Tag: healing

Eating the Maze

Posted on by Flag Bearer

Trauma’s Cultural Echoes and Collective Imprint

Childhood trauma doesn’t simply disappear; it calcifies into lifelong patterns of perception, desire, and behaviour. These early wounds sculpt identity and quietly choreograph how a person moves through relationships. In my previous piece, The Marketplace of the Broken, I explored how unprocessed trauma gravitates toward its own kind, forming communities built on mirrored fractures.

In this reflection, I’ll be examining how those trauma-bound communities scale outward, cascading through culture, reshaping social norms, and seeding ideologies that echo, and often amplify, the unresolved dynamics of the private psyche.

To recap, early experiences with stepfathers, transient lovers, or other adult male figures often involve projections of evolutionary-driven resentment or desire toward raising children who are not their own. Girls growing up in these households absorb subtle or overt signals of control or threat. Over time, this early vigilance translates into adult patterns: heightened distrust, compulsive self-protection, and strategies to obscure reproductive signals. Desexualisation, masking, or making oneself “unclaimable” emerges as a protective mechanism to navigate environments perceived as unsafe.

Protective Mechanism: Aesthetics

Like most things that reside within us, these coping mechanisms never stay confined to private life; they are projected outward, eventually shaping cultural expression and even social aesthetics. Body modification, for instance, can operate as a symbolic extension of these sexual-protective strategies. Extensive tattooing can, from a distance, blur into scale-like textures. Brightly coloured, tropical parrot-dyed hair can emulate belonging to a different species altogether, signalling sexual incompatibility. Asymmetrical shaved-section haircuts can mimic the visual cues of age, signalling infertility. Piercings can permanently scar the skin in order to hold jewellery with no inherent value or status, subtly disfiguring an organ universally used to assess health and fertility from the opposite sex. And women using fake-tanning products can deliberately invoke the appearance of higher masculine hormone levels, melanin-driven aggression markers and testosterone-mimicking effects, acting as a form of strategic desexualisation that subverts conventional sexual cues.

Over time, these individual survival strategies stop being merely personal, they become contagious. When enough people carry the same protective adaptations, the behaviour calcifies into fashion, then into ideology, and finally into a cultural atmosphere that treats trauma-coded signalling as normal. What began as private attempts to manage danger becomes a shared aesthetic language based on collective sexual camouflage. And as this aesthetic spreads, it subtly reshapes the culture itself, reinforcing the very conditions of mistrust, defensiveness, and disconnection, that produced it. In this way, unprocessed childhood trauma doesn’t just scar individuals; it hijacks cultural evolution.

Protective Mechanism: Medicalisation

The implication of trauma extends beyond even beyond aesthetic signalling. Women raised in environments that demanded tight self-policing of reproductive cues also often carry these patterns into adulthood, shaping how they approach reproduction and relationships. This has, in fact, manifested in often framing abortion as a safety or health measure, rather than as a conscious assertion of reproductive agency. By medicalising and abstracting the uterus and potential offspring, the body becomes a site for trauma avoidance and a locus in need of healing. Reproductive acts, in this context, are rendered neutral procedures, stripped of both sexual and social significance. This pattern mirrors a broader societal tendency toward desexualisation and control, echoing protective strategies internalised during childhood and ultimately constraining authentic reproductive choice. In doing so, sexuality itself is censored, even from the self, as the uterus and its potential are depersonalised and medicalised safeguarding the mind from reliving foundational trauma.

In effect, abortion becomes disconnected from female sexuality, desire and what is fundamentally what defines the female sex, treated not as an exercise of reproductive power but as a neutral, procedural intervention. Using this definition, reducing abortion to a medical procedure reflects structural misogyny: a system that disregards what it means to be a woman, including the responsibilities and agency inherent to that role. Individual strategies of desexualisation and unclaimability developed in childhood, are projected outward, shaping ideology and public discourse so that reproductive termination is framed as a clinical service. Through this process, the patterns of control and suppression learned early in life are inscribed on society itself, constraining authentic reproductive choice and obscuring the sexual and cultural dimensions of the act.

Protective Mechanism: Externalisation

These protective postures do not remain confined to the body; they migrate outward into politics and public emotion. The same psychic strategies that govern self-presentation and sexual withdrawal also shape how women collectively respond to shifts in reproductive authority. When policy touches the reproductive sphere, it reactivates the early circuitry of control and safety that was first laid down in childhood.

The widespread anxiety among women following the decentralisation of abortion law in the United States highlights how trauma-shaped dynamics continue to influence collective psychology. In this context, Trump functions less as a policymaker and more as an archetypal figure, the mother’s lover, whose presence destabilises the household’s emotional order. This archetype represents an intrusive male force entering a system meant to feel safe, which is why he becomes such an easy target for projected fear. While his decision returned reproductive authority to the states without banning abortion outright, it provoked intense reactions. For many women, it triggered a replay of unresolved childhood trauma, projecting onto Trump the fear and anger originally associated with intrusive male figures. His political action was experienced not just as policy but as a personal threat, an echo of past violations of safety, autonomy, and trust within the domestic sphere.

In this sense, the hysteria is not merely political outrage but the resurfacing of stored memory. The paternal protector (the federal state) was suddenly perceived to have abandoned its role, leaving women to face the unpredictable household of state authority. Trump, embodying the intrusive lover, became the projection surface for collective fear and rage rooted in earlier experiences of control, violation, and maternal complicity. Thus, the debate over abortion rights was not just about autonomy, law and decentralising power, but about the re-enactment of unresolved childhood configurations: authority, dependency, and the ambivalence of power and protection. Through this lens, modern political discourse becomes a form of public psychotherapy, its emotional volatility a reflection of how deeply private wounds continue to script public life.

Protective Mechanism: Gender and Sexuality

Just as girls internalise vigilance and self-protection in households with unfamiliar male figures, boys may develop a different, but equally potent, set of psychological adaptations when raised in similar environments. In homes where a mother cycles through partners, a distinct trauma pattern forms. The boy watches strangers’ step into the role of “father,” yet these men, at least at the unconscious level, do not relate to him with genuine care or recognition, perceiving him as a future rival for dominance within the household. Even when never spoken aloud, the child absorbs this tension, and it carves itself into his developing sense of identity.

For the boy, masculinity becomes framed as adversarial. The men around him are not protectors or allies; they are rivals whose attention and affection are reserved for his mother, not for him. At the same time, he experiences himself as the obstacle, the living reminder of another man’s seed, the child who blocks or complicates his mother’s desirability in the eyes of her lovers. Meanwhile, his mother becomes a paradox: she is the centre of desire, powerful in attracting men, yet also the source of his deepest vulnerability, since her choices expose him to this cycle of rejection.

This creates a psychic split. On one side is the male role, which he associates with exclusion, resentment, and hostility. On the other is the female role, which he sees bound up with being desired, central, and powerful. Unable to reconcile this, the boy develops patterns of identity conflict. To him, embodying masculinity feels unsafe, because masculinity has only been modelled to him as threatening and rejecting. His unconscious solution is to shift his identification toward the feminine: to see in his mother’s role a route to agency, love, and acceptance that his own budding masculinity seems to deny him.

Over time, this develops into suppression of his own masculine signals. The resentment he absorbed from his mother’s lovers becomes internalised as self-rejection: “If I were different, if I were less male, I might be loved instead of despised.” This unconscious narrative often shapes adult outcomes. Some boys later develop gender dysphoria, resolving the conflict by “switching sides” and seeking to embody the female role they once saw as powerful and safe. Others grow preoccupied with feminine presentation of their mothers as a symbolic reclamation of their mother’s power. Perhaps even causing homosexual behaviour.

In short, when little boys grow up watching men desire their mothers while resenting them, they absorb the lesson that to be male is to be despised, while to be female is to be central, powerful, and desired. Their adult identity, whether expressed through gender dysphoria, self-rejection, or an overidentification with femininity, is an unconscious attempt to resolve their early relational wounds.

Much like the desexualisation and masking observed in girls growing up with unfamiliar male figures in their households, trans identity can be understood as a trauma-driven mechanism that rehearses and externalises unresolved familial dynamics. Childhood experiences leave impressions not only on perception but on the very architecture of desire and self-concept. For some, the relationships with mothers or step-parents contain latent resentment, control, or unconscious sexualised desire, which is internalised and processed in adulthood through the body, identity, and presentation.

Many trans individuals demonstrate a pronounced focus on children, caregiving, or recreating familial dynamics. Viewed through the trauma lens, this can be understood as an attempt to repair, master, or control what was denied to them in early life. The intense fascination with nurturing, mentoring, or otherwise engaging with the children mirrors the same patterns seen in other trauma-driven behaviours: the compulsion to rehearse unresolved relational dynamics in a setting where the stakes feel safer or more controllable. It goes without saying that when an adult projects their own traumas expressed through fears, or desire re-enactments onto a child, it can deeply harm or damage that child.

Trauma Contagion

Repeated disruptions of trust, desire, and bodily autonomy, do not remain confined to the individual psyche. They ripple outward, reshaping cultural norms, aesthetic standards, and collective assumptions about identity, sexuality and reproduction. Clothing, body modifications, social rituals, and even ideological movements become vessels for these unresolved patterns, embedding personal wounds into the texture of culture itself. Over time, what began as individual coping strategies manifest in widely recognisable social trends, informing how communities interpret gender, and relational norms, in effect inverting morality and reality, something the West is currently experiencing.

Trans identity can be understood as a microcosm of trauma’s broader societal imprint. Childhood experiences, day care centres, fatherlessness, step-parent dynamics, neglect, imprint patterns of desire, control, and projection onto the child. When amplified through communities and social discourse, these patterns inform ideology, norms, and cultural expressions, subtly reshaping society at large. This is not an argument about causation or morality, but an observational framework: a lens for understanding how unresolved wounds if not addressed by the individual or corrected by society scale from the private, interior world to the collective, cultural sphere. By tracing these threads, we can better understand the mechanisms at play and approach individuals and communities with insight, nuance, and, crucially, compassion set within boundaries.

Trauma functions like the maze in an old Pac-Man game: experiences and preferences shape the pathways of our minds, yet Pac-Man trauma consumes anything it encounters. Still, just as Pac-Man can seize a power pellet and alter the course of the game, we too possess the capacity to intervene through conscious choice, remapping our internalised maze. Trauma lays the groundwork, but it does not dictate the finish line. By intentionally charting new routes and pruning old patterns, we can transform the legacy of early wounds into a fertile landscape of growth, both for ourselves and for the societies we shape.

Annabelle Fearn

The Marketplace of the Broken

Posted on by Flag Bearer

The Harvesting of Childhood Wounds

Communities often carry unspoken layers of trauma, and the individuals within them are quietly shaped by these histories in ways that are not always obvious. Childhood trauma does not simply vanish; if left unresolved, it mutates, seeking new contexts in which to replay itself throughout adulthood. Even seemingly harmless hobbies and lifestyle choices, such as planning or aeroplane modelling, can carry this charge. These are not trivial quirks but patterned behaviours, because the mind recognises threats in structure, not in literal content. Evolutionary logic makes sense of this: it is safer to over-detect danger than to miss it, and repetition serves as protective rehearsal.

Online communities reveal this pattern at scale. What presents itself as shared interest is often a network of trauma-driven behaviour. Take the journalling and planner communities: on the surface, they are harmless hobby groups, sticker enthusiasts, stationery lovers, fountain pen aficionados. Yet beneath the carefully curated layouts lies a compulsion, a ritualistic display echoing unmet childhood needs for validation. This is where the symbols begin to speak. Their Superior Labor planning café totes stand in for school bags, and the oversized jumpers so often worn in this YouTube community evoke a little girl swallowed by clothing too large for her, a vulnerability hook designed to make the viewer want to protect her. Each calendar week spread is a Groundhog Day repetition, an attempt to quench the unrequited validation once sought from mothers and teachers in early childhood, showing mummy their crayon creations. It is a trauma response, a compulsion to recreate the past in order to process it and master it.

Beneath these behaviours lies a shared trauma narrative rooted in childhood neglect, invalidation, abandonment, or abuse. The way participants gather, plan, and create, often in infantile or fickle ways, makes it clear that productivity or creativity is seldom the goal. Unconsciously, they offer an adult version of a daycare arts corner, where planning sheets echo children’s school crayon drawings. The dominant behaviour is the ritualistic display itself: planners, stickers, pens, corner punches, and countless other accessories. Journal flip-throughs and haul videos dominate YouTube and TikTok, offering little practical information; their purpose is simply to trigger followers’ lust to encourage others to buy similar products or tools, which gives them a sense of mastery or completion over the trauma.

When watching these women, it becomes very apparent that childhood trauma doesn’t simply vanish with time; it mutates, latching onto new contexts and disguising itself in places that, on the surface, seem entirely innocuous. Trauma lays down patterns, not just memories. The child’s memory is trained to scan for threats, and once trained, it generalises. It does not matter if the new situation is harmless, the circuitry fires anyway, because it was built for survival, not accuracy. By dragging the past into new contexts, the mind tests whether danger is still present, running the same drills to prevent surprise.

These mechanisms endure even when the original sources of care were absent or insufficient: mothers occupied by work and household duties, daycare teachers stretched thin among dozens of children, unable to soothe every cry. The unacknowledged wounds of neglect or inattention are carried silently, often outside conscious awareness. In the digital age, these symbolic loops find new stages: the comment sections of YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram become surrogate caregivers, spaces where the afflicted reach for validation and comfort. Here, they grasp for the words they never received as children: Tell me I am good. Tell me I matter. Tell me I am loved, validated, protected… Mummy.

This heartbreaking dynamic becomes even more poignant when considering the racial context. A high number of prominent planner influencers and followers are Black women, whose videos, TikToks, and planner-related businesses dominate the community, at least on my stream. Statistically, this demographic is also more likely to have experienced childhood trauma, fractured family systems, and institutional neglect or abuse. Their presence is particularly visible in a related community known as the Cash Envelope community, where childhood poverty and deprivation have transformed a simple budgeting method into a system of tens of binders holding countless cash envelopes stuffed with $1 notes, creating the illusion of volume. This excessive micromanagement of funds is less about financial control and more a reaction to chaotic homes and poverty-related trauma rooted in their upbringing.

The evolution of these communities, facilitated by the internet, makes it strikingly clear how widespread childhood deficits of security and validation are in Generations Y and Z, generations which have, coincidentally, been overwhelmingly raised in daycare centres and after-school care. These individuals have grown into a compulsive generation, driven by the need to satisfy their wounds through the display of purchasing habits or ideological signalling. Their desire knows no thematic boundaries: if it shines, they want it, not just because it glitters, but because they want to impress the world. Online communities have gathered these love-starved children and turned them into lust-driven cults, led not by people of remarkable qualities, but by facilitators of desire, consumerism’s pimps.

Childhood trauma tends to distort one’s sense of self, leaving identity fragmented or shaped by false selves developed to survive neglect or invalidation. Without a coherent sense of who they are, these individuals lack the internal narratives and boundaries that normally provide meaning and regulate desire. As a result, their pockets are emptied, not through purposeful choice, but through scattered, impulsive craving. Unlike someone who embraces a moderate planner style and resists every new distraction, they have no internal filter to decide what fits or what disrupts.

The behaviour of the journalling and planning community is mirrored across most online consumerist and ideological communities, often spiralling into competitive display and actively preventing members from developing and healing. Participants are encouraged to create, one-up, and endlessly refine their lives for likes and comments, fuelling a toxic arms race of consumption where authenticity is sacrificed for approval and status. The result is a subculture driven not by passion, creativity, or independent thought, but by the display of possession and the illusion of understanding, and, in ideological communities, even extremism, since challenging the system risks invalidation from followers.

While in smaller hobbyist communities the consequences of trauma-driven behaviours are often limited to the individual and their niche market, the underlying dynamics point to patterns that can scale as communities expand and exert wider influence. This broader influence is especially evident in ideological communities built around the consumption of concepts. Once amplified, these patterns shape norms, drive cultural trends, and ripple outward to affect the behaviour of countless others, eventually imprinting themselves on laws and morals. One such community is MGTOW (Men Going Their Own Way), where personal experiences of loss, rejection, or systemic frustration are channelled into a shared narrative that extends far beyond the self.

Beneath the surface rhetoric of independence and “walking away” lies unresolved grief. Many of these men carry the trauma of divorce, the loss of children, homes, and their identity as husbands or fathers, as well as the danger of investing in a child who is not their own. Others are haunted by a lifetime of rejection, never chosen, or only chosen for their money. The community becomes a surrogate shelter, a place where the wound is hardened into ideology. Its structure rests on the belief: “I am not at fault; the system or women are to blame.” This provides a sense of agency over chaos. Yet the structure is double-edged: it externalises grief and removes all accountability, preventing internal processing and perpetuating a cycle of resentment, transforming individual trauma into collective identity. What begins as a coping mechanism ossifies into dogma, allowing resentment, outrage, bitterness, hatred, and mistrust, left unchecked and collectivised and preyed upon by exploiters.

And just as MGTOW channels unresolved male trauma into collective identity, other communities, including contemporary feminist spaces, reveal a parallel process. While feminism attempts to projects strength, independence, and empowerment, much of its raw fuel stems from trauma imprinted in fractured childhoods. The absence of a nurturing father, or the presence of a stepfather who unconsciously resents his reproductive disadvantage in raising children who are not his own, or who desires to impregnate them to reclaim his genetic agency, instils hyper-vigilance, suspicion, and a persistent sense of threat. Girls raised in homes where the mother has taken in a boyfriend often grow into women for whom betrayal, suppression, and subtle emotional harm shape both their adult relationships and their view of the world.

Not all communities follow this pattern. Some create spaces where trauma is acknowledged, explored, and transformed, fostering personal growth rather than perpetuating cycles of projection. The carnivore movement provides a striking example. Often framed as rational health optimisation, it is deeply entwined with trauma related to the body. For many participants, this trauma originates in childhood or adulthood experiences of parental influence based on exploiters’ narratives or on their own naivety regarding the health and food industries. The body, once a source of shame, insecurity, pain, and disease, becomes both battleground and teacher. In this context, the diet evolves from a simple nutritional experiment into a symbolic exorcism, helping individuals reclaim control over a body that once felt chaotic, uncontrollable, or treacherous. The community establishes clear boundaries and cultivates a narrative of wounded flesh striving for redemption, mastery, and self-sovereignty.

What distinguishes this community is its implicit psychological architecture. Unlike ideological groups that externalise trauma into dogma or grievance, carnivore adherents largely work through their trauma via acknowledgement, accountability, progress, science, and community sharing, all of which provide repeated, structure and mastery. Each pound gained or lost, each adherence to a self-imposed rule, each remission, each obstacle overcome becomes a rehearsal of agency: a tangible demonstration of recalibrating from past helplessness to present efficacy. The trauma is largely acknowledged, processed, and contained rather than projected outward.

This inward focus makes the community unusually resilient, constructive, and compelling to both allies and observers. As a result, the group scales naturally: it is primed for rapid growth and success because its foundation rests on self-awareness, healing, and skill acquisition. Unlike communities driven by reactive and unconscious grievance, the carnivore network thrives by fostering mastery, promoting autonomy, and encouraging discourse. Here, trauma healing becomes the vector of growth, the more members engage consciously with their trauma, and their successes, the stronger and more enduring the collective becomes.

Communities such as MGTOW and feminism channel would greatly benefit from taking the Carnivore community’s approach instead of managing trauma by externalising danger. The “enemy” is named and contained, but understanding allows us to step outside the cycle. We need not be drawn into others’ unresolved wounds or project our own grievances onto the world. Trauma, left unprocessed, keeps us suspended in the past, effectively leaving many adults operating with the guidance and boundaries of children. Recognising these dynamics brings clarity. It explains why patterns repeat, why some groups implode into toxicity, and why others remain contained. Our psychology is primordial, our evolutionary wiring persistent, and understanding it allows us to navigate human behaviour with insight. Ultimately, every ritual, hobby, or ideology is a mirror. How we respond, with reflection, curiosity, and awareness, determines whether trauma continues to run us or whether we finally master the patterns that control our lives, our systems, and our culture.

Annabelle Fearn