Sharon Shaw is a respected psychotherapist specialising in cases of childhood sexual, emotional and mental abuse. Few of Shaw's clients would know that her brilliance as a therapist comes from profound personal experience. Her early life has inspired and informed her therapeutic techniques, now shared in this remarkable book, A Child Inside: understanding, healing and freedom following childhood abuse and trauma. Now an adult woman with the language and training to explain and analyse her experiences of abuse, Shaw revisits herself as that damaged child, with the support of her personal counsellor, her mother and other important safe connections. She reveals a frightened child, lost in a world that was not safe for her, trapped in a body and with a developing brain that wasn't yet mature enough to understand and articulate the horrors she was experiencing, thinking and feeling, all of which conflicted with what she had been taught by family and society at large: she knew they were meant to protect her but why had they failed to do so? A Child Inside explores the complex issues of trust and responsibility between adults and children, charting the progression from acute distress through cognitive and intuitive understanding and ultimately towards forgiveness.