Welcome to The House That Trauma Built. If you are reading this, you are stepping across the threshold of a very personal architecture—a structure built from memories, pain, and ultimately, survival.
I chose to open the album with “The Thing” because every story of trauma has an origin point. Not necessarily the event itself, but the moment the child internalizes it. The moment we decide that the chaos outside is actually a failure inside.
Table Of Contents
The Wiring of a Lost Boy
The song begins with a “sparse, echoing piano chord,” creating a sense of space that feels safer than the noise I grew up with. But that safety was an illusion.
“There was a house with a silence so loud / A little boy lost in a grown-up crowd / He learned how to listen through plaster and wood / And tried to be quiet, and tried to be good.”
For those of us who have navigated the care system or turbulent homes, hypervigilance becomes a superpower we never wanted. I wasn’t just hearing; I was “listening through plaster and wood,” monitoring the emotional temperature of the room to survive.
But when you are that young, you don’t have the context to blame the adults. You blame yourself.
“But the cracks in the walls let the chaos right in / And he started to think it was under his skin / A flaw in his wiring, a fault in his code / A heavy, invisible, terrible load.”
This is the tragedy of the “looked after” child. We start to believe the dysfunction is inherent to us—a “flaw in our wiring.” We search for the defect “in the dim, bedroom light,” convinced that if we can just find it and cut it out, the world will make sense again.
A Child Playing Surgeon
The chorus of this song contains perhaps the most difficult metaphor I have ever had to write, but it is the heartbeat of the track.
“It was the thing that I did to try and fix the break / A child playing surgeon with a trembling hand / And when the surgery failed, for goodness sake / I built a wall so no one could understand.”
When I wrote about a “child playing surgeon,” I am speaking directly about the first time I self-harmed.
It wasn’t an act of destruction; in my child’s mind, it was a desperate attempt at repair. I was trying to “fix the break.” I thought if I could release the pressure, if I could perform this surgery on myself, I could remove the “badness” I felt inside.
But, of course, the surgery failed. It didn’t fix the environment. It didn’t stop the chaos. And the shame of that failure forced me to construct the next phase of my survival: The Wall.
“It was a prayer to be whole, a secret to keep / A mistake that I buried down so very deep / And for twenty long years, the real reason was hid / The terrible, beautiful, reason I did it.”
I call it a “terrible, beautiful reason” because the intent was survival. It was a “prayer to be whole.” Even in our darkest coping mechanisms, there is often a tiny, distorted kernel of hope—a wish to survive the night.
The Aftermath and the Stone
In the second verse, I explore the isolation that comes after the “surgery.”
“The aftermath lived in a deep, hidden place / Outside it was bright, but I’d vanished from grace / While the other kids played, I was lost and alone / My bad feelings growing and turning to stone.”
This is the emotional reality of trauma. While other children are playing, you are on a “long, silent mission” to “guard the one secret” you have to defend. You become a stone to weather the storm, but stones don’t feel joy. This numbness is a theme that echoes later in the album, specifically in tracks like “A Medicated Mess” and “The Wall”.
The Resolution: It Wasn’t Me
The bridge of “The Thing” is the pivot point. It is the voice of the man looking back at the boy.
“And to stand here today, and to finally see / That the flaw he was trying to fix wasn’t in me… / It’s a truth so profound it can stop you stone cold / A story that had to wait years to be told.”
This realization—that “he was never the problem, he was never the cause”—is the foundation of Looked After Child Limited. It is the message I try to convey in every speech and every workshop. We were “just small children, breaking under their laws.”
The Scar of Resilience
The song ends not with the erasure of the past, but with an acceptance of it.
“And that was the thing. / A child’s desperate fix. / Now a scar that reminds me that resilience exists. / The surgeon is gone now… the wall’s coming down… / And that little boy’s safe now… / He’s safe and he’s sound.”
The “thing”—that desperate act of self-harm—is transformed from a shameful secret into a symbol of resilience. The surgeon has retired. The wall is being dismantled, brick by brick.
“The Thing” is the entry point to this album because it admits the secret I held for twenty years. By speaking it aloud, by typing it, I am letting that little boy know that he doesn’t need to perform surgery on himself anymore. He is enough, just as he is.
We are just getting started. Welcome to the house.
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