The Child in Me Protests: What Lily Allen’s West End Girl Teaches Us About Healing the Parts Within
The mother of many modern day female artists’ new album West End Girl isn’t just music, it’s a reclamation.
West End Girl is making huge waves with its autobiographical rawness.
WEST END GIRL, released in October 2025, is a raw, poetic, sometimes chaotic expression of love, betrayal, desire, and the inner voices that won’t stay quiet any longer.
When I first listened to it, I had one of those rare moments where art cuts right through the noise.
The lyric “I tried to be your modern wife but the child in me protests” stopped me in my tracks.
Because that protest - in fact that inner uprising - is something I see every week in therapy rooms with clients around the world.
It’s the moment when the self we’ve been performing can’t keep going.
When the parts of us we’ve pushed down — the ones holding anger, grief, playfulness, need, or innocence — finally demand to be seen.
The Protest Within
In Internal Family Systems (IFS) therapy, we understand this so clearly. Each of us carries a system of “parts,” inner sub-personalities that hold different emotions, roles, and stories.
Some have been protecting us for years — by people-pleasing, controlling, numbing, or performing — while others, often younger parts, have been exiled, waiting for someone to finally listen.
That lyric feels like one of those exiles finally speaking.
A younger part saying: I tried to do it your way. I tried to be who you wanted. But I can’t betray myself any longer.
Healing begins in that moment of truth. Not through perfection, but through compassion — through the willingness to turn toward that protesting part and say, I hear you.
Beyond the Persona
Many of us, especially high achievers and caregivers, have learned to survive by performing competence, calm, or care for others.
We’ve built beautiful, shiny exteriors while quietly holding deep exhaustion underneath.
Lily’s album speaks to that tension with honesty and courage.
It doesn’t tidy things up. It doesn’t offer easy answers. It just tells the truth.
As a trauma therapist specialising in Internal Family Systems (IFS), Brainspotting, and Relational Life Therapy (RLT), I work with people who are learning to hold that same truth — to meet the younger parts that still live within them with tenderness rather than shame.
The “child in me” doesn’t protest to destroy the adult self.
She protests because she’s asking to be included — to be part of a more integrated, whole, and honest life.
Where This Work Leads
This kind of work is not about blame or regression.
It’s about reclamation.
When we allow the full range of our inner world — the competent, the chaotic, the wounded, and the wise — to coexist, something powerful happens:
we stop performing healing and start living it.
If you’re interested in the relational and couples themes that run through West End Girl — from betrayal and power to love and repair — you can read my companion article on my couples therapy site, CouplesAwaken.com. There, I explore how these same patterns play out between partners and what real repair can look like in therapy.
For now, I’ll leave you with this: sometimes the bravest thing we can do is to stop being the “modern wife” (or the perfect therapist, parent, or professional) for a moment — and listen to the protest within.
That part isn’t the problem.
She’s the beginning of your healing.
—
Lucy Orton
IFS + Brainspotting Therapist | Relational Life Coach | Sex + Couples Therapist
www.lucyorton.com
