Trigger Warning: Mentions of trauma, abuse, and systemic neglect.
Written from lived experience.

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The Price of Healing

For children who grow up in state care, the trauma doesn’t end when the placement ends. The system’s failures echo through adulthood — in the body, in the nervous system, and in the mind. Yet what’s rarely acknowledged is that healing from those injuries carries a cost — one that survivors themselves are forced to pay.

While the state funds the institutions that failed to protect children, it rarely funds the repair of the harm caused. The financial weight of trauma is invisible but immense; therapy sessions, medication, lost work opportunities, exhaustion, disability, and the simple cost of surviving day to day with a body and mind still responding to past abuse.

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Trauma Has a Price Tag

Trauma doesn’t end when you leave care, it changes how you live.
For many, PTSD or complex PTSD (CPTSD) becomes a lifelong condition. Flashbacks, insomnia, anxiety, dissociation, chronic fatigue — these are not fleeting experiences. They affect your ability to work consistently, to sustain income, to manage relationships, to cope with everyday tasks.

That means increased costs in daily living:

• Higher energy and food bills when you can’t cook or leave home easily.
• Transportation costs for therapy and medical appointments.
• Paid childcare when you can’t rely on family support.
• Lost wages from needing more recovery time or flexible hours.
• The ongoing expense of private therapy, when NHS waiting lists stretch into years.

Healing, for those who can afford it, becomes a full-time job. For those who can’t, survival itself becomes the therapy.

For example: In my own personal experience, to date I have paid over 5k in therapy costs, and around 14k in legal fees.

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Therapy: A Right, Not a Luxury

The NHS offers trauma therapy, but only in theory. In practice, most survivors face:

• Waiting lists that stretch for 12–24 months.
• Short-term interventions like CBT, often capped at 6–8 sessions despite the complexity of trauma.
• Limited specialisation, as many public services aren’t equipped to treat complex childhood abuse or CPTSD effectively.

For someone reliving trauma daily, a year-long wait can mean a year of unmanaged symptoms, isolation, or crisis. Private therapy is often the only realistic option, yet it can cost £50–£179 per session. That’s hundreds or even thousands of pounds a year. For survivors who grew up in care or poverty, that is a luxury they should never have to fund alone.

When harm happened under state guardianship, the cost of recovery should never fall on the child who survived it.

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The System That Withholds Support

Social care doesn’t just fail to help, it often blocks the routes that can help.
When survivors try to seek compensation or redress, they are met with resistance, denial, and bureaucratic obstruction.
Local authorities and their legal departments routinely:

• Dispute or deny historical abuse claims, even when internal evidence exists.
• Delay investigations until survivors give up from emotional exhaustion.
• Hide or “lose” records that could support compensation cases.
• Offer token financial settlements that don’t even cover the cost of therapy for one month.

Instead of Social services departments acknowledging their duty of care. Many local authorities act as though they are defending themselves in a lawsuit, even when the claimant was once a child under their protection. The system that caused the harm then becomes the system that fights to prevent its repair.

Every denial saves the authority money, but costs the survivor another piece of peace.

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The Economic Silence Around State Harm

The state speaks proudly of “corporate parenting,” but refuses to take true accountability.

When a child in care is abused, neglected, or left unsupported, the injury is not just emotional, it’s physical, psychological, and financial.
Yet there is no compensation scheme, no dedicated trauma fund, and no therapy guarantee for care-experienced people.
Even when redress schemes exist, they are bureaucratic, retraumatizing, and often exclude those who suffered institutional abuse without “sufficient evidence.” Often evidence is reliant on whether you can get access to files, kept and distributed by local authorities.

So survivors pay.
They pay in therapy bills, lost income, and reduced life expectancy.
They pay in silence, because the same system that harmed them dictates the language of their healing.

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Lifelong Impact, Lifelong Costs

Complex PTSD reshapes the brain’s responses to stress, trust, and safety. It’s not a temporary wound — it’s a rewiring of survival instincts. Symptoms can reappear decades later: panic attacks, depression, chronic illness, and relationship difficulties. Each episode brings new costs, prescriptions, therapy, unpaid leave, extra care — and no public support system designed to absorb that burden.

The cruel irony is that trauma reduces your ability to earn, while recovery demands that you spend more than you can afford.

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The System That Profits From Silence

There’s a quiet economy built around trauma — professionals, therapists, agencies — necessary but inaccessible to those most harmed. Survivors from care backgrounds must navigate forms, apply for grants, and justify their suffering to access partial support.

Meanwhile, social care departments protect their reputations through non-disclosure agreements, limited settlements, and institutional denial. They ensure survivors remain dependent on fragmented welfare systems, which offer survival, not healing. It’s structural neglect reframed as personal failure.

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Toward a Just Model of Care and Repair

If the UK truly recognised the human cost of trauma, it would:

• Provide lifelong access to trauma-informed therapy for all care-experienced adults.
• Recognise CPTSD and abuse-related disabilities as grounds for financial support.
• Create a national monitored trauma fund or redress scheme for those harmed in care.
• Enforce transparency and accountability in abuse investigations.
• Treat recovery as a collective responsibility, not an individual expense.

Because the price of healing should not be borne by those who were already failed.

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Conclusion: The Debt Society Owes

Every therapy bill, every unpaid day, every sleepless night represents a form of unacknowledged restitution the survivor pays to themselves — because the system refuses to.

Children in care should not have to grow into adults who must buy back their well-being from the very state that broke it. If the state can afford to raise a child, it can afford to repair what it allowed to be damaged.

Healing should never depend on income. It should be part of justice.