Some doors don’t open. Others are just part of the trap.
Today, I address other women who, like me, have at some point needed to seek help and guidance while facing situations of risk, violence, or any kind of disaster. Friend, open your eyes: there are professionals who live off others' suffering as if it were a fixed income. They disguise it as vocation and cynically dress it in empathy, but what they actually do is settle into your pain and live off it—and off you. They don't come to resolve anything. They come to stay.
In particularly delicate contexts—such as the so-called "gender violence" processes, contentious separations, custody disputes, or institutional violence—these profiles abound. They often present themselves as therapists, psychologists, lawyers, or mediators, but stay alert, as they can take other forms.
They have a great talent for appearing before you as allies, but they operate as managers of your despair. I acknowledge that some genuinely don't know what to do: they simply listen to you describe a situation they professionally lack the knowledge or capacity to resolve. However, they will never admit this, because they need to put bread on their table. Far from helping you by confessing their ignorance and giving you the chance to find someone better, they drag you down further, because their strategies don't work, and their "professional advice" will lead you to disaster.
Others (the fewer) simply have no interest in or desire for you to get out of the problem. Because if they solve it, they lose a client. I couldn't tell you which is worse: the one who can't help you or the one who doesn't want to because a long process means a steady drip of money, and that's what they live on. Practically speaking, both are disastrous.
This is not a metaphor. It's an industry. And it operates with logic similar to that of big pharmaceutical companies: they're not interested in curing you; they're interested in treating you. The cure is the end of the business. Indefinite treatment is the profitable model.
For years, we've debated—in barbecues with friends, over coffee chats—that pharmaceutical companies, apparently, don't aim to eliminate diseases but to make them chronic. That investment in research is more directed at alleviating symptoms than eradicating causes. That curing isn't profitable. And in the offices of many "support" professionals, we can bet they face the same dilemma.
They act perversely. They explain in detail everything that's happening to you. They have technical vocabulary for each stage of your downfall. They explain the effects, the causes, the dynamics. They name each of your fears and even catalog the violences you've suffered or are suffering with scientific and bombastic names. But they don't bring solutions. They don't show exits. There's no plan. Just more analysis, more sessions, more reports. More time and more money.
If you go to a doctor, you expect them to tell you what's wrong, yes, but also what you can do to get better or not die. If you go to a dentist, you don't expect a class on cavities or who discovered orthodontics; you want to know how much a filling or a root canal costs and whether there's a solution or extraction is needed. If your house is sinking or leaking, you don't need a treatise on geology or on the big mistakes you made choosing this or that engineer; you need to know if the foundation can be reinforced and how much it costs. In other words, a professional and objective strategy to resolve what's worrying you.
This is the same. Victims don't want trauma pedagogy or to read books about what's leaving them impoverished and stressed, fearful or isolated. They want a winning strategy. And they can't find it.
And the thing is, many times, the very structure of these professional relationships is another form of abuse. A covert, validated, even prestigious abuse. An abuse that hides behind reports, sessions, diagnostic labels, and symbolic complicity. But abuse, nonetheless. An abuse yet to be named, by the way.
The big problem is that these intermediaries of pain don't just steal your money: they steal your time, hope, and energy. They make you think that what's happening to you is so complex, so specific, and so delicate that only they can explain it to you. But they don't resolve it. Never. Or, being a bit condescending... almost never.
The question is uncomfortable but inevitable: what will they live on if you heal? What will they live on if your child's custody is resolved in three days simply by respecting the child's wishes?
I’ve encountered silences that truly accompany, and discourses that only numb. We are surrounded by the latter. People who, when you come to them with your life falling apart, recommend reading their books on the subject. Or invite you to attend their talks about the very drama you’re living.
It’s time to identify those who are not working for your escape, but for their own permanence. Because a victim doesn’t need an interpreter. She needs a key.
And these people don’t even know where the door is.
Isabel Salas
