11/16/2025
The Beginning of the Unraveling
Why survivors need more than personal healing — they need informed families, trained professionals, accountable systems, and structural change.
I have exhaled only half a breath since the release of the Epstein files. In the days that followed, more and more survivors of men’s violence began to speak. Some shared memories of trafficking and sexual exploitation. Others described the ordinary, everyday harms woven into their lives. None of it is new. The buying and selling of human beings, especially women and girls, is threaded through human history. Practices like dowries, domestic servitude, and sexual ownership were normalized for centuries. Their records survived because they were written by the captors, not the captive. The voices of the subjugated rarely had the chance to tell their own truth.
As a professional who works with survivors, I see daily that individual healing is only one part of what people need. Survivors also need families who understand their responses, courts that are educated in the realities of abuse dynamics, professionals who are trained to recognize patterned harm, and systems that reflect current science rather than outdated myths.
When escape is impossible, the human nervous system adapts. It plays dead. Scientists call this state tonic immobility. For years, it was believed to occur only in animals, but research on prisoners of war and women experiencing sexual and family violence revealed that humans also collapse into this final mode of survival. It is the possum defense. The deepest descent in the defense cascade, beyond fight, flight, freeze, and even the appeasement response people call fawning.
Tonic immobility does not simply immobilize the body. It can erase the inner world of a person trapped within violence. These responses unfold beneath conscious thought. They require no permission. The human organism, like any animal, senses danger and reorganizes itself to endure the threat. In today’s world, the threat is most often relational, and most often male.
The loss of self, the emotional shutdown, and the shame that accompany tonic immobility protect the person from the full terror of the situation. Shame offers a story that feels safer than acknowledging total powerlessness. It softens the unbearable. The numbing of emotion prevents outward reactions that might provoke further harm. Dissolution of self allows the person to appear compliant, becoming whatever the perpetrator requires to keep violence at bay. From the outside, this can look like consent. Inside, it is survival.
Yet our systems — legal, medical, educational, and cultural — often misinterpret these responses. Survivors are judged for reactions that are predictable under threat. Their credibility is questioned because the science of human survival is not widely understood.
This is why individual healing alone is not enough.
We need systemic understanding.
American psychology has resisted naming this phenomenon in its diagnostic system for decades, even as experts have called for its recognition. The question remains. Why avoid diagnosing a state that is well documented, measurable, and life-saving under threat? It is not a mental illness but rather an adaptive and predictable outcome of captivity, coercion, and domination. Recognizing it would require acknowledging the conditions that produce it and the individuals who create those conditions. Those individuals are overwhelmingly male. They are often protected by political, economic, or institutional influence. Naming the injury requires naming its source.
When Judith Herman wrote about this phenomenon in the 90s, she used it to describe the experience of women’s everyday life, not conditions of war but rather the cumulative effect of cultural and interpersonal harm: repeated violations, exploitation, physical and psychological domination, diminishment, and fear. These are not isolated events. They are the landscape women walk through.
One only has to look at the self-defense accessories marketed to women. TikTok creators assemble pastel “safety kits” filled with rhinestone pepper sprays, cat-ear knuckle spikes, adorable personal alarms, and pocket-sized bedazzled tasers. The aesthetic softens the brutality of what these objects acknowledge: that women are expected to live in danger and to manage that danger alone. Our culture trains girls to avoid being assaulted or killed rather than demanding that men stop doing the assaulting and killing.
I have not been trafficked. But as a survivor of men’s violence, I know the ecosystem that allows it. I have been disbelieved, blamed, scapegoated, and punished for harms inflicted on me. The same patriarchal structures that empower exploiters also teach women to align themselves with those structures for proximity to protection. This pursuit of approval turns the vulnerable into accomplices who repeat the very tactics once used against them. They climb the hierarchy, but only far enough to serve it.
The harm revealed by the Epstein files is not an aberration. It is an amplified version of the same patterns embedded in ordinary life. The world paid attention only because the perpetrators were wealthy, politically connected men who hid behind the illusion of legitimacy. Their tactics mirror those used in homes, workplaces, religious institutions, schools, and courtrooms where women’s bodies, voices, safety, and personhood are slowly dismantled by men who call themselves partners, colleagues, leaders, husbands, mentors, and friends.
And still, the Epstein saga is narrated through the male gaze. The public obsesses over the political fallout, the reputational damage, the spectacle of elite predators caught in the light of undeniable truth, stripped of the shadows they once hid behind. But what of the desecrated lives of the victims? What of the years they spent numb, isolated, or struggling to survive because no one believed the violations they endured? What of the revictimization framed as poor judgment, even as predators deliberately target the wounded? What of the so-called safety keepers who dismissed them as opportunists or gold diggers instead of girls desperate for protection and justice? What of the slow destruction of their inner world, followed by the second, more painful wound: that their most shattering truth was denied, dismissed, and then used against their humanity?
These same dynamics are not exclusive to the girls exploited within that global trafficking network. They are the connective tissue linking all survivors of systemic male violence. The isolation, the shame, the disbelief, the character attacks, the way communities judge a person’s reactions rather than the violations themselves, the targeting of the vulnerable, the dismissal of truth, the twisting of disclosures, the spiritual and emotional damage of being denied and degraded by those with power. These are not their experiences alone. They are mine as well. I recognize the architecture because I lived inside its walls.
And this is why my work cannot stop at individual support.
