Ing Says: Trust Yourself First and Always
I knew they had broken the law.
Removing my service dog during involuntary hospitalization. Falsifying medical records. Using violence on a non-violent client. Refusing medical care to a person with dangerously elevated vitals.
Illegal. Illegal. Illegal. Illegal and stupid dangerous.
Yet when I stated these facts, they looked at me with blank faces and denied everything.
That’s when the vertigo hit. Not just confusion, but a physical disorientation — the kind that comes when someone with absolute power insists that up is down, that right is wrong, that four lights are actually five. The Guidance Center itself, and my former therapist, became utterly abusive in their efforts to argue they had done nothing wrong. The institutional gaslighting was so thick that I felt like I was standing on a tiny, moving stand in the middle of a hurricane — with no vision and a stand moving like waves underneath me.
I knew these things. I knew them clearly and I knew them cold.
Yet they sat there, blank-faced, and told me they had done nothing wrong.
And I? I stood in a blackout storm, on a tiny stand that moved unpredictably, and for a while, my whole sense of being able to make sense of the world I lived in was destroyed. Up was down, black was white — and I had nothing to hold on to except my own internal sense of self.
They broke laws and ethics, acted like it was normal — and then blamed me for speaking up.
Their denials weren’t just wrong. They had a flavor of disconnect from reality. They have done these things so many times, they had gone blind to their own distortion — and it was clinic-wide. To me, it seems on the cusp of psychosis. A shared institutional detachment from reality so complete that maintaining power became more important than acknowledging and correcting objective harm.
And they knew they could get away with it. The organizations supposedly in charge of making sure this doesn’t happen have very little teeth. They might lose a clinician or two — but the real power holders are not at any risk. It borders on the Machiavellian, frankly — because the objective is institutional protection, no matter the price to humans.
This is what medical gaslighting looks like at the institutional level. It is not one bad clinician having a bad day. It is a clinic-wide system of denial so practiced and so complete that it has lost contact with its own reality. The institution has gone mad. And the only sane response — the only response that preserves your grip on what is true — is to keep saying it.
There are four lights.
I am speaking about and to you — Devon Forrest, Dr. Stephanie Babbitt, Dr. Teresa Bertsch, Mary Jo Gregory.
“There are four lights” isn’t about Star Trek. It’s about that moment when you realize an institution has gone mad, and the only sane response is to scream it out loud.
That is why I started writing. No matter the cost — there are four lights. Their blatant disregard of ethics, laws, and common human decency does not change the facts.
This time, they miscalculated — because I will not stop until this institution can no longer handle the price of its own silence. They had a chance. My original demand was simple: meaningful suicide assessment training for all front-line staff. They refused.
The price keeps going up. The price is also a better clinic — something they, for some reason, just don’t want.
If you recognized yourself in this
Institutional gaslighting — the systematic denial of documented harm by the people and organizations that caused it — is one of the most disorienting forms of abuse a survivor can face. It is designed to make you doubt your own perception. It is designed to make the cost of speaking up feel higher than the cost of staying silent.
It isn’t.
Between Trust and Trauma exists because one person standing on a moving stand in a blackout storm is easier to dismiss than many. We document what happened. We name the institution. We connect survivors who experienced the same pattern of denial from the same facility.
You are not confused. You are not difficult. You are not the problem.
There are four lights.
[Find us at Between Trust and Trauma — and tell us what you saw.]
This is, of course, all in my opinion. (“There are four lights” refers to the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode “Chain of Command,” Part 2.)
