Framing Truth as Disloyalty

Language that treats truth-telling as betrayal rather than integrity

The fifth spoke in the Wheel of Reality-Bending Phrases captures what I think may be one of the most common experiences of the truth-teller who is viewed as a threat. Rather than cherishing the truth-teller, as Dr. Jennifer Freyd recommends when she writes, “those who raise uncomfortable truths are potentially the best friends of an institution,” the truth-teller is viewed and treated as the problem.

Gaslight tells the story of a husband who tries to control his wife, Paula, by convincing her she is going “insane.” In one scene, Paula experiences a moment of awareness as she tries to speak about what she is experiencing inside the house, experiences engineered by her manipulative husband. She attempts to make sense of these things by talking to her husband, hoping he will help her understand what is happening, but gradually the conversation changes course. And as is the case in so many abusive relationships, her concern itself becomes the concern.

It’s that sinking moment where the person experiencing harm realizes they have become the main source of concern instead of being treated as a witness to a harmful reality. He uses her emotional distress against her to suggest that she cannot be trusted to interpret reality accurately. And the more she insists that something is wrong, the more her insistence is used as evidence that something is wrong with her. Over time, the issue is no longer whether the gaslights are dimming or objects are disappearing, but whether she is “insane.”

In many coercive systems, a similar bending of reality unfolds when truth threatens power. The discussion slowly rotates away from the truth itself and toward the attributes and behaviors of the person speaking it.

And once that shift occurs, reality begins turning upside down.

Imagine a landscape of two paths: a high road that is more difficult to navigate and takes longer to travel, and a low road that is easier, shorter, and more convenient.

Truth-telling in a landscape of coercive power is like taking a difficult high road that sometimes requires confronting deceptive and abusive people who are traveling the low road of truth-repelling. One of the tactics used by deceptive people and institutions when threatened by the truth is to turn that landscape upside-down and give others the impression that the truth-tellers are the ones who are choosing the easy low road of pursuing revenge, rejecting reconciliation, spreading gossip, harboring bitterness, demonstrating hate, and promoting division, while they are the ones who have taken a difficult high road of pursuing peace, inviting reconciliation, letting go of the past, demonstrating love, and promoting unity.

When truth-telling is framed as the primary concern, those who are harmed are forced into an impossible position. To remain faithful to what they know is real is to risk being cast as unfaithful to the community they once trusted. And so the cost of telling the truth is relational, spiritual, and sometimes vocational, exile. I’ve experienced and witnessed countless examples of people who cared so much about their community that they felt compelled to speak up for the good of that community, only to, in the end, be shunned by that community.

How does that happen? One way I’ve come to imagine this process is to think of a map of the high road and low road and how the gaslighter begins to slowly rotate that map one turn at a time.

Photo by Trevin Rudy on Unsplash

For example, someone raises a question about a pattern of manipulation, coercion, dishonesty, or harm, believing others will want to understand what happened and respond with integrity. The expectation is often simple and sincere: if something damaging is occurring, surely people will want to face it honestly and protect those affected by it.

But then the map begins to turn. At first, only slightly.

The discussion widens just enough to include concerns about tone, process, timing, or relational impact. Were the concerns raised in the right way? Was the conversation handled in a way that demonstrated trust in leadership? Could this create confusion or unnecessary disruption? The original issue still appears present, but it is no longer standing alone at the center of the discussion.

Then the map turns again.

Attention begins drifting toward the effect speaking about the concern may have on the institution, the leadership, or the community’s sense of stability. The concern is no longer evaluated solely by whether it is true, but by what consequences might follow if it continues being voiced. Leadership may begin warning about division, gossip, breakdowns in trust, bitterness, and unforgiving hearts. What once sounded like genuine concern for what was shared now starts sounding like a warning against proceeding with sharing.

Then comes another turn.

The person raising the concern slowly becomes inseparable from the disruption associated with it. Their motives begin attracting scrutiny. Their emotional and spiritual state becomes subject to diagnosis. Their past relationships, frustrations, tone, personality, timing, and perceived deficiencies move quietly toward the center of attention. The issue itself has not necessarily been settled, but it has become increasingly difficult to discuss the issue apart from the supposed problems of the person raising it.

And then, eventually, the map completes its rotation.

The original concern has nearly disappeared from view altogether. The truth-teller has now become the primary subject of concern. The person who spoke out is no longer interpreted primarily as someone attempting to protect others, but as someone threatening peace, damaging trust, creating division, attacking leadership, or destabilizing the mission. And armed with this narrative, those in power can convince their followers to organize around protecting itself from the discomfort created by exposure rather than from the harm that exposure originally named.

What makes this rotation so difficult to detect and resist is that each turn of the map may appear reasonable enough on its own, or happen so subtly that it is not easily named as a bending of reality. Yet by the end, the landscape has rotated so completely that loyalty to truth now appears to be disloyalty to the community itself. The exposure of harm is treated as more dangerous than the harm itself. Those who took the high road of truth-telling, the best friends of the community, are now seen and treated as enemies on the low road intent on destroying something good.

Phrases That Frame Truth as Disloyalty

Once the map has begun to rotate, language itself starts helping stabilize the new orientation. Certain phrases begin appearing with increasing frequency, not necessarily to examine the truth more carefully, but to manage the disruption created by its exposure. These phrases often sound spiritual, relationally mature, and deeply concerned with peace. They tend to appeal to unity, humility, grace, reconciliation, and trust. Yet within coercive systems, they can quietly redirect attention away from the harm being named and toward the supposed danger of continuing to name it.

If you’ve walked this path then you may have experienced these kinds of phrases. Perhaps you raised concerns about the way a vulnerable person was treated, believing those in authority will want to understand what happened and protect others from similar harm. But before the concern itself is meaningfully examined, the conversation turns toward the effect your questions might have on “unity.” Somehow the status quo becomes that which needs protection, even if it rests on denial.

Or perhaps you expressed concern that certain patterns of harm are continuing unchecked, but are cautioned not to “give the Enemy a foothold” by continuing the conversation, as if the devil himself might be using you as a tool in his schemes. Somehow speaking up about injustice is what gives “the enemy a foothold,” rather than the unchecked injustice or abuse.

Another common phrase I’ve encountered, and one that hits hard, is some form of phrase suggesting you need to “check your own heart.” Somehow the focus gradually shifted away from the unresolved concerns toward your own emotional and spiritual posture. Maybe you are asked whether bitterness may be clouding your perspective or whether unresolved past hurt and trauma is affecting your judgment. The original issue recedes into obscurity while your interiority becomes the subject of investigation.

Then there are phrases like, “Why can’t you just let this go?” or “Continuing to speak about this is unhealthy'“ or “It’s time we all moved on.” These phrases tend to frame continued concern as stubbornness rather than persistence in pursuit of repair. The deeper implication is that peace is available if only you would stop insisting on truth.

Or maybe you’ve experienced that turn in which the issue becomes your lack of trust in leadership, where questioning decisions is made into a problem of submission rather than discernment. Instead of examining whether authority is being exercised with integrity, the conversation centers on whether you possess sufficient trust and humility.

Over time, phrases like these, when used to bend reality and hide the truth, produce a culture in which loyalty to the system is equated with faithfulness, while loyalty to reality is equated with rebellion. Those who continue to speak are described as unsafe, divisive, or spiritually problematic. Their motives are questioned. Their tone is scrutinized. Their character is placed on trial, while the actions that prompted their concern fade into the background.

Casting Off Reflected Shame

One of the most harmful effects of this process is that shame becomes displaced. The burden does not remain with the one who abused power, concealed truth, or caused harm. Instead, it is quietly transferred onto the person who exposed it. When systems experience truth as a threat, they often respond by attempting to relocate the shame attached to it.

Those in power might see concerns as a threat to their own individual identities, identities rooted in the outward appearance of success and in the positive impressions others have formed of them. If a difficult truth has the potential to reflect shame onto that person, rather than glory, then that individual might choose to split the shame off as a threat and cast it away from them - often by casting it onto the very person perceived to be the threat.

I’ve found that inside the self-serving institution there are parts kept at a distance, parts made up of untold truths, of truths forgotten, ignored, and obscured. The truths were not told or really heard because they revealed the failure of a community or its leaders. These are the experiences of people who have been cut off from their community because they reported a trusted person who abused them, or dared to dissent in a place of coerced assent, or blew the whistle on cover-up and corruption.

In her book, The Country of the Pointed Firs, Sarah Orne Jewett describes life along the Maine coast in 1896. In one idyllic scene, the narrator of the book tells of a sailing trip during which she finds herself among some unfamiliar islands, and in a moment of meditation there is this line that has always stuck with me:

In the life of each of us . . . there is a place remote and islanded, and given to endless regret or secret happiness;

How do we get to the point, as individuals or as institutions, where the remote and islanded places are given to endless regret instead of a quiet inner happiness? I think our response to failure has something to do with it. Or to be more precise, our response to the shame we believe the failure reflects. We cut off the parts that reflect shame and bask in the parts that reflect glory — and we keep doing this until we are fragmented and scattered, like an archipelago of islands slowly drifting apart from each other.

As I work with and study institutional responses to abuse, it seems so much hinges on how the institution relates to success and failure. When they are led by self-serving individuals, and when the system itself is self-serving, identities become linked with shows of success, and whatever might come along that speaks of failure is seen as an identity threat. And so a system can protect itself the way threatened identities often do: by distancing itself from whatever reflects shame and drawing closer to whatever reflects glory.

When an institution cuts itself off from every difficult truth in order to preserve its reputation, power, and possessions, it creates a cycle of cover-up: as the truths stack up, the threat to the institution grows, and along with it the incentive to keep such truths at a distance. It must continue to suppress truth because acknowledging it would require revisiting the very places the institution has worked hardest to keep remote and islanded. The more one casts away reflected shame, the more necessary it becomes to keep casting.

Casting away reflected shame is accomplished, in part, by two tactics that I’ll refer to as tarnishing and humiliating. Tarnishing belittles and devalues the positive attributes of the truth-teller in order to make them appear worse than they really are. “They are not as well-meaning as they seem. We need to be careful or they’ll take us all down with their story-telling.”

Humiliation reveals to others, actual, fabricated or exaggerated perceived weaknesses about a person that they believe will make that individual look bad in the eyes of others. For example, they might reveal past trauma a truth-teller has suffered in order to give others a reason to distrust them, suggesting they haven’t yet healed, are overly sensitive, easily triggered, and “insane.”

Once shame has been displaced onto the truth-teller, the final rotation becomes possible. The institution no longer merely denies wrongdoing, but begins portraying itself as the injured party and the one raising concerns as the true source of harm. Psychologists sometimes refer to this pattern as DARVO: deny, attack, and reverse victim and offender. The map rotates until the person seeking accountability is recast as the aggressor, while the system protecting itself assumes the moral position of the wounded.

This is one of the most painful and disorienting experiences of speaking truth to abusive power. You begin with a concern for safety, and hope those in authority will act to protect, but you are left with a reality that has been so bent you can hardly recognize what’s true anymore, and wonder how it’s possible you are the one now being cast as the wrongdoer.

Returning Shame to Its Rightful Place

Healthy repair requires shame being returned to its rightful place. Not shame in the sense of human worthlessness or humiliation, but in the moral sense: the honest acknowledgment that responsibility for wrongdoing belongs to the one who committed or enabled it. Repair begins when individuals and institutions stop asking wounded people to carry the emotional and reputational burden of truths they did not create.

This requires a sincere turn in a different direction: a turn toward the high road of truth-telling. This kind of authentic repentance is far more costly than image management because it requires relinquishing the desperate need to appear righteous, competent, unified, or spiritually superior. It requires institutions to stop treating truth as a threat to survive and begin treating it as a reality to face.

The irony, of course, is that systems built on self-protection often fear this surrender because they believe acknowledging failure will destroy them. Yet the refusal to acknowledge truth is usually what corrodes them most deeply. Communities sacrifice integrity when preserving the appearance of innocence becomes more important than telling the truth about harm.

Real repair is made possible when the map is turned right-side up again: when those who have bent reality are willing to say, in effect, “We will claim the shame we’ve asked you to carry but was always ours to begin with, and we will surrender the legitimacy we tried to claim but was always yours to begin with.” Real repair is made possible when truth is no longer treated as betrayal, when those who spoke honestly are no longer made to carry the burden of institutional shame, and when responsibility finally rests where it always belonged.

A Closing Note

All of these varied attacks on the credibility of the truth-tellers generates a dizzying rotating of the map that can confuse and disorient. Truth-tellers can, with the support of others, try to keep their footing while the ground spins so they do not lose sight of the distinguishing factor: truth. Those on the high road will consistently invite the discovery of truth while those on the low road will consistently repel and confuse it.

For those of you who have spoken truth only to be stigmatized and discredited by those around you, know that you have been a light in a deep darkness, a voice in a deafening silence, a stream in a dry desert, a path in a dense forest, a bridge across broken ground. You have been shunned when you should have been cherished. May you find places where you thrive.