When the Kingdom Is Only Paper: What Alice in Wonderland Teaches Us About Trauma, Power, and the Nervous System
- Jane Alice Davidson
- 35 minutes ago
- 4 min read
In this piece, I explore how Alice in Wonderland teaches trauma through metaphor that mirrors the human nervous system waking up to the truth of a paper kingdom.
We usually meet Alice in Wonderland long before we have a nervous system that can make sense of it.
As kids, it feels like a fever dream, talking animals, impossible rules, a queen who shrieks for heads like it’s her morning coffee order. The whole thing reads as nonsense. And because we’re small and trusting, we accept nonsense as normal.
Then adulthood happens.
Then trauma recovery happens.
Then you pick the book back up and think: Wait… this isn’t a fairy tale. This is a field guide.
Some stories lie to children and tell the truth to adults. Wonderland is one of them.
Once your body has lived through a few systems that didn’t make sense, families, churches, schools, and companies, you start to realize that Carroll wasn’t writing fiction. He was writing a map of what it feels like to grow up in places where logic breaks down, and survival depends on decoding rules that contradict themselves.
And because he was a logician and a quiet critic of Victorian authority, Carroll didn’t fill his kingdom with humans. He filled it with playing cards.
Not because it’s whimsical.
Because it’s accurate.
A deck of cards is the perfect symbol for arbitrary power
Flat, fragile, assigned value, shuffled by whoever happens to hold it. A king looks powerful until the wind blows. A queen looks terrifying until you realize her authority is printed on flimsy paper. Soldiers march because they’re drawn that way, not because they have depth or agency.
Carroll built a paper monarchy to show how absurd some hierarchies really are.
I didn’t catch that the first time I read it. But my body did. Your body did. Most of us know the feeling of trying to navigate a system that scares us, even when the structure behind it is as thin as cardstock.
Look at the Queen of Hearts
She isn’t just a villain. She’s sympathetic, overdrive wearing a gown. Pure activation. Pure threat. A person whose emotional dysregulation rules the temperature of the room. You don’t reason with the Queen of Hearts; you anticipate her. You shrink when she enters. You brace for impact. Her power isn’t structural; it’s physiological. And everyone treats her rage like law because the alternative feels dangerous.
Her husband stands beside her, a gentle, ineffective man who tries to smooth things over, explain things, keep the peace. He apologizes for her. He tidies her chaos. He behaves like an authority but carries none of it. If the Queen is fight, the King is fawn. Together, they form a pair many of us recognize from childhood: one person exploding, the other minimizing and soothing, neither truly regulating.
And then there are the soldiers...
flat, identical, silently compliant. They bend. They fold. They go where they’re placed. They remind me of what people become in rigid systems: roles instead of selves. Paper cutouts of their own potential.
The trial scene is the part that hits differently when you’re grown.
Evidence doesn’t matter. Rules change mid-sentence. Everyone pretends the chaos is reasonable. It’s a courtroom designed by gaslighting. If you’ve ever been punished under rules that didn’t make sense, such as religious rules, school rules, or family rules, you know exactly what Carroll was describing. It’s the helplessness of realizing you’re being judged by nonsense, and everyone else is pretending the nonsense has merit.
But the most important moment in the whole book isn’t an action scene or an act of rebellion. It’s recognition.
When Alice finally stops shrinking herself to survive, she looks around and notices something the rest of the kingdom refuses to see:
These terrifying figures are just cards. Flat. Printed. Without depth. Their power depends entirely on her willingness to fear them.
And once she sees the paper for what it is, the system collapses.
Not because she overpowered anyone.
Not because she argued well.
Not because she proved her innocence.
Because clarity is stronger than illusion.
One day, you wake up and realize the rules you lived under were never real.
The threats were exaggerated.
The authority was unearned.
The power imbalance depended on your obedience.
And the whole structure, this towering system that shaped your identity, turns out to be a house of cards.
Carroll understood that awakening doesn’t begin with anger. It begins with accuracy. The moment Alice sees clearly is the moment she stops participating in the kingdom’s nonsense. And without her belief, the monarchy dissolves.
That’s the part of Wonderland that lingers. Not the absurdity, but the recognition. The reminder that some systems are terrifying right up until the second you stop cooperating with their logic.
The reminder that your nervous system often saw the truth long before your mind caught up.
The reminder that sometimes the most powerful sentence a person can say is the one Alice finally chose:
“You’re nothing but a pack of cards.”
That’s not rebellion. That’s awakening.
And once you see the paper, you can never unsee it.
Thank you for reading. If this stirred something in you and you’d like to spend more time with this work, you can explore The Humble Pie 12 Steps and learn more about how I support people as a trauma recovery coach.