By Geoffrey Clow | A Twinkling of the Soul Article
I’ve been in rooms where people talk about mental health with great care and expensive language. Psychiatrists. Managers. HR people. Therapists. Policy types. All of them nodding seriously while someone says things like “low mood” or “poor coping” or “emotional dysregulation,” as if the words themselves have done something helpful.
And every time, I want to interrupt with the same question. Who hurt them?
Because most of the people I’ve worked with were not mysteriously unwell. They were reacting to something real. A childhood where no one stepped in. A partner who controlled every move. A workplace that slowly ground them down. A family that gaslit them until they stopped trusting their own memory. A system that closed ranks instead of protecting them.
Poor mental health is almost always the result of poor treatment. By someone. By some system. By some institution that should have known better. But try saying that in one of those rooms.
Instead, we get the cleaned-up version. The respectable version. The one where the problem sits neatly inside the person. Where the solution is therapy, medication, mindfulness apps, resilience workshops. Where everyone else can carry on exactly as they are. Funny how the version that protects everyone in power is always the one that survives.
Call it “poor mental health” and nobody has to say “abuse.” Call it “anxiety disorder” and nobody has to say “you were never safe.” Call it “depression” and nobody has to say “you were worn down until you shut down.”
I have watched people take those labels on like verdicts. Smart people. Capable people. People who survived things that would flatten most of us. And once the label sticks, the conversation changes. The question is no longer “what happened to you?” It becomes “what is wrong with you?” and “how will you manage it?”
That shift does real harm. Not because diagnosis is evil. Not because therapy is useless. But because when we stop at the label, when we never name the cause, when we never tell the whole story, we end up treating the smoke and ignoring the fire. And nothing actually changes.
The file that erased what actually happened
I think about the files that get created. Somewhere in a building none of us will ever see, someone types up a summary. They do it while you’re sitting in a waiting room, or crying in an emergency department, or trying to explain something that doesn’t fit on an intake form. They close the file. Move on to the next one. And you walk out carrying a new story about yourself. Not the story of what happened. The story of what’s wrong with you.
I’ve seen these files. The thing about them is that they’re incomplete. Deliberately so.
A woman is terrorised in her own home for seven years. Controlled, isolated, gaslit, threatened. She doesn’t sleep. She can’t eat. She flinches when a door opens. The file says: Generalised Anxiety Disorder.
A child grows up never knowing which version of his father will walk through the door. He learns to read micro-expressions before he learns to read books. Decades later, he still scans every room for exits. The file says: Hypervigilance. Query ADHD.
A worker spends three years being undermined, excluded, humiliated. Told she’s “too sensitive” when she objects. Eventually she stops getting out of bed. Stops seeing the point. The file says: Major Depressive Episode.
In each case, someone did something. In each case, the file makes them disappear. The diagnosis stays. The cause gets dropped. And you become the entire problem.
Your body was there for all of it
If you’ve lived through something, your body figured it out long before any professional did. You flinch at sudden movements, check the locks twice, three times, once more before you can sleep. Your chest tightens at a certain tone of voice, that particular cadence, the one that used to mean it was about to start. You go blank when someone raises their hand near your face, even when they’re just reaching for the salt.
That’s not malfunction. That’s memory. Your body took notes when your mind couldn’t. It logged every danger, every betrayal, every moment you should have been safe and weren’t. Now it won’t stop reporting. Not because something’s wrong with it. Because it was right. The danger was real. Your body did its job.
The only problem is, nobody wants that testimony. It implicates too many people. It asks too many questions. It suggests that maybe, just maybe, the problem wasn’t you.
Why it’s convenient that you’re the problem
There’s no money in accountability. I’ve looked. No pharmaceutical company sells consequences. No wellness app tracks whether your abuser faced any. No therapy model bills by the hour for systemic change. No workplace runs a workshop called “How to Stop Destroying Your Employees.”
But there’s a fortune in managing you. Breathwork classes for women whose partners are still in the house. Gratitude journals for people whose employers never faced a single question. Mindfulness programs so you can learn to breathe through oppression. Resilience training so you can cope with abuse that nobody plans to stop. All of it aimed squarely at you. Your nervous system. Your responses. Your regulation. Your healing journey. None of it aimed at them.
If you’re unwell, you’re the project. If you were harmed, someone else might need to answer for it. The entire apparatus runs more smoothly when you’re the only one in the room.
The truth that makes rooms go quiet
I’ve watched people get handed diagnoses for things that were done to them. And every time, I think: that’s not illness. That’s damage. That’s what happens when someone breaks you. That’s proof that something happened. Abuse. Oppression. Neglect. Cruelty. The kind of treatment that breaks people down. The kind nobody wants to name.
But that truth is inconvenient. It implicates families, employers, institutions, courts. Systems we’d rather believe are fair. People we’d rather believe are decent.
So we tell a tidier story. I’ve heard it told so many times I can recite it for them now. At the family dinner, someone says “she’s always been anxious” and everyone nods. Nobody mentions the father. In the HR meeting, they talk about “supporting your mental health” while the manager who destroyed you sits two doors down, untouched. In the courtroom, your trauma responses get called “instability” and used against you. The person who caused them walks out looking reasonable.
We’ve gotten very good at this. The clean version. The version that doesn’t make anyone uncomfortable. The version that lets everyone sleep at night except you.
You knew before they reframed it
You knew before anyone handed you a diagnosis. You knew what happened. You knew who did it. Or who allowed it. Or who looked the other way while it was happening. You knew your insomnia wasn’t random. Your numbness wasn’t weakness. Your hypervigilance kept you alive when nothing else would have.
You knew it wasn’t “poor mental health.” It was poor treatment. By people who should have done better. By systems that failed you. By institutions that protected themselves instead of you.
But then they gave it the wrong name. And you’ve spent years trying to squeeze yourself into a frame that doesn’t fit. Trying to be a good patient. Trying to fix what was never yours to fix. That cost you something. It cost you the right to be angry at the right people. The right to say: this was done to me. The right to call it what it was. Abuse. Oppression. Neglect. Harm. The right to stop treating yourself as the problem.
The moment you say it out loud
When you tell the real story, you stop being easy to dismiss. You stop apologising for your reactions. You stop explaining yourself to people who were never owed an explanation. You stop performing recovery for an audience that includes the people who broke you.
I’ve seen what happens when someone finally says it out loud. Not to a therapist. Not in clinical language. Just: this is what happened, this is who did it, and this is what it cost me. The room changes. They change. Not because they’re healed. Because they’re no longer carrying the lie.
That doesn’t fix everything. Doesn’t calm the nervous system overnight. Doesn’t mean you stop needing support. But you’re not the broken thing anymore. You’re the one who knows what actually happened. And that’s a different place to stand.
What it cost you to believe the wrong story
You don’t have to tell everyone. You don’t have to tell anyone until you’re ready, if you’re ever ready. But somewhere, even just with yourself, the whole story needs room to exist.
Not the version that protects them. Not the version that makes it easier for everyone else. Not the version that got typed into a file and closed.
The version that names it properly. Not “mental health.” Harm. Abuse. Oppression. Poor treatment by people and systems that should have known better.
That’s the only version where you get to be the person who was harmed, instead of the person with something wrong with them.
One of those is survival. The other is freedom.
If you’re done being the diagnosis
If any of this felt familiar, I offer online trauma informed counselling sessions for survivors who are tired of being the problem. No intake forms that erase what happened. No clinical distance. Feel free to get in touch here
