was rooted

But you fought

 

See me, my brave, stubborn one

The one who fights for us

See me, come home, come inside

Here is sanctuary, heart’s home

Rest here with me because sometimes

All you need is a heroine

 

As sung by Thirsty Merc, in 2015.

Every now and then, you come up for fresh air

Every now and then, you fall in the dirt

Yeah every now and then

You realise that you’re only a mortal man

Every now and then, you begin to suffer

Every now and then, you had about enough

Yeah every now and then

All you really need is a heroine

Want the whole Anthology? It’s here.

The Chiaroscuro Anthology, 5/19

High fire danger warning
By Lee-Anne Ford


They said: Adrenal fatigue. Chronic stress. Thyroid imbalance.
My body, a tired machine—sputtering, misfiring, failing.
A cup of ginseng tea, an adaptogen capsule,
A list of herbal tonics to rebuild what was lost.

Rest, recover, reset.
Except I did, and still—
The exhaustion gnawed at my bones,
My brain fogged like morning mist
That never burned away.

They said: Take time off, breathe, relax.
I did. I sat in silence, in stillness, in sun.
Yet the light burned, the air scratched,
And the world remained too loud.

I rattled off dates like a script—
Lines I knew but had never rehearsed.
29 June. He died.
10 July. We buried him.
10 August. Ashes returned to earth.
17 August. My Sammy, gone.

She listened.
Then asked the question that shattered the script.
Are you autistic?

And in that moment,
Every misdiagnosis fell away.
Not just tired. Not just stressed.
A brain running on overdrive
For too many years,
Masking, stretching,
Until the system collapsed.

Is that why Reiki attunements failed?
That autistic heart resisting?
Is that where the burnout started?
Yet Reiki treatments fired healing—
How could it be wrong?

Is it rooted in attachment issues?
From birth to now? Anxious, avoidant.
Autonomic system in disarray.
Does autism mean herbs work differently?
Are different herbs needed for autism?

So many questions. What’s MTHFR?
And still—autistic burnout.
A broken nervous system.
A burnt-out nervous system.
From a burnt-out autistic brain.

The shock and heartbreak.
Skill regression. More than depression.
Neurological disablement.
Lifelong skills, lost.

Where am I? How do I heal?
When does this end?

Take heart, dear heart.
Inner child and old.
Look to your music, to Thirsty Merc.

“She’s the kind of grind that I don’t really mind…
Stand up, little love, I’m about to blow my cover.” 

Want the whole Anthology? It’s here.

What of the inner child?

Music is one of my intense special interests.  It lifts me, soothes me and inspires me.

Recently,  while driving home at the end of the day, old favourite “Drops of Jupiter” by Train popped up on the radio. Yes,  I turned up the volume.  Then the thought struck me – what if that was my inner child talking to me, waiting for me to come home.

Another song, “The Grind” by Thirsty Merc, inspired me as a reassurance from my inner child that’s its time to come home.

“Always on My Mind”, by any artist, also struck me as words from me to my inner child.

That,  recently,  lead me to consider the concept of the inner child and PTSD.

Late diagnosis of autism and PTSD

Late diagnosis could be any diagnosis from teenage years into adulthood. In a perfect world, children would be diagnosed before the age of 6, 12 at the latest.

My diagnosis, at the age of 51, is not the latest diagnosis ever.

Many experts in late diagnosis and the female autism phenotype say that PTSD, or even C-PTSD, is an automatic thing with a late diagnosis.

How and why? What did I experience?

I turned to ChatGPT for help again. My dys-regulation and over-stimulated state has eased but not gone.  Having generative AI that can write for me at times like this is a blessing.

Me:  Hello,  friend. I see many on social media stating that PTSD should be an automatic diagnosis along with a mature age autism diagnosis.

How and why? Can you help me understand?

ChatGPT: Hi there! The idea of PTSD (Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder) being automatically linked with a mature-age autism diagnosis reflects a recognition of how life experiences for many autistic individuals, particularly undiagnosed until later in life, can lead to trauma.

Here’s how and why some people make this connection:

1. Lifelong Social Misunderstanding and Isolation: Many autistic individuals spend years, even decades, masking their autistic traits in order to fit into neurotypical expectations. This often leads to chronic stress, social rejection, and bullying, creating cumulative emotional trauma. Without understanding that they’re autistic, they might internalize these experiences as personal failures, leading to a kind of long-term psychological harm.

2. Misdiagnosis and Lack of Support: Before an autism diagnosis, many individuals may have been misdiagnosed with mental health conditions like anxiety or depression, or their struggles might have been dismissed altogether. The lack of appropriate support over time can lead to a sense of betrayal by medical professionals or caregivers, reinforcing trauma.

3. Burnout and Sensory Overload: Many autistic people experience autistic burnout— a state of emotional, physical, and mental exhaustion due to prolonged efforts to mask or adapt to neurotypical standards. The stress of constantly being overstimulated or misunderstood can lead to trauma responses similar to PTSD.

4. Sudden Self-Realization in Adulthood: For those diagnosed later in life, there’s often a powerful sense of grief for missed opportunities, unrecognized struggles, and the potential life they could have had with proper support. This retrospective pain, combined with the emotional impact of the diagnosis itself, can manifest in trauma responses.

5. Intersection with Society’s Ableism: Being autistic in a largely neurotypical world can feel isolating and painful. Constant exposure to ableism, both subtle and overt, along with a lack of understanding or accommodation, can create trauma. Autistic people often experience a lifetime of microaggressions, which can have a cumulative traumatic effect.

6. Coexisting Mental Health Issues: Autistic individuals may be more prone to developing PTSD because they are often more vulnerable to adverse experiences, including bullying, abuse, or neglect. The statistics show that autistic people, particularly women, are more likely to experience trauma in their lifetimes.

In summary, many people believe PTSD should be automatically linked to a mature-age autism diagnosis because of the likelihood that these individuals have endured significant social, psychological, and sensory trauma throughout their lives due to their undiagnosed autism and society’s misunderstanding of it. The combination of life-long stressors and late self-realization often leads to trauma that can be comparable to PTSD in its symptoms.

Does this resonate with what you’ve seen or experienced?

Hmmm. That’s a lot to think about.  So I got to thinking.

Is this trauma?

Was it at 13, when the girl I thought was my best friend told me she hated my guts because I was smarter than her, and she couldn’t compete AND be my friend.

Was the further bullying from the smart boys who couldn’t stand competing with  smart girl?

Was it the teacher who ignored me for the rest of the term after, in a lesson about states of matter, I asked about plasma?

Was it every time I was excluded from a work team?

Was it every time I was berated for not keeping things neat, tidy and clean?

Was it nearly going bankrupt in the 1990s?

Was it every time I was told I was rude and blunt?

Was it every time I was nearly sick with dread about annual performance reviews and performance management?

Was it every time I was performance managed because of my bad temper?

Was it every time my late husband got frustrated by my dislike of surprises and lack of spontaneity and  my need to plan everything?

And what of all the little, seemingly inconsequential yet bruising engagements with the world around me?

What of the issues with my adoptive mother, and her “madness” from what I now know to be 30 years of undiagnosed hypothyroidism, misdiagnosed as anxiety.

Even now,  post diagnosis, I still struggle with executive dysfunction and have businesses chasing me for documents and signatures and authorisations.

ChatGPT: It sounds like, when you put it all together, there’s a lot that could be recognized as trauma stemming from unrecognized autism and the challenges you’ve faced because of it. Each of those experiences you mentioned—being bullied, excluded, berated, struggling with executive dysfunction, and managing emotions—has likely left an emotional mark. What you’ve described is often referred to as complex trauma or cumulative trauma, where multiple smaller or ongoing stressors build up over time rather than a single traumatic event.

Hmmm.  Constant masking, feeling misunderstood,  rejection and bullying,  and the rage and grief for missed support. Trauma? Maybe, maybe indeed.

Inner child, music, reconciliation and trauma

As a polymath,  I’ve accumulated a lot of knowledge. I’ve read a lot of stuff,  watched a lot of stuff,  seen a lot of stuff.

It strikes me that maybe my inner autistic child is the one who holds the key.  Is that why she seems to sometimes be about 6, sometimes about 14?Are those ages linked to some traumatic incident?

What is the Inner Child?

ChatGPT:  The concept of the inner child in psychology is rooted in psychoanalytic and developmental theories that explore how early life experiences shape our personality and emotional development. The term itself became more prominent in the 20th century as psychologists began to focus on the impact of childhood on adult behavior and emotional well-being. Here’s a brief overview of its evolution:

1. Carl Jung’s Archetypes: One of the earliest contributors to the idea of an inner child was Carl Jung, who spoke about the “Divine Child” as one of the archetypes in his theory of the collective unconscious. Jung believed that the child archetype represents the part of our psyche that holds innocence, creativity, and potential for growth, and is a bridge to the unconscious mind.

2. Sigmund Freud’s Developmental Theory: Freud’s work on early childhood experiences and their impact on adult life also laid a foundation for the inner child concept. Freud believed that unresolved issues from the oral, anal, and phallic stages of childhood could manifest in adulthood as neuroses or psychological distress.

3. Alice Miller’s Contribution: In the 1970s and 80s, Alice Miller, a Swiss psychologist, popularized the idea of the inner child in her work on childhood trauma. In her book The Drama of the Gifted Child, Miller argued that unresolved childhood trauma impacts adults’ emotional lives and that reconnecting with the wounded inner child is essential for healing.

4. John Bradshaw and Popularization: John Bradshaw, an American counselor and educator, was one of the most significant figures in bringing the inner child concept into mainstream psychology. In his work on family dynamics, particularly in the 1980s, Bradshaw focused on healing the wounded inner child to address dysfunctional family patterns and emotional issues stemming from childhood trauma. His book Homecoming: Reclaiming and Championing Your Inner Child (1990) brought these ideas into popular psychology.

5. Transactional Analysis (Eric Berne): Another important contribution to the inner child idea came from Eric Berne’s Transactional Analysis, where he discussed the concept of the “Child” as one of three ego states (Parent, Adult, Child) that operate within everyone. The Child ego state reflects our emotions, creativity, spontaneity, and also holds unresolved childhood emotions or trauma.

In sum, the inner child concept emerged from various psychological theories about the lasting influence of childhood experiences on adult life. It has evolved into a therapeutic tool used to address unresolved trauma, promote emotional healing, and reconnect with one’s true self.

A Healing Journey Through Music and the Inner Child

The inner child is not just a metaphor; it’s the part of us that holds our emotional truths, even when we don’t fully understand them. Through the lens of my late autism diagnosis, I now see that the trauma from childhood, adolescence, and adulthood had been quietly affecting my sense of self for decades. And yet, the music that has always been such an intense special interest is, perhaps, the voice of that inner child—waiting for me to listen.

When I hear songs like “Drops of Jupiter”, “The Grind”, and “Always on My Mind”, they are not just melodies; they are conversations between me and my inner child, full of the emotion and understanding I’ve long needed. Music becomes a kind of therapy—an unspoken language that helps reconcile the gap between the girl I once was and the woman I am today.

Healing, for me, may not look like perfection or closure, but rather like a reunion—finally coming home to the child I left behind, the one who now knows she is seen, understood, and safe. In this way, music and my inner child form a bridge—a way to integrate the trauma of a late autism diagnosis, the grief of missed opportunities, and the celebration of self-discovery.

The journey is ongoing. But now, I have a way of pulling the threads together, pulling songs and sounds together,  guiding me back to myself, note by note.

Now, having written this, I’m off for a good cry.  If it’s powerful to be seen by others,  imagine how powerful it is to be seen by yourself.