The Thing No One Wants To Talk About With Sophie Olson

Content note: this episode discusses childhood sexual abuse, addiction, self-harm, psychiatric systems, and suicide attempts.
Please take care of yourself as you listen.

What happens when the unspeakable has no language? When every time you try to speak, someone turns away?

Sophie Olsen is a survivor of childhood sexual abuse, a trainer, and the author of The Flying Child — a book that took a decade of being labelled, medicated and told there was no recovery before it could be written. She was eventually told by a psychiatrist that she would never live without community support and medication. She disagreed.

This conversation goes into the territory that most podcasts avoid — not to shock, but because the silence around it is part of the harm. Sophie talks about what it took to finally find words for the unspeakable, the door that was shut on her again and again by the systems meant to help, and the moment a fairy story written on a phone at midnight changed everything.

In this episode:

• How behaviours get labelled as disorders when nobody asks why
• Ten years in a mental health system that saw the symptoms and never the cause
• The door handle moment - advice to her 29-year-old self on what she needed to hear
• How images, drawings, and eventually fairy tale writing became the bridge to speech
• 'Society shame not mine' - why the silence around child sexual abuse is a collective shame, not just a personal one
• The writing workshops that are now paying it forward for other survivors

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 | "Was she unstable? Or were you unable to be the anchor? Her rock? One eye on your clock? Was she too complex? Or was it quite simple — if only you cared where to look." — Told You, Sophie Olsen

Links:
The Flying Child Website: https://www.theflyingchild.com/
Link to Book: https://www.theflyingchild.com/book

Resources to support those of you affected by this episode due to personal experience:
https://enoughabuse.org/get-help/survivor-support/