The Emotional Toll of Living With Institutional Betrayal

“I have a sick feeling in my stomach all the time,” a friend said to me at dinner last week. “I’m having trouble sleeping,” said another during a recent work phone call. “And I’m so, so angry.” Within minutes of looking at social media, on any given day, my feed is filled with people expressing similar sentiments: disgust, contempt, fear, rage, sadness, and outrage. We have been going through a wash-rinse-repeat cycle of egregious harm, institutional denial, and evidence of impunity.

The past several weeks, the primary catalyst for people’s heightened despair has been exposure to the horrifying contents—text, photographs, videos—of newly released Epstein files, coming fast on the heels of deadly ICE encounters in Minneapolis. These, in turn, sit on top of years of live-streamed genocidal wars, scenes of mass starvation, gruesome stories of sexual violence, and other widespread crises.

How could Jeffrey Epstein’s vicious crimes, his elite network, and the near-total lack of accountability on display not traumatize the public? How could watching Immigration and Customs Enforcement tear families apart, detain children, and cause preventable deaths—all while government officials deny, deflect, and attack critics—not break something in us?

Images of sexual violence against children, racist policing, family separation, and mass killing aren’t simply “news” or “content” that informs us, but rather knowledge that is rewiring us. The triggers might differ, but the wounds inflicted by the content we are consuming are the same: emotional distress and plunging people into the risk of trauma—insidious, secondary, and vicarious—and, for millions, re-traumatization. These responses aren’t aberrations; they’re humane and predictable responses to witnessing horrors.

When Protectors Become Perpetrators

In many ways, what we are all living through today is made legible by two events that took place in 2005. In March of that year, the Palm Beach police department began investigating Epstein after the family of a 14-year-old girl reported he’d molested her at his home. This was the beginning of the first major criminal investigation into Epstein’s crimes, ultimately leading to his 2006 arrest and his now infamous 2008 plea deal.

That same year, Dr. Jennifer Freyd published a paper that would lead to her theory of “institutional betrayal,” as an extension of betrayal trauma theory. While interpersonal traumatic events are often the most harmful, those that involve betrayal of a trusted or depended upon relationship or institution are uniquely harmful. It’s no surprise that her work centered on the experiences of victims of sexual violence.

The failure of trusted institutions to do what we expect them to — keep people safe, protect them, hold bad actors accountable — deepens trauma and its costs to individuals and collectives by eviscerating social trust. The trauma stems not only from interpersonal violence but also from the awareness that a collective body purporting to be just and protective is the opposite, instead more likely to punish the vulnerable than to help them.

DARVO: The Favorite Weapon of Institutional Self-Protection

Freyd’s work also led her to another concept with incredible value and usefulness today, DARVO. DARVO stands for Deny, Attack, and Reverse Victim and Offender. It’s a pattern Freyd identified in how perpetrators of violence respond when confronted. However, institutions also use this strategy, and they often have more power and resources, allowing them to be more effective than individuals.

Today, DARVO is a weapon wielded against the public by people and institutions meant to represent and protect us as citizens. The handling of the Epstein files, for instance, follows the classic abuser’s playbook identified by Freyd: the obstruction, and then slow-walk, of selectively redacted release of information (Deny); the constant discrediting and threatening of survivors (Attack); the protection of powerful men’s identities, reputations, and privacy (Reverse Victim and Offender). Asymmetrical power and the government’s use of “transparency” have exposed victims’ identities while masking those of the powerful. At various points, their names. Faces. Bodies. Addresses. Families.

This is what a system protecting itself does. DARVO, in the Epstein case, has consistently made victims the face of the crimes and ensured that the network that enabled Epstein remains an abstract force.

For many women, especially women of color who have never had the luxury of trusting these systems in the first place, the Epstein situation is confirming our worldview. The distress we are feeling isn’t borne of surprise or even outrage, but deep grief and rage. It’s the exhausting weight of living in a world that continues to tell women that we don’t matter, not even as children. What the Epstein case is doing, however, is showing many more people that the men most likely to talk about protecting “their” girls and women are the ones most likely to feel entitled to do to girls and women whatever they please.

What This Does to All of Us

I’ve focused this piece on the dynamics of the Epstein case, but the same patterns apply to ICE killings, racist policing violence, xenophobic expulsions, government abandonment of the most vulnerable people in our society, the course of genocidal wars around the world, and more. All represent forms of institutional betrayal and of moral injury: having to act in ways that violate your ethics and morality.

Moral injury and institutional betrayal aren’t abstract concepts. They are visceral, existential challenges that result from our experience of a shift in our worldview. The experience of a slow-motion dismantling of our social trust has a specific pattern: Dread. Anger. Alienation. Despair. Disgust. Hopelessness. Apathy. Resignation. Outrage. Shame. Fear. Endless discussions of Epstein’s network abusing minors, coupled with no major accountability for perpetrators or enablers, leave the public feeling vulnerable to, trapped in, and complicit with broken systems.

For Black and Brown Americans, Indigenous people, working class people, and many others, institutional betrayal and moral injury are not new realizations or experiences. They are realities that no one can afford to ignore. History is the proof. What history will this episode shed light on?

The Antidote: Institutional Courage

The perpetual risk of institutional betrayal and moral injury is that we become exhausted and withdraw from civic life and stop demanding change and accountability. If your vote doesn’t matter, if your outrage changes nothing, if the powerful always win, why stay engaged?

The antidote to institutional betrayal, Freyd writes, is institutional courage, a concept she has built an organization and expanding community around. Freyd identifies specific approaches, policies, and actions designed to restore trust and deliver justice. Valuing whistleblowers. Respond sensitively to disclosures and centering victims. Bear witness, being accountable, and apologizing. Going beyond simple compliance. Engage in constant self-review. Genuine transparency. Committing real and meaningful resources: budgets, full-time staff, and time.

The problem, however, is that many of these assume there are people within institutions with the power to fight for what is right. It’s an assumption we cannot make. Contexts where institutions are the perpetrators of violence represent, in Freyd’s terms, Institutional Betrayal by Commission. Think, for example, of police brutality, the damage of government negligence, and systemic sexual violence. These require a fundamental dismantling and re-envisioning of institutional identity. This looks like truth and reconciliation, reparations, independent investigations, people losing power, and the end of public gaslighting. It might mean abolition.

In today’s political environment, however, these outcomes are even more difficult. Institutional courage is the remedy, but institutional capture requires qualitatively different interventions and, sometimes, institutional abolition. The question now is not only, “How do we make institutions better?” but “Do these institutions deserve to exist in their current form?” Ask any prison abolitionist how they came to their work. The courage required takes political will.

For members of the public, courage now means not only pressing institutions, but shifting people, money, time, and attention to exerting massive external, public pressure on captured institutions. It means not giving up on the fact that powerful people should and will face consequences. It means becoming trangressive in the understanding that the institutions we rely on don’t represent us or our interests.

We have the capacity to envision what it means to build new practices and systems that can deliver accountability from the outside: independent investigations, preserving data and information that might disappear, protecting witnesses, whistleblowers, and survivors. New social contracts that ensure justice and mean that when consequences are necessary, they are commensurate with the severity of harms to individuals and to society.

We can’t let institutions that have failed us and are complicit in widespread injustices overwhelm us to the degree that we stop expecting and demanding change. Institutional courage never actually starts with institutions, but with people’s stubborn refusal to look away and insistence that the truth still has the power to change the world.