Leaning into the inner child
Fight, Flight, Freeze
Therapists Write What The Body Remembers
As trauma therapists, we spend much of our professional life tracking the nervous system, noticing the quickening breath, the tightening jaw, the gaze that drifts or sharpens or drops. We learn to name patterns in others long before we recognise them in ourselves. Survival responses are something we teach, understand, and work with every day. But they’re also something we live, intimately and often invisibly.
This blog series is an attempt to turn some of that gaze inward.
Across cultures, generations, and families, we are taught what to fight, what to flee, what to silence, and what to surrender. These lessons become muscle memory long before they become language. As clinicians, we’re not exempt from them. If anything, our histories and identities shape the very lenses through which we understand trauma.
So this series isn’t a teaching space. It’s a remembering space. A place where we write from the body, from culture, from the small rebellions and quiet escapes that shaped us long before we had a therapist’s vocabulary for them.
Here we reflect on our own escapes, fights and surrender.
If you’re a fellow therapist, a client, a caregiver, or simply a human who has
ever wondered, “Why did I react like that?”, we hope these reflections offer
resonance, not rules. Curiosity, not conclusions.
This is the work beneath the work.
These are the patterns beneath the practice.
This is what the body remembers — and we are finally slowing down enough to notice.
Flight From Disability: How I Ran Toward Cultural Ableism Without Realising It
I didn’t just grow up around disability. I grew up fleeing it. It took years to name this for what it was: not a lack of compassion, not a personal failing, but a survival response, a flight response, shaped by a child trying to manage more than her body could metabolize.