They named it connection…

Perhaps you have long sensed something of this, albeit without ever quite finding words for it.

We might name this the trauma of ambiguous care. Not of what was there, rather of what was not there.

Ambiguous trauma is the trauma of what was missing. It is the organisational residue of unmet needs, unspoken misattunements, and absence in the very moments when presence was most vital.

Where developmental trauma and where neurodivergence is part of our story, this ambiguous absence often holds a particular form and shape.

Our ways of sensing, moving, attending, and responding are often met as difficulty, as defiance, as too much or too little, and the critique or absence that follows is often delivered through the guise of care and protection.

As young children when these experiences first happened, and where these messages landed most frequently, we had no means by which to evaluate or fathom these experiences. The messages that came from those upon whom our survival depended were our only means of making sense.

And so, in order to maintain a sense of Self semblance whilst remaining connected to those we depended, we began to doubt our inner experience, often then turning the critique or absence inward, blaming ourself for our inability to live up to expectations.

This is where what often arises is confusion – a confliction between our felt sense of knowing and what is known.

Perhaps as we look back this is the most disorienting part of ambiguous trauma: where harm moves through the language of care, there is nothing available to name, and so we become lost and alienated in a world that does not make sense.

There is hope here. Where our experience is met with compassion, connection, and contextual coherence, what was once unnameable can be recognised, and our own knowing can be restored to us.

Perhaps we might begin gently, with one moment in which something within us knew. And perhaps, in the company of an Other who stays close, that knowing may become speakable.

You are not alone in this, your body and mind were making sense all along.