Institutional gaslighting of caregivers

There is a quiet violence of school support teams who pretend to be confused by the very behaviours they have helped create.

Parents, who spend years documenting harm, requesting support, and watching their children fracture under the weight of neglect, are met with professional expressions of concern that erase the system’s role.

Institutions selectively forget what was said, what was agreed, and what was never done. They externalise blame, mischaracterise trauma, and redirect attention toward the family whenever distress becomes impossible to ignore.

The system that forgets what it caused

Your child arrives at school carrying patterns of distress that were shaped by the school itself. Her fear of being misunderstood, her refusal to trust, and her rage at being abandoned did not appear from nowhere. These are the consequences of failed relationships, broken promises, and environments that punished rather than protected her. She was clear, and you were clear, and the school had every opportunity to intervene with care and consistency. Instead, they watched her struggle and labelled her complex. Then they forgot what led her there.

Selective amnesia as institutional strategy

Schools erase the history that would hold them accountable, treating past harm as irrelevant or private and framing current distress as a mystery—they forget that you asked for help repeatedly, forget that they ignored your warnings, forget that the support plan was never implemented, forget that the child who is now “acting out” was once a child who asked politely, who tried her best, who waited far too long to be believed. This forgetting is not an accident—it protects the institution from responsibility.

The theatre of concern and the performance of meetings

You are invited into meetings where people wear concern like a uniform, nodding solemnly, taking notes, and speaking in the language of support without delivering any of it—they ask if she had breakfast, ask if you’ve followed up with the paediatrician, ask if you think she might be anxious, ask if there’s been a change at home. Each question is a deflection, a way to look anywhere but inward—the performance is polished, the follow-through is absent.

Plans that don’t protect and strategies that go unused

You collaborate, you document, you meet again, you bring in therapists, you agree on a plan, you outline specific strategies, you clarify what works and what doesn’t, you explain the history, you offer your expertise—and then they return to business as usual. They do not use the plan, they do not follow the strategies, they say they forgot, or misunderstood, or weren’t staffed that day, they tell you it’s hard to be consistent in a busy school environment, they ask for your trust, and then they waste it.

Parental blame as a tool of deflection

When the child begins to show signs of injury—refusing to go, exploding in class, shutting down—they look to you, they ask how she’s sleeping, they wonder if you’re too involved, they suggest your advocacy is escalating things, they propose that your expectations are unrealistic, they act as if the behaviour was cultivated at home rather than shaped by repeated exposures to stress and harm at school—this is a deflection, because it is easier to blame a parent than to confront the system’s failure.

They say they couldn’t implement the strategy because your child was absent.

Emotional abuse disguised as professional neutrality

You sit at a long table with people who speak calmly while describing your child’s suffering—they do not name the betrayal, do not acknowledge the abandonment, do not admit that the child is responding exactly as one should when safety has been repeatedly withdrawn.

Instead, they refer to her as dysregulated, they say she has low frustration tolerance, they say she needs to build tolerance for change, they turn the harm she has survived into a pathology she is now expected to overcome alone.

The language of complexity as an excuse for inaction

They say your child’s needs are too complex, the system wasn’t designed for this, they are doing their best—but these words are not truth, they are chosen to sound reasonable while avoiding responsibility, because the needs are not impossible. The system could adapt, the staff could learn, the school could reallocate, but instead of acting, they pretend they are helpless—weaponised incompetence.

How long do they get to pretend?

Years pass and the behaviour escalates, while the child begins to internalise the message that her distress is unwelcome, her pain is confusing, and her needs are too much to hold within the narrow logic of school support.

Still, the school pretends to be confused—they act surprised, they ask if this might be a home issue, they treat each new expression of distress as a disconnected incident, as though trauma resets every morning with the bell.

There is no limit, it seems, to how long they are allowed to perform confusion while ignoring the root cause—their pretending has no expiration date, only a cost that the child continues to pay.

Holding composure in the face of bullshit

You sit in the room, again, listening as they speak in circles and recite the lines they’ve used before, holding your tongue while your child is mischaracterised in ways that you know will shape how support is withheld. You try to stay calm because if you cry, you’ll be seen as emotional, if you get angry, you’ll be seen as hostile, and if you disagree, you’ll be seen as difficult—so you steady yourself, even as the truth is twisted in front of you. You practice composure in the face of bullshit, try to stay focused while they rearrange the facts, and remind yourself, again and again, that you’re right. Not that it matters, really, to your child.

Parental advocacy as a source of discomfort

You are not supposed to remember what was said at the last meeting or bring receipts or ask why they didn’t follow through or know your rights—because your clarity is a threat, your memory is inconvenient, and your truth-telling disrupts the performance they are trying to maintain. When you show up with documentation, when you ask for accountability, when you name what has been erased, they begin to question you, casting doubt on your credibility in order to protect their own.

Repair is possible but it is not offered

What your child needs is not mysterious.

• She needed consistency, not unpredictability—
• Dignity, not surveillance—
• Adults who were emotionally regulated, not reactive or punitive—
• Clear expectations she could trust, not shifting rules or hidden tests—
• Follow-through on what was promised, not endless meetings with no change—
• Recognition that her pain made sense, not pathologizing of her distress—
• The repair she was owed a long time ago, not more strategies for tolerating harm.

But instead of offering repair, the system recycled harm. Instead of rebuilding trust, they talked about resilience. Instead of addressing what went wrong, they blamed the fallout.

Telling the truth is the only sane response

You refuse to forget, because forgetting would mean abandoning your child’s reality—and you have already watched too many adults do that with a straight face and a professional tone.

You refuse to pretend this is just a difficult case, because there is nothing mysterious about what happens when a child is repeatedly mischaracterised, unsupported, and made to feel unsafe in a place that claims to be for her.

You refuse to act like the support plan was followed, because you have the documents, the memories, the bruising evidence that what was agreed to was not delivered, and you will not participate in the lie that says otherwise.

You refuse to downplay what has happened, because the harm is not theoretical—it lives in your child’s nervous system, her school avoidance, her refusal to hope.

You are clear because your child needs you to be, because no one else in the room seems willing to say what is obvious, and because clarity is the first condition of repair.

You are unyielding because your child has been failed too many times, and because your softness has been mistaken for flexibility while your warnings were dismissed as tone.

You tell the truth because it is the only sane response to a system that keeps lying, keeps forgetting, keeps performing, and keeps producing the same outcomes for children like yours.

You name what you see because someone must—because silence would make you complicit, and because your child deserves an advocate who will not look away.