Chapter 18 — The Cost of Being Disbelieved

Disbelief is not merely an opinion held in somebody else's mind. Once acted upon—or entered into an institutional record—it changes decisions, relationships, care and access to justice, creating damage which can continue for decades.

To be disbelieved is often described as though it were a disappointing conversation. Somebody tells their story; another person doubts it; both go away holding different views.

That was not my experience.

Disbelief altered what people did. It determined who was protected, who was punished, whose explanation entered the record and whose words were treated as a problem. It followed me from childhood into family relationships, employment, healthcare, legal processes and the Royal Commission.

It also affected the support and care available to me. When services which were supposed to provide safety, care or practical assistance fell into line with the same obstructive account, the consequences became more devastating than ordinary disbelief. The systems to which I should have been able to turn for protection could instead reinforce the injury and leave me with fewer safe places to go.

The cost did not arise only from people saying, “I do not believe you.” It arose from everything they felt entitled to do after making that decision.

First Called a Liar

The lesson began early. The nuns called me a liar. When the people who held authority controlled both the conduct and the explanation, a child's account had little chance of surviving.

Being labelled a liar did more than deny one statement. It changed my place within the family and community. It made exclusion and humiliation appear justified. It taught other people that they could disregard what I said before listening to it.

For a child, disbelief can also become a threat to survival. If telling produces punishment, another beating or the loss of the few relationships upon which safety depends, the mind learns to make disclosure safer. It can reduce the story, change its surroundings, conceal names or remove access to the event entirely.

Those responses are then used to justify the original disbelief. The child cannot tell a continuous story because telling was dangerous; the broken account is treated as proof that there was nothing to tell.

The Credibility Trap

Dissociative amnesia placed me inside a credibility trap.

If I could not remember, the event was said not to have happened. If a memory returned later, it was said to have been invented. If I corrected a name or detail, the correction became inconsistency. If I spoke with certainty, I was said to be fixed or obsessed. If I expressed uncertainty, the uncertainty was treated as an admission that none of it could be trusted.

Every possible presentation could be interpreted against me.

A trauma-informed response would ask what was accessible at a particular time, what conditions made further disclosure possible, and what independent material could test the account. The responses I often encountered demanded a polished chronological narrative first and treated my inability to produce one as a moral or psychiatric failure.

That placed the burden upon the very capacity the trauma had disrupted.

What the Evidence Says About Traumatic Memory

Research does not establish one prevalence rate for dissociative amnesia among survivors of abuse. Studies have measured different things: a formal diagnosis, partial gaps around an abusive event, complete inability to recall a documented incident, delayed recovery of memory, broader childhood autobiographical memory loss, and failure to disclose an event during an interview. Those outcomes are related, but they are not interchangeable.

The strongest prospective evidence nevertheless demonstrates that later failure to report documented childhood abuse is not extraordinary. In a study published by Linda Meyer Williams in 1994, women were interviewed approximately seventeen years after incidents of childhood sexual abuse had been documented in hospital records. About 38 per cent did not report the particular documented incident during the later interview.

That finding does not mean that every one of those women had dissociative amnesia. Some may have remembered but chosen not to disclose, some had been very young when the abuse occurred, and ordinary limits upon childhood memory may also have contributed. What the study establishes is narrower and still extremely important: failure to report a previously documented abusive event cannot responsibly be treated, by itself, as evidence that the person is lying or that the event did not occur.

A 1999 clinical study by James Chu and colleagues examined ninety women admitted to a specialist trauma-disorders unit. A substantial proportion of those reporting childhood physical or sexual abuse also reported partial or complete amnesia for abuse memories. Greater amnesia was associated with abuse beginning at an earlier age, more frequent sexual abuse and higher levels of dissociative symptoms. Because this was a specialist clinical group, its findings cannot be converted into a prevalence rate for all survivors.

Together, the studies support the existence of a significant subgroup of survivors whose access to traumatic memories is partial, delayed or interrupted. They do not provide one percentage which can be applied to every survivor, and they do not make every subsequently recalled detail automatically accurate.

The professional conclusion should therefore be straightforward. Inability to produce a continuous and consistently accessible account is not proof of fabrication. It calls for paced, trauma-informed assessment and careful examination of contemporary records, later disclosures and independent corroboration. Dissociative amnesia explains why access to memory can change; provenance and evidence remain necessary when determining what happened.

The importance of that distinction is difficult to overstate. Where a lawyer, clinician or investigator treats disrupted recall as dishonesty before examining the evidence, the professional is not applying scepticism. The professional is replacing investigation with an assumption which the research does not support.

Research sources: Linda Meyer Williams, “Recall of Childhood Trauma: A Prospective Study of Women's Memories of Child Sexual Abuse” (1994); James A. Chu and colleagues, “Memories of Childhood Abuse: Dissociation, Amnesia, and Corroboration” (1999).

When a False Label Arrived First

Eventually, the evidence showed that there had been no actual diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia. Yet the label had travelled far enough to arrive before I did.

A professional meeting me for the first time could read the label before hearing my history. Once viewed through it, my account of abuse by religious figures could be interpreted as delusion, my efforts to provide evidence as fixation and my objection to the label as further evidence that I lacked insight.

This was character assassination carried out through paperwork. It presented me as something I was not and allowed people to avoid examining what I was actually saying.

The cost was not abstract. It influenced legal advice, responses within the Royal Commission, healthcare interactions and relationships. It gave institutions and individuals a ready-made reason to protect themselves or alleged abusers while describing their refusal to engage as a clinical judgment about me.

The false label could be repeated in seconds. Challenging it required finding its source, obtaining files, comparing versions and asking separate organisations to correct what they had received. During that process, the label remained available to shape the next encounter.

Disbelief in Healthcare

Healthcare depends upon clinicians deciding which parts of a patient's account require investigation. When disbelief enters before assessment, symptoms can be reclassified without being examined.

My accounts of retained glass, physical pain, injuries and trauma-linked responses were vulnerable to this. A clinician could begin with the psychiatric label and interpret the physical complaint through it. An incomplete scan or a report which did not identify a radiodense foreign body could then be treated as proof that the whole history was false, even when the relevant anatomical area had not been completely visualised or earlier fragments had physically been removed.

This created a second danger. The consequences of disbelief could be entered into the medical record as further reasons for disbelief. A failure to investigate produced no finding; the absence of a finding was then used to justify the failure to investigate.

Where trauma affected my capacity to remain in a process, withdrawal or distress could also be described without the trigger which produced it. The record showed the patient's reaction while the conduct, environment or misunderstanding which caused the reaction disappeared.

The cost was delayed care, repeated explanation, avoidable distress and the knowledge that seeking help could expose me to the same pattern again.

Disbelief in Law

Legal processes claim to test evidence, but access to that testing depends upon somebody first agreeing that the matter deserves to proceed.

Lawyers who approached my account through a false psychiatric label could make a credibility judgment before assembling the evidence. Dissociative gaps became a reason not to investigate rather than part of the condition within which the evidence had to be gathered.

Procedural abandonment deepened the harm. A lawyer moved, a department was sold or a firm stopped responding, and I was left carrying the trauma and the unfinished matter. The legal professionals retained their careers, institutional standing and sometimes a continuing financial interest. I retained the consequences.

Each failed pathway consumed more than time. To approach another lawyer, I had to disclose again, reconstruct the chronology again, provide the records again and risk being disbelieved again. What appears in an office ledger as a closed or transferred file can represent months or years removed from a survivor's capacity to continue.

The collapse of a claim can then be invoked as though a court tested the evidence and rejected it. Often, no court heard it. The pathway ended earlier—in delay, conflict, withdrawal, procedural failure or a professional decision not to proceed.

The Royal Commission

The Royal Commission was supposed to create a place in which institutional survivors could be heard. My experience remained heavily affected by the false psychiatric material and by the assumptions it encouraged.

There was another part of my relationship with the Commission which made its later treatment of me especially difficult to understand. Patrick Smith disclosed to my younger sister information which he said came from the Commission's intake system. New people approaching the Commission had been asked how they heard about it. According to the statement relayed to me, more than 1,970 people during the Commission's early stage had identified my Facebook pages as the source of their knowledge of the Commission or the incentive for making contact.

That was an extraordinary number. I was told that I had established a record which Patrick doubted anybody could come near matching. Some people within or around the Commission pushed back seriously against the claim, and others said it could not be possible.

I stand by what was conveyed to me. The timing and the substantial number of people who had joined my Facebook pages were consistent with it. On that basis, I feel confident that my work prompted more than 2,000 people to make contact with the Royal Commission.

The distinction in provenance remains important. The figure was disclosed by Patrick to my younger sister and then conveyed to me; I do not presently hold the Commission's underlying intake dataset. That does not make the disclosure unimportant. It identifies a specific record which should be capable of being checked and shows the scale of the contribution I understood I had made.

If that contribution generated resistance in parts of the Commission, it presents a profound contradiction. A survivor could be effective in bringing large numbers of other survivors forward while still being personally diminished through false psychiatric material and institutional disbelief.

I brought evidence and an account of religious institutional protection. Yet once credibility had been injured elsewhere, I was not approaching the process on equal terms. I was also carrying dissociative amnesia into a system which depended upon spoken narrative, names, dates and the capacity to remain present while describing traumatic events.

The Commission later documented serious problems in institutional responses, including the insufficient independence of the Melbourne Response and conflicts within its structure. That broader recognition did not restore what was lost when my own material was approached through prejudice.

For a survivor, being invited to speak is not the same as being heard. A process can receive words while allowing an inherited label to decide what those words mean.

Relationships Made Into Evidence

Disbelief entered relationships which should never have been recruited into an institutional defence.

People close to me encountered competing accounts: what I was trying to disclose and what a professional or institution had written about me. The institutional version carried the authority of titles, files and diagnosis-like language. My account arrived through distress, gaps, corrections and the urgency of somebody trying to be understood.

That imbalance could turn family members and partners into informal judges. Ordinary conflict became entangled with questions about sanity and credibility. Behaviour arising from fear or trauma could be taken as proof of the label which had already distorted the relationship.

Some relationships fractured under that pressure. Others became burdened by information and responsibilities they were not equipped to carry. The damage extended beyond whether a particular person believed a particular event. It altered trust itself.

This is one reason I am careful about what happened to Johl. My attempt to obtain help and justice should not have made him the communication channel for material capable of causing vicarious trauma. Whatever conclusions are ultimately drawn about individual conduct, the system failed when the burden of managing my trauma was transferred into the parent-child relationship.

The Cost of Repeated Disclosure

Every new institution tended to ask for the story again.

The request sounds reasonable until the nature of the story is considered. Disclosure could bring physical reactions, dissociation, lost time, sleeplessness and a period in which ordinary functioning became difficult. If the professional then left, failed to respond or reduced the account to a label, the cost of telling had been incurred without the promised purpose being achieved.

Repeated disclosure was not neutral information gathering. It could become repeated exposure without safety, continuity or outcome.

The exhaustion this produced was easily misunderstood. Pausing could look like abandonment of the claim. Difficulty responding to correspondence could be read as lack of seriousness. Anger after years of obstruction could be treated as aggression unrelated to what had produced it.

Disbelief created the conditions which made continuing difficult, then used that difficulty as evidence that the matter lacked substance.

The Professional Cost Was Different

The risks were distributed unequally.

A professional could make an error, move to another position and leave the record behind. An institution could close a complaint, transfer a file or respond through a new staff member. The consequences remained attached to me.

Even when an error was acknowledged, the people who relied upon it rarely returned to repair every decision it had influenced. There was no automatic notice to every lawyer, clinician, police officer or family member who had encountered the false account.

This absence of consequence encourages institutional carelessness. When the person writing the label bears little cost if it is wrong, while the person labelled bears the cost everywhere it travels, accuracy becomes an ethical and human-rights issue—not merely an administrative preference.

Disbelief as Institutional Action

The most important lesson was that disbelief must be judged by its actions.

Did it stop an investigation? Did it prevent medical examination? Did it cause a complaint to be redirected into psychiatry? Did it allow a religious institution to define the credibility of a person alleging abuse by its own members? Did it separate a survivor from legal representation, family support or control of their own record?

These questions move the discussion away from whether somebody privately felt sceptical. Professionals are permitted to test evidence. They are not entitled to replace investigation with prejudice or to turn an unverified label into permission to disregard a person.

The distinction is procedural fairness. I did not require every person to accept every recollection immediately. I required them to examine the available evidence, identify uncertainty honestly, avoid conflicts of interest and refrain from treating institutional repetition as independent proof.

What Disbelief Left Behind

The original abuse caused harm. The organised disbelief which followed created another layer.

It reinforced the childhood lesson that speaking was dangerous. It affected self-worth, trust and the ability to remain within relationships and professional processes. It consumed years in which I was forced to argue about my character before anybody would consider the evidence.

It also created records of its own. Every unanswered email, unexplained transfer, unsupported diagnosis, refusal to correct and decision based upon copied material became part of the history.

That history could be examined. If disbelief had been built through records, the answer was not simply to tell the story more forcefully. It was to preserve the sources, expose the copying, document the gaps and show exactly how one unsupported claim had affected later decisions.

The cost of being disbelieved was why building the evidence became necessary.