There’s a particular kind of heartbreak that comes not just from watching your child suffer, but from realising that the people responsible for that suffering will never acknowledge it—will never name the harm, will never say, we saw what happened, and we’re sorry. And even knowing that, even having been disappointed a hundred times already, you still write the letter, or sit through the meeting, or stand awkwardly at the edge of the schoolyard, hoping for something—some recognition, some trace of humanity, some brief suspension of the system’s cold logic.
But you can’t process your trauma with the people who caused it. And most of the time, that’s what we’re trying to do—because we’ve been taught to believe that healing requires closure, and closure requires validation, and validation should come from the source of the injury. But what if it doesn’t? What if it never will? What if the people who agreed to uphold the policies that excluded your child, who minimised your concerns, who used the language of regulation and neutrality to justify their own inaction—what if those people are not only incapable of witnessing the harm, but were never meant to?
School systems are not set up for recognition
School systems are set up for containment. For self-protection. For plausible deniability. And when you try to describe the pain—to say, my child was isolated, or punished for their disability, or denied the support that might have allowed them to stay—they tilt their heads and say things like, “That’s not how we experienced it,” or “We followed the process,” or “He didn’t say anything at the time.”
And you feel yourself begin to unravel, because of course he didn’t say anything. He was twelve. He was scared. He was being punished for melting down after being denied what he needed. He didn’t know the language of accommodation or procedural fairness. He only knew that he was different, and that his difference made adults uneasy, and that the less he asked for, the more likely they were to leave him alone.
And now you are here, with all the words he never had, trying to speak the truth aloud in a space that cannot—or will not—hear it.
This is what institutional gaslighting looks like
Their way is not dramatic or overt, but slow and cumulative and clean. You’re not being told that you’re lying, exactly—you’re being told that your account is one version, that there were mitigating factors, that everyone did their best. The result is the same: you begin to doubt what you know. You begin to wonder if maybe you’re exaggerating. Maybe he wasn’t excluded. Maybe it’s just a tough age. Maybe the lack of support wasn’t intentional. Maybe the absence of friends, the refusal to adapt curriculum, the disciplinary referrals for disability-related behaviour—maybe those weren’t signs of neglect but just unfortunate oversights.
And then you remember: he didn’t graduate. He didn’t walk across the stage. He wasn’t celebrated.
What are you supposed to do with that?
It is profoundly human to want someone to name the harm. But schools rarely say it, and when they do, it’s unpredictable and uneven and always, always too late. If you’re lucky, you’ll find one person—a teacher who stayed late to check in, an EA who sat with your kid when no one else would—who is willing to tell the truth. But you cannot base your survival on the hope that someone will break rank.
That kind of hope will break your heart over and over again.
So many of us keep going back to the people who harmed us—or our children—because we’re still looking for resolution. But institutions don’t offer resolution. They offer distance. They offer sanitized apologies and policy clarifications and long delays. They offer the language of process, not the language of care.
And I don’t think we can keep asking for care from people who have only ever offered compliance.
So instead, we build something else.
The next wave
We write our stories not for the school, but for the other parents who need to know they’re not imagining it. We let ourselves be witnessed—not with false neutrality, but with shared anger and fierce compassion. We sit with friends who say the quiet, necessary things—I believe you. That was wrong. I would be devastated too. We cry on the floor, or scream into the void, or pour a glass of wine and scroll through the Facebook group until someone else’s story helps us make sense of our own.
This isn’t closure, and it isn’t justice. But it is truth.
And truth—when held collectively, has power.