The legal system is designed to establish facts. Dates. Filings. Orders. Timelines. That work matters. But too often, the process goes further than fact-finding and slips into something more corrosive: the dismissal of lived experience because it cannot be perfectly documented.
And sadly, none of this harm is accidental. It is structural. But we can and should change that.The legal system must respect lived experience, including the harm it causes.
Emotional truth and factual truth are different kinds of truth
Factual truth concerns external events. What happened. What was said. What was filed. What was ordered.
Emotional truth concerns a person’s internal reality. Fear. Confusion. Powerlessness. Humiliation. Relief. Grief. Dread. It reflects how an experience was processed in someone’s body and mind, how meaning formed, how memory settled. How you think and feel about a situation that happened to you.
A person can be truthful in both registers at once. A person can also be emotionally truthful even when factual recall is fragmented, nonlinear, or incomplete. To accuse someone of “not being scared” when being threatened, or claiming to know how they felt, is emotionally abusive and intellectually dishonest.
The legal system frequently collapses these categories and survivors pay the cost.
Trauma does not store itself like evidence
Trauma does not encode memory as a clean transcript. It fragments. It prioritizes survival over sequencing. It stores threat, bodily response, and emotional intensity more reliably than precise dialogue or exact timelines.
This is well established. Yet in courtrooms, administrative proceedings, civil litigation, and credibility assessments, survivors are routinely penalized for this reality.
If their timeline shifts, if memory is incomplete, or if narrative focuses on fear rather than chronology. Those features are treated as signs of deception rather than the symptoms of harm they really are.
Abuse survivors often speak in emotional truth because abuse is lived emotionally
Abuse is rarely experienced as a single discrete act. It is often experienced as a pattern. Survivors describe consistent patterns of PTSD:
- constant vigilance
- walking on eggshells
- fear without a single identifiable trigger
- unspoken threats
- control that accumulates rather than explodes
When survivors speak or write about these experiences, they are not fabricating events. They are describing how harm moved and operated in their lives. The legal system prefers discrete incidents. Abuse frequently exists as a sustained condition.
System misconduct creates survivors too
This analysis cannot stop at interpersonal harm. The legal system itself produces trauma. People and their loved ones are routinely traumatized by:
- retaliatory lawsuits
- abusive litigation tactics
- prolonged uncertainty
- coercive procedural pressure
- public humiliation through filings
- being disbelieved as a matter of routine
- being treated as expendable collateral rather than human
Moving through the legal system does not mean consent to harm.
Participation is not permission.
No one forfeits their right to safety, dignity, or psychological integrity because they filed a complaint, defended themselves, testified, appealed, or spoke publicly about abuse.
“You’re in the system” is not a waiver of humanity
There is a quiet but pervasive assumption embedded in legal culture: that distress is an acceptable byproduct of process.
It sounds like:
- “That’s just how litigation works.”
- “Court is stressful for everyone.”
- “You should have expected pushback.”
- “If you couldn’t handle this, you shouldn’t have spoken.”
This logic is not just dangerous; it’s a complete cop-out.
Stress is not the same as trauma. Accountability is not the same as retaliation. Procedure is not a license to inflict wounds.
A system designed to resolve disputes does not gain moral immunity to harm the people inside it.
System misconduct survivors experience harm differently
People harmed by institutions often describe:
- disorientation caused by shifting rules
- fear tied to power imbalance rather than physical threat
- anxiety triggered by notices, filings, or silence
- a sense of being pursued through procedure
- erosion of trust in reality itself
These are emotional truths. They matter even when every rule was technically followed. Compliance does not equal justice.
Memory divergence is not deception
Two people can experience the same event and carry different emotional truths.
One person may feel safe.
Another may feel terrified.
One may remember a hearing as routine.
Another may remember it as devastating.
Both can be telling the truth.
This is no different from siblings remembering the same childhood event differently. Difference does not equal deceit. It reflects the complexity of human perception, especially under stress or threat.
Narrative writing is not perjury
Memoir, advocacy writing, and personal narrative are not sworn testimony. They do not promise perfect timelines or verbatim dialogue. They promise honesty about experience.
Survivors, including those harmed by systems, often write to make sense of what happened. They compress time. They reconstruct moments. They focus on emotional meaning.
Treating this as fabrication is a category error. One that is increasingly weaponized to silence critics and punish people who speak from lived experience.
What a competent legal system would do differently
A system that respected emotional truth would:
- distinguish factual allegations from experiential descriptions
- stop treating emotional language as evidence of unreliability
- recognize trauma responses in both interpersonal and institutional harm
- reject the idea that process excuses injury
- refuse to equate subjective experience with falsehood
This does not weaken the law. It makes it far more accurate and equitable.
The bottom line
Emotional truth is not a lie. It is not exaggeration. It is not manipulation.
It is how people survive abuse, endure harmful systems, and how meaning is made when power is uneven and damage is real.
No one consents to being traumatized because they entered the legal system.
No one waives their humanity by participating in process.
A legal system that cannot tolerate someone’s emotional truth is not protecting justice.
It is only protecting itself.
