Over the past few weeks, my posts about trauma have sparked some deep conversation and connection. Yet when I spoke about the challenges around funding, gatekeeping, and entrenched thinking within safeguarding systems, the response was very different — absolute silence.
I’ve been reflecting on why this happens, and what it might say about the bigger picture. These reflections aren’t about blame or criticism. They come from observation, lived experience, and a deep wish to understand and improve how we support people.
What I’ve come to realise is this:
Survivors who heal become highly attuned, insightful, grounded observers of human behaviour — because they’ve spent a lifetime surviving it.
Healing doesn’t just soothe old wounds.
It sharpens clarity.
It changes perspective.
It reveals the quiet places where systems don’t yet reach.
And that can be confronting.
The Two Pathways: Anchored and Unanchored
I often think about two very different nervous system pathways that people grow up with:
Those who are “anchored”—who grew up in environments of love, safety, and predictability—often develop a strong internal baseline of calm. They thrive in structured systems because those systems reflect what they already know.
Those who are “unanchored,” raised in environments of fear or unpredictability, develop adaptive strategies that keep them safe. Hypervigilance, intuition, environmental scanning — traits once labelled as “disordered” — are actually signs of a nervous system trained for survival.
The more survivors heal, the more they begin to see this clearly:
What the world called dysfunction was often incredible intelligence.
Not intelligence measured by grades or titles, but intelligence measured by sensitivity, perception, and lived truth.
The Third Path: Becoming Anchored Through Healing
When I speak about anchored and unanchored pathways, I’m not describing fixed identities — I’m describing starting points. Because there is a third pathway that emerges only through healing.
Those of us who grew up unanchored often started life believing everything was our fault:
- our reactions
- our sensitivity
- our fear
- our overwhelm
- our inability to “just be normal”
Because of this internalisation, we learned to go inward early in life — not gently, but in a survival-driven way. We analysed ourselves before anyone else ever did.
Healing later in life asks us to go back into that inner space, but this time with compassion.
It asks us to face the triggers we once fled from.
To understand the sensations that shook us.
To sit with the memories we buried.
To confront the fears that shaped us.
And when we do this — when we meet ourselves honestly — something extraordinary happens:
We become anchored.
Not anchored the way others were in childhood,
but anchored in a deeper, earned, embodied way.
This anchoring is built on:
- self-awareness
- self-compassion
- nervous system understanding
- emotional regulation
- truth and integration
And here is the part society has never understood:
We keep all of our survival intelligence.
Healing doesn’t take away our sensitivity.
It refines it.
It transforms:
- hypervigilance into intuition
- sensitivity into empathy
- environmental scanning into deep awareness
- pattern detection into discernment
- old fear responses into embodied wisdom
We don’t return to who we were before trauma.
We evolve into someone we never had the chance to be.
Once you have faced your deepest fears —
walked into the fire of your own nervous system —
and survived it with grace and truth,
there is very little left to fear.
Fear itself becomes the only remaining fear — and even that begins to dissolve.
This is why healed survivors see systems differently.
This is why they recognise blind spots.
This is why they speak up.
This is why silence often follows.
They are anchored now — anchored with insight, with clarity, with their survival training intact — and they can finally articulate what many systems are not yet equipped to hear.
We evolve through healing.
When Trauma Heals, Insight Emerges
Something transformative happens when a survivor reaches the stage where they can look inward without shame or fear. They begin to recognise:
- their intuition was real
- their responses made sense
- their perceptions were accurate
- their adaptations were protective
- their sensitivity is a gift, not a flaw
And with this comes an increased ability to articulate what they see — calmly, clearly, compassionately.
This is where systems struggle.
Why Systems Go Silent
When someone speaks from lived insight, especially insight shaped by surviving trauma, it can highlight gaps that professionals may not have noticed or been trained to see. Not because they lack care, but because their nervous systems formed in different landscapes.
For someone who grew up anchored in safety, the world is often interpreted through stability.
For someone who grew up in threat, the world is read through subtle cues others miss — the energy in a room, the shift in tone, the quiet inconsistencies.
Professionals who have never lived in danger often don’t develop the same internal radar.
So when survivors bring forward observations about:
- harm caused unintentionally
- blind spots in safeguarding
- outdated assumptions
- subtle but unsafe language
- practices that don’t consider nervous system states
…it can feel confronting.
Not because a survivor is attacking.
But because a truth is being spoken that disrupts familiar frameworks.
Sometimes silence is not disagreement — it’s discomfort.
Alongside silence, many lived experience survivors also encounter something equally painful: dismissal. Not always loud, not always intentional, but present all the same.
For years, we’ve been met with the quiet assumption that we must be mistaken, emotional, or “misunderstanding the situation,” while those positioned as experts remain unquestionable.
For survivors, this dismissal lands in a very particular way.
When you’ve grown up feeling worthless, helpless, or “wrong” in your own body, it becomes easy to believe that other people must know better. Imposter syndrome doesn’t appear out of nowhere — it takes root in childhood when your reality was dismissed or denied. So when systems or professionals dismiss your insight, it can echo those early experiences and temporarily pull you back into old beliefs:
“Maybe I really am wrong. Maybe I shouldn’t speak up. Maybe they know better than me.”
Healing teaches us to reframe these beliefs.
It shows us that our reactions made sense, that our perceptions were accurate, and that our nervous system learned to survive in environments others cannot imagine. Dismissal still hurts — but it no longer defines us. Instead, it becomes a reminder of how far we’ve come and how much clarity we now hold.
Naming this is not criticism; it’s simply acknowledging a pattern many of us recognise.
The Fear Behind the Quiet
When survivors heal, they step into a different kind of clarity. They begin to see where systems don’t yet match the lived realities of the people they are meant to support.
And this can be frightening for those within those systems — particularly if they’ve never been encouraged to question the structures they work inside.
It’s not about superiority or inferiority.
It’s not about professionals being wrong.
It’s about the value of perspectives shaped by different nervous system experiences.
Healing gives survivors strength.
Strength gives voice.
Voice brings truth.
And truth asks systems to evolve.
Change is rarely comfortable.
But it is always necessary.
A New Kind of Wisdom
As more survivors heal, something profound is happening:
They are reframing themselves not as “disordered” but as wise.
Not as “broken” but as attuned.
Not as “too sensitive” but as deeply perceptive.
Not as “the problem” but as part of the solution.
The silence surrounding difficult conversations isn’t failure.
It’s a sign that we are speaking into places where the ground is shifting.
And perhaps, gently, it’s an invitation:
For systems to listen more deeply,
for professionals to reflect without fear,
and for society to recognise the extraordinary insight that emerges when a survivor heals.
Because when survivors heal, everyone has something to learn.