I'm Just a Girl

Two months of silence. A professional meeting that went sideways in the specific, targeted way that only happens when someone with institutional standing decides to use their access to deliver a verdict instead of a conversation.

This episode names what that is clinically — institutional betrayal, moral injury, the wound response that looks like a creative block but isn't — and why the standard advice for getting unstuck doesn't work when the problem isn't a block. It's a wound.

Nikki Hensler Gordon is back. And she brought the framework.

Structure & Scars
Unfiltered dialogue about the structures that shape us.

✉️ Continue the conversation: nikki@perspectivestherapywi.com

Transcript

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I want to tell you about a meeting I had earlier this year. And I'm not going to name the person. And it's not because I'm protecting them, because trust me, I'm not. But it's because people like this really relish knowing that they landed, that they stuck with you. And they measure their worth by the impact of the hit. And I'm not interested in giving them that. What I am interested in is naming the experience. Because I know I'm not the only person who has sat in a version of that room. And I know that most of us who have walked out of it never said a word about what happened inside. So earlier this year, professional meeting with someone who had reached out to connect with me about the work I do with first responders and EMS in particular. Someone with institutional standing in a space I cared deeply about. Someone who presented themselves as collegial, curious, and interested in collaboration. And somehow in that meeting, I realized that what was actually happening was an assessment, that I was being measured against a standard I hadn't even been told about by someone who had already decided what I was, and that the purpose of the meeting wasn't to connect. It was to make sure I understood my place. At a certain point, I made a strategic decision to step back and let Iron Star's program director take over the remainder of the conversation. Because I recognized that my window of opportunity had closed, and my maiden name was about to start acting up, and my father's prettiest son was going to throw hands, metaphorically, of course. And then I went quiet for two months. This podcast went silent. The content stopped. And the work that I have spent the better part of two decades building just sat in a folder. And I could not make myself open it. That silence is what this episode is about. Welcome back. This is Structure and Scars, and it's a podcast for people who are relentlessly committed to destroying the status quo. We don't do compliance here. We don't do Polite Society's version of a healing journey. You know, the one you didn't buy travel insurance for. We call things out, we cite our sources, and we do it authentically and unapologetically. I'm Nikki Hensler Gordon. I'm a therapist, an educator, researcher, storyteller, first responder wife, and former last responder. So let's get into it. So the meeting. This meeting didn't come out of nowhere. It actually started the way that a lot of professional interactions do now, which was just an outreach message from someone who had missed a presentation. I gave it a conference, expressing interest in connecting, citing mutual professional territory. They work in a space that I'm adjacent to and is adjacent to the work that I do. They had institutional standing, and the message presented as collegial. Here's what I'm working on. Here's my research. I'd love to learn more about what you're doing. Let's find a time. So I noticed in retrospect that the message was really heavy on their credentials and very light, i.e., non-existent, curiosity about mine. It was about the program they had recently completed, the research they were conducting, the initiatives their office is funding, and all of it offered as context before a single question about my work was asked. I didn't clock it at the time, and that is 100% on me. I will own that. All I did was respond very warmly with genuine interest, and we set up a time to meet. So I want to be precise about what I walked into that meeting carrying. Not because I am humble bragging here, but because I like to give context. So I walked in with over a decade of clinical practice specializing in trauma, graduate credentials in community psychology, criminal justice, trauma-informed care, and forensic victimology, my Mdrea certification, a manuscript that's been accepted for publication, a peer support organization built specifically for the first responder and EMS population that this person works with professionally, and a framework developed from clinical practice, research, and direct proximity to the population that the field's own data supports. I want to be equally precise about what they walked in carrying: institutional standing, a credential they had recently completed, and a very clear sense of what the hierarchy of this particular professional space was supposed to look like, and where I fit inside of it. Those two things are not equivalent. This meeting made sure that I knew it. So the through line of the conversation was this there was nothing I could design or implement that would meet the standard of the program they had just completed. Never mind that they are not designed to do the same thing. Never mind that they come from different places with different funding. My framework was interesting, perhaps, but it would not pass the rigor of what their institution was doing. My work with this population, the clinical practice, the research, the lived proximity was not the kind of thing that people in this space were going to take seriously. They were doing me a professional kindness by letting me know. They were also, and I want to be very clear about this, they were visibly uncomfortable with the way I occupy space. I am not a small presence. I am aware of that. I am direct, I am confident, I don't hedge my clinical position, and I don't apologize for taking up room in a conversation. There was a very specific, very recognizable energy in that meeting. And it was the energy of someone who had decided that a bold, assertive woman needed to be reminded of the rules. Now I have sat across from this energy before, and it has taken a long time to come to a place where I recognize I am not intimidating. You are just intimidated. Because I have seen this energy in conference rooms, in supervision, in the kind of professional interactions where someone smiles while they're diminishing you and expects you to smile back and thank them for their time. I got to that point in the meeting where I just knew there was no version of this conversation in any world on any plane of existence that was going to go anywhere productive. And continuing to sit in it was costing me something I wasn't willing to spend. Shakespeare seriously knew what was up when he wrote the line discretion is a better part of valor. And I recognized that moment. When I chose to have Iron Star's program director step in to manage the remainder of the conversation, that was not retreat or an inability to handle it. That was a regulated, deliberate leadership decision made by someone who knew exactly what was happening. And I chose not to act from a flooded nervous system. I chose not to act from a place of defensiveness. And I chose to put the greater good of the organization and what its goals are ahead of any personal feelings I may have had about this individual and their interaction style. And honestly, I am not even a little bit sorry about it. I am wholly and completely unapologetic about the choice that I made. However, then I didn't record another episode of this podcast for two months. So I'm a therapist. I know what this is. Knowing when something is making you uncomfortable, knowing what something is doesn't make you immune to it. And I want to say that very clearly before I put the framework on it, because one of the most insidious features of this particular type of wound is that the people most equipped to name it are often the least able to believe it happened to them. What happened in that meeting was institutional betrayal. And I want to define that precisely because it tends to get really loosely used and the precision matters. So institutional betrayal, developed in the research of Jennifer Freud and extended through subsequent scholarship, is the harm that occurs when an institution or its representatives fail someone who depended on it. It requires a dependency relationship. You have to be in a position where you cannot simply disengage, where the institution holds something you need: your professional legitimacy, your access to the population you serve, the credibility that comes from being recognized by the structures that govern your field. I need that space. I need the legitimacy of that institutional relationship to do this work at scale with this population. The person I met with did not sit on the periphery of the field that I am trying to reach. They sit inside its infrastructure. That dependency was real. They sought me out. They established a context that looked like collaboration. They used the access I extended in good faith to deliver a message about my place. That's not a difference of opinion, and that's not a professional disagreement. That is a specific and deliberate kind of harm that uses the appearance of relationship to do damage that a stranger could not do nearly as effectively. This call came from inside the house. And here's the feature of institutional betrayal that explains the two months of silence. It does not make you angry enough to fight, not immediately. What it does first is make you doubt. It gets into the work itself. It seeps into the cracks. And it makes you look at the thing you built and wonder whether the person who just told you it wasn't good enough was right. Whether you missed something, whether the confidence you brought into that room was arrogance or ignorance rather than competence. Whether the boldness that made them uncomfortable was actually a liability. Whether you should have been smaller, more deferential, folded yourself up and shoved yourself in the box a little bit tighter, more willing to let them set the terms. That doubt is not weakness. It is a completely predictable response to having your professional safety violated by someone who had the institutional standing to make the violation land. Your nervous system is doing exactly what it is designed to do, updating its threat assessment based on evidence. And the evidence said this space is not safe. The creative work stopped because the creative work required a kind of openness and exposure that doesn't feel survivable when the evidence says the space is not safe. That's not a block, that is a wound response. And there is a meaningful clinical difference between the two. What was communicated to me in that meeting, not in words, because people like this rarely use words when they can use tone and credential and institutional weight, was that I'm just a girl. A therapist playing in a space that belongs to people with the right letters, the right programs, the right institutional affiliations. Someone who should be grateful for the meeting, who should take the feedback and moderate her ambitions accordingly, who should understand that the hierarchy of this particular professional space has already been determined. And her job is to fit inside it rather than challenge its edges. And the reason that I want to talk about gender directly is because I think it's important and because it gets minimized in professional post-mortems like this one. The discomfort with my directness and confidence was not incidental to the interaction. It was load-bearing. I am confident enough in this read after over a decade of clinical practice and enough rooms to know what that particular energy feels like, to name it without hedging. Women in clinical and research spaces are granted authority on a conditional basis by the men that feel threatened. Not every one of them. I want to make that really clear. This is not man hating, this is not man bashing. I, for the most part, have the most amazing group of men who admire this work and they cheer me on. And my partner at Iron Star is a man. So absolutely, this is not about bashing men, but men will be the first ones to step up and tell me I don't belong here. The condition is legibility. Stay within the established framework. Use the approved language, defer to the credentialed hierarchy, build things that fit neatly inside what already exists. When you do something new, when you build a framework that doesn't fit, when you present it with the confidence of someone who's done the work and knows it, you become illegible. And illegibility in a space run by people who need to be the most credentialed person in the room reads as a threat. So after the meeting, they sent me research from their own institution, which, if you read it with any clinical literacy at all, is a direct citation for the framework they had just told me nobody was going to be interested in. The data identified exactly the organizational conditions that our framework addresses. They sent me the evidence that we were right. Apparently, without noticing that's what they did. I'm just a girl standing in front of a data set, asking it to confirm what she already knew. I told you at the beginning I was not going to name this individual, and I want to explain why more fully, because I think the reasoning is clinically important and not just strategically convenient. People who operate the way this person operated in that meeting, who use institutional standing and professional framing to diminish and control, are sustained by the impact of the hit. Naming them gives them a role in this story they haven't earned and they don't deserve. They're not the protagonist of this episode. They're not even the antagonist. They're the mechanism. They are the thing that created the wound. The wound and what it did and what it took to come back from it, that is the story. Maybe not with someone from a professional organization or a state-level body. Maybe with a supervisor who reframed your clinical instinct as inexperience. Maybe with a colleague who used a conference to establish dominance over a framework you've spent years building. Maybe it was with a journal reviewer who dismissed your methodology without engaging with your argument. Or it could be a chief who smiled while they told you that the concern you raised was noted. Maybe you went quiet afterward. Maybe the work slowed or stopped, or you started hedging in your writing, softening your presentation, making yourself smaller in the rooms where you used to take up exactly the right amount of space. Maybe you told yourself it was a creative block or burnout or just a busy season. Because naming it as a wound response to institutional betrayal requires you to acknowledge that the institution betrayed you. And that acknowledgement is its own kind of hard. Naming that relational wound, knowing that it needs repair, that you will probably never get it from the person who was the mechanism, that's hard. So silence isn't a character flaw, it is absolutely a wound response. Wounds heal differently than blocks because they require acknowledgement of what happened, not to the person who caused it necessarily, but to yourself and to the people who need to hear that this happens, that it lands the way it lands, and that coming back from it is not a sign of weakness. It is a sign of the kind of committed, stubborn, relentless commitment to the work that no person with an institutional title gets to take away from you. They did not get to take it from me. Two months is what it cost. That's what I'm willing to give, and not one day more. So if you had your version of that meeting, and I'm gonna take a guess that most of you listening here have, I'm gonna ask you to sit with a few things. The doubt that followed was not evidence that they were right, it was evidence that the wound landed. Those are not the same thing. The silence that followed wasn't failure. It was your nervous system doing its job, protecting you from further exposure in a space that had just demonstrated it was not safe. You do not owe anyone a performance of resilience over a wound that has not been treated. And the work, the thing they told you nobody would be interested in, the framework they measured against their credential and found lacking, the research they dismissed with the confidence of someone who had never actually engaged with it, the work is still there. It didn't become less true because someone with institutional standing couldn't see it. Data does not require the approval of the person who collected it to mean what it means. Now, I'm just a girl who has spent over a decade building something real, who walked out of a meeting that tried to tell her otherwise, who went quiet for two months, and now who is back? I'm Nikki Hansler Gordon and this is structure and scars. Remember to make your healing as loud as the hell you went through to get those scars. Thanks for being here. We'll see you next time.