The Little Princess and The Meeting 🌸

Photo credit: Joanne Barker-Marsh

By Sophie Olson

What began months ago with a passionate conversation after an event with a fellow panelist, grew into a kitchen-table meetup in Rochdale. This week we convened in Bloomsbury with practitioner allies. Tea, shortbread, and shared experience.

Everyone involved gave up their time for free to travel far across the U.K. because there was no money and this is more than a job. We were humans bound by empathy and purpose - it was the start of a network. A culmination of years of conversations, connection, and courage - over two centuries of collective experience and professional insight gathered in one room.

Together, we described systems that one day might acknowledge child sexual abuse and the impacts - particularly on the body. There were stories that illustrated healing, listening and compassion within relational practice. Everyone agreed it was a validating space to be in.

The agenda was deliberately broad:

Number one: Connect. (We did. And it felt significant)

Number Two: Decide on a name for the network. (We didn’t. We were too busy connecting. I knew everyone, but not all knew each other).

Sounds a bit ethereal? Maybe - but much as some pretend otherwise, our lives intertwine. As one said: “when one of us is hurt, we all hurt.”

Too many years of my life were spent hurting. As a survivor of abuse I’d like to prove those ACEs wrong but I’m realistic that I might not live a long life. I simply can’t spend it solely in online meetings filled with performative politeness behind muted screens, and a repetition of empty words - where no one is really listening, because at the end there is nothing but jargon, self-preservation, comfort and a rung on the career ladder.

I need to work with those who make space for humanity. I need to breathe the same air as others who dare to challenge the status quo. It’s why the connections were made in the first place. The people I’m privileged to call my colleagues quietly get on with improving and saving lives.

When we’re brave enough to come together - survivors, professionals, and allies - we are stronger. I’m excited to see where this goes. Thank you to everyone who attended our very first new network meeting. It will grow, slowly - with time and intention 🌸

The final words in The Flying Child - A Cautionary Fairy Tale for Adults read: Not The End. This is because my story, like all children who suffered child sexual abuse, continues. I write in the style of the fairy tale to put words to emotion or experience I find hard to express through direct speech. Overwhelm, as you will read in this latest chapter, isn’t always negative. Sometimes it’s the result of being in the presence of those with the warmest of hearts.

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One day, The Little Princess travelled to a far away place to meet The Doctors. There was to be a meeting about the Shadows and how they pressed and pushed and wrapped tightly around the Bodies of many children, and how they stole all the colours of The World and how nobody really knew what to do about it, especially the ones who pretended they did and sold expensive solutions in bottles that rattled with lies and false promises.

As the train clickety-clacked its way along the track, The Little Princess’s Body remembered hospital rooms and thick fingers belonging to doctors with closed ears, eyes and hearts.

Her mouth remembered Hard-To-Speak-Words, and how they had once tumbled out, upside down and inside out.

Her heart remembered what had once happened when she spoke these words that scratched her throat - how it was too late and she was locked inside her own sick body as she was once locked in a ward, perhaps for ever and ever.

The Little Princess travelled with another Little Princess - one who mirrored her own little red boots with a little red coat.

“I feel nervous, Coat,” said The Little Princess. “What will happen next?”

Coat, who was wise and kind, with a reflection that stretched far beyond the colour of her coat, said to The Little Princess that it would be okay because she knew the meeting was important.

“The Doctors are coming because you asked them Boots,” she said. The Little Princess thought about this. And how most people say yes when they really mean no, and how people talk about trust and then smash it into smithereens when you least expect.

Then she thought about how these Doctors were different, and that being different wasn’t the bad thing she had once been led to believe, but something good.

The Little Princess remembered that different was why she had asked them to the meeting in the first place.

These Doctors were different because they too wanted The World to stop pretending it was the wolves on the outside of kingdom walls who were the danger, and not the Evil Kings who lived within them.

These Doctors were different because they had ears that listened to The-Words-That-Had-Been-Spoken, not just her words, but the words of others. They heard the words and didn’t pretend they hadn’t.

These Doctors were different because they understood lives lived in Grey, with Shadows and heavy rocks that made bodies buckle and grow sick with the weight. They understood haphazard and messy, and that some journeys were not a straightforward A to B.

These Doctors were different because they didn’t believe in calling people broken, and discarding those who had not only forgotten they could fly, but didn’t know they had wings in the first place. They believed in making space for everyone in The World and not just for some - as that is only fair, and most of all -good.

The Little Princess unhardened (some, but not all) of her heart.

Red Boots and Red Coat

The Little Princess and Red Coat got off the train and made their way to a room with walls that whispered with other important, long ago words, spoken by those with the most unbuttoned of minds.

The first good sign was the shop inside the woods on the way where there weren’t wolves and bears waiting to eat them up, just biscuits and tea.

The second good sign was the guard on the gate. He talked about the importance of questions, and how people like to take without asking, and how silence doesn’t mean yes. The Little Princess and Red Coat agreed. And the guard was surprised because he hadn’t expected it.

And the best sign of all was that The Doctors turned up. And The White Witch. And everything feels possible in a room with a huge table with curves and not corners, old books, shortbread and a sprinkle of history and magic.

It was a meeting of souls, not of People in Charge, because there is no such thing as Expert other than of one’s own self. Knowledge and power is to be shared, not hoarded and placed on shelves in rooms that exclude those who believe they are broken because that is what they have been told. Or those who haven’t been allowed to learn because broken is what is expected.

The Little Princess asked if The Doctors would like to meet with them again, to see what can be done to make The World less upside down. And The Doctors said they would because they had the want to try something New - and it was a day of pink blossom, blue sky and flight.

The journey continues…