Dictionary

A community has developed its own language for its experience, and others refuse to use it.

Example: Autistic communities have built detailed language for masking, shutdown and autistic burnout. Professionals keep using older frameworks that do not fit.

Some accounts receive more credibility than the evidence supports. This often sits alongside a credibility deficit for others.

Example: Parents ask for adjustments, and a professional records this as the "parents' vision." The professional's wording becomes the official version, even though the parents said something different.

A response to being confronted about harm. The harm is denied, the person raising it is attacked, and the person who was questioned presents themselves as the victim.

Deny. The concern or the harm is rejected. "That is not what happened."

Attack. The focus moves to the person raising the concern. They are described as difficult, unreasonable, emotional or hostile.

Reverse Victim and Offender. The person or institution that was questioned presents itself as the one being harmed. The person who asked becomes responsible for the "breakdown in trust."

Example: A parent asks why an adjustment was refused. The school then talks about the parent's tone, the parent's "vision" or the parent's relationship with staff. The original question goes unanswered, and the family now has to defend itself.

Note: Disagreement, criticism or a defensive response does not establish DARVO on its own. The sequence and the evidence matter: what was said, what was documented, which explanations changed, and whether the original concern ever received a real answer.

Marginalised people are expected to keep explaining their own experience, often while it is still doubted.

Example: A family is asked again and again to prove their child's needs, and each explanation opens another debate.

A wrong done to someone in their capacity as a knower. The harm happens through how their knowledge, testimony or understanding of their own experience is received.

"Epistemic" relates to knowledge: how we know things, and who is recognised as someone who knows.

A sustained process that leads a person to doubt their own perception or memory.

Example: After being told repeatedly that "nobody else sees a problem," a parent begins to wonder whether they have misunderstood their own child.

A person lacks shared language to make sense of their experience, because people like them were left out of shaping that language.

Example: A child experiences shutdown or sensory overload, and the only word available to them is "naughty," because that is the word the adults around them use.

The person is never asked. Nobody expects their account to be worth hearing, so nobody invites it.

Example: A student gets detention for arriving without the correct pencils, and nobody asks why the pencils are missing.

A person's account gets less credibility because of prejudice about who they are.

Example: A teenage girl needs more than four minutes for a toilet break because she is menstruating, and she receives detention. Her knowledge of her own body counts for less than a rule.

The speaker isn't recognised as a knower, so their words have no effect.

Example: A parent raises the same concern in three meetings, and it appears in none of the minutes.

A person shortens, softens or withholds their own account because they expect it to be misunderstood or used against them.

Example: A teacher can see that a student needs an adjustment but stops raising it, because questioning the policy may carry consequences for their own position.

People in more powerful positions choose not to learn the concepts that marginalised people use.

Example: A family presents newer autism research, such as the double empathy problem, and the response is "we work with our own framework."

Understanding why someone behaves coercively keeps them accountable for the consequences. A clearer map of what is producing a behaviour makes it possible to aim expectations, boundaries and accountability at the right layer.

Behaviour is often read as motivation. Permission Architecture proposes that behaviour may also be permitted, inhibited, shaped, released or blocked. When a person says "I couldn't" and the listener hears "I wouldn't," the account loses credibility because of the listener's model of behaviour.

Example: A girl stays home the day after detention for a longer toilet break. That may be read as refusal. It may also be a system that no longer permits school as a safe place.

A difficulty with written expression, not with intelligence, understanding or the complexity of thought.

Dysgraphia can affect handwriting, spelling and the speed of writing without diminishing a person's ability to think deeply, recognise patterns, question or reason.

Writing slowly does not mean thinking slowly. Just as speaking fast and loud does not mean being more intelligent.

Confidence and fluency can create the appearance of expertise, but what knowledge has been selectively brought together? What has been overlooked? And is the person willing to be questioned?

An expert who cannot be questioned may be protecting a framework they have stopped learning from.

Intelligence is not measured by the speed of expression, but nor should expertise be measured by the confidence with which it is delivered.

The ability to question and remain open to being questioned matters more than the performance of knowing.

Writing slowly does not mean thinking slowly.

WSNE gives lived experience a defined place, through testimonial recognition and The Sessions, in generating questions and testing professional interpretations.

The WSNE accountability charter asks of every framework, its own included:

• Experience. How were the observations and account of the affected person received and evaluated?
• Questioning. How can the interpretation be challenged, and who must respond?
• Correction. What would justify changing the interpretation or decision?

The right to question must carry the same legitimacy as the authority to explain.

The moment accountability is blocked and protection of self places the burden on another person.

WSNE proposes this as one possible biological route into DARVO. Deny blocks accountability. Attack and Reverse move the cost onto the person who raised the concern.

Pressure applied where another person's routes are already narrow.

Example: Neurodivergent students and their families may already be working with narrowed routes because of sensory load, burnout or previous experiences of not being believed. Pressure applied at that point can cost them more.

When questioning a framework would mean questioning someone's own understanding, expertise or position, the question itself can be registered as a threat. Protection of self extends to the framework.

Example: Newer autism research is presented, and the response is "we work with our own framework." The research is treated as a challenge to the professional before it is treated as information.

The fear of being wrongly known: being held inside a false version of yourself in someone else's mind.

This describes what testimonial injustice may feel like from the inside. A parent recorded as "difficult," or a family recorded as having a "vision," is now held in a version of themselves they never presented.

The listener's own system replaces what is arriving with a predicted story, and the routes to correction close. The words arrived, and the architecture replaced them before they became understanding.

This offers a possible mechanism for testimonial injustice. The listener may sincerely believe they heard something the speaker never said.

Example: Parents ask for adjustments. The professional records this as the "parents' vision." The parents' words arrived, and a predicted story took their place.

Receiving an account as evidence, then investigating it.

Testimonial recognition is the response to testimonial injustice. People are recognised as knowers of their own lives. Every account is received with full weight, then investigated with care. That includes accounts from students, parents, teachers, professionals and people who disagree.

Core principles

• An account is evidence before it is an interpretation.
• The person's own words are recorded in their own words.
• Documented incidents, first-hand experiences, different interpretations and allegations still needing checking are kept separate.
• A conscious explanation is one source of information among several, alongside biological permission.
• The same recognition applies to accounts that challenge our own work.

In WSNE: Testimonial recognition gives lived experience a defined place in generating research questions and in testing whether a professional interpretation fits the person it is applied to. It is built into the WSNE accountability charter: How were the observations and account of the affected person received and evaluated?

In practice: The Sessions is where testimonial recognition is carried out, through conversations, interviews and personal stories, shared named or anonymously with informed permission.

Example: Parents ask for adjustments. With testimonial recognition, the record says "adjustments requested," in the parents' own words. Their request is then examined on its merits.

Your stories become education.

An inward architecture and an outward architecture locked together. One person's open shame route becomes another person's escape route.

DARVO may land hardest in exactly this pairing: an institution whose protection runs outward, and a family or student whose protection runs inward.

When failure feels close, the fastest route left open can be turning against the self: sorry before knowing what was done, blame accepted before the facts are clear.

This may help explain why the Reverse stage of DARVO can work. A person whose shame route is already open may accept the role of offender they have been handed.

A question that formed in front of a professional and closed before it was spoken.

The Striatic Veto proposes that inhibition may come before conscious explanation. This gives testimonial smothering a possible biological side: a person may stop speaking before they have decided not to speak.

Example: A student who has learned that asking leads to detention stops asking. A teacher who has seen colleagues questioned stops raising concerns.

A framework decides in advance which accounts are believable.

Testimonial injustice usually describes prejudice about a person. Theoretical prejudice is prejudice built into a framework. When it is applied, it lowers credibility automatically, before the person has spoken.

Example: A Theory of Mind framework assumes autistic people have a deficit in understanding minds. An autistic student's account of their own experience is then read as a symptom.