What this can look like

• Repeated procedures and loss of bodily control
• Not being believed, or being spoken over
• Professionals addressing carers rather than the disabled person themselves
• Inaccessible services and painful interventions
• Diagnostic uncertainty and prolonged hospitalisation
• Ongoing dependency on healthcare systems
• Having the body repeatedly treated as an object of professional expertise, rather than a person’s own

A distinction worth holding onto

Therapy benefits from separating two things that easily get merged: distress caused by impairment or illness itself, and distress caused by how systems and people respond to the person. The first calls for support with grief, adaptation and meaning. The second calls for validation that something was actually done wrong — not a reframe toward acceptance.

Trauma and nervous-system language is powerful here, but it should never collapse into “everyone with a disability has medical trauma” — nor into denying that many genuinely do.