By: Grace S. Lee
There is something quietly disarming about childlike language. It lowers the stakes, inviting curiosity instead of performance and humor instead of defensiveness. When we encounter stories, images, or metaphors that feel simple or playful, we often find ourselves letting our guard down without even realizing it. Beneath that softness lies a profound psychological truth we often overlook in our “adult” clinical spaces: we mistake play, humor, and inflated metaphors for regression, when they are actually developmentally appropriate tools for survival and healing.
The Limits of Adult Language
In clinical and educational settings, we are trained to prioritize efficiency, precision, and structured “adult” language. We talk a lot about “trauma-informed care” and shifting our questions from “What’s wrong with you?” to “What happened to you?” But even that shift assumes that trauma is something we can easily name, recall, and package into adult definitions. When we rely solely on rigid categories, we risk talking right over the way people actually experience distress.
The reality is that many of the experiences that shape us happen in pre-verbal spaces. Emotional neglect, instability, or a chronic lack of safety don’t just vanish when we learn to talk; they stay in the body, resurfacing later as hypervigilance or a quiet, persistent sense of unease. If trauma is formed before we have words, then healing might require us to go back to that wordless place. We don’t actually leave our childhoods behind; we just carry them forward, often invisibly.
The Power of Indirect Storytelling
I was reminded of this while reflecting on The Child Deprimer by Peter Schumann. The book uses exaggerated, almost absurd childlike framing to explore emotional states that are anything but trivial. What struck me most was the method: there is a specific kind of safety in indirect storytelling. It feels less like an interrogation and more like an invitation. Childlike language creates space because it doesn’t demand immediate clarity; it allows complexity to exist without forcing it into a box.
This realization became the heartbeat of The Garden of the Open Gate, an animated storybook I developed for the STAR Trauma-Informed Care Conference (Video 1). The story follows a small girl who builds protective armor around herself—rusted, heavy, and isolating. I kept the story intentionally simple, avoiding explicit explanations of the “why” behind the armor. This allowed the story to achieve a deeper resonance than rigid definitions could, inviting readers to find personal reflections within the silence.
Video 1. “The Garden of the Open Gate” is a mixed-media trauma-informed story inspired in part by Julia Y. Lee’s artwork and Dr. Jill Klein’s work on emotional resilience and human fallibility. The piece uses symbolic visuals to depict how compassionate connection can soften protective responses to stress and early adversity. English, Spanish, and Korean subtitles available.
Creating Space for Transformation
In the story, the girl eventually encounters a gardener who doesn’t try to pry the armor off or analyze its construction. Instead, the gardener simply offers patience, safety, and a steady presence. This is the core of healing: it doesn’t happen through force or urgency. It happens through the kind of boring, quiet consistency that builds real trust. The gardener creates an environment where the girl eventually feels safe enough to loosen the straps herself.
The accompanying artwork, inspired by my sister Julia Y. Lee’s mixed-media pieces, serves as a visual counterpart to this philosophy. By focusing on vulnerability and new beginnings rather than the harm itself, the visuals lean into quiet transformation. Childlike storytelling mirrors how a child processes the world: not through logic, but through metaphor and relational safety. It creates a “recognition” in the reader that doesn’t require immediate articulation.
Expanding the Definition of Care
Trauma-informed care asks us to expand what we consider a “legitimate” way to communicate. We have to recognize that play isn’t a step backward, metaphor isn’t just avoidance, and curiosity—real, open curiosity—is not a lack of seriousness. Often, these are the only accessible entry points into experiences that are otherwise too painful or too deeply embedded to face head-on.
In times marked by burnout and high emotional demands, slowing down or using “softer” language can feel like an inefficiency. It’s not. It is a form of care. At the end of the day, we must offer forms of connection that people can actually receive. Sometimes, healing doesn’t start with a better explanation. It starts with a story simple enough to hold something complicated, until we are ready to understand it ourselves.
Grace S. Lee
Grace Lee is an MD candidate at Emory University School of Medicine whose work centers on health equity and patient-centered reform. Her writing explores how health policy is experienced in everyday life by patients, families, and the communities they belong to.