They Believed Me. They Did Nothing. (Part 2) — When the Systems Meant to Help You Serve the Abuser

This is Part 2. If you haven't listened to Part 1, start there — though this episode can also stand on its own. In the first episode, Amy Prieb walked through four moments of disclosure that were met with silence, redirection, and institutional failure. In this episode, she continues — and the stakes get higher, because the people failing her are no longer just family friends and boyfriends. They are licensed professionals, academic institutions, and the systems explicitly designed to help. She describes a family therapy session in which her therapist — a credentialed professional from her own church community — instructed her to narrate every sexual act her father had ever committed against her body, in a room that contained her abuser. When she refused, the therapist offered the only alternative he could think of: her father would narrate it instead. She walked out. She was the only person in that room who understood what was actually happening. She describes arriving in graduate school in her mid-thirties — training to become a therapist herself, in a Christian seminary — answering a direct question honestly in a human sexuality class, and being pulled aside afterward by a beloved mentor who told her the setting was inappropriate. And then she asks the question that sits at the center of this entire conversation: Then where the hell is the setting? Not at eleven. Not at fifteen. Not at sixteen. Not with CPS. Not in the therapy room. Not in graduate school. The cumulative answer to "not here, not now, not like this" is, and always was, never. This episode connects every one of those moments to the Jeffrey Epstein files — to the DOJ releasing survivors' names while redacting perpetrators', to the millions of documents still withheld, to the survivors who have been fighting for decades to be heard by systems that were never built for them. And it ends with Amy speaking directly — to the children still in those houses, to the adults who are right now deciding whose side they're on, and to every institution that has ever dressed up self-protection as procedural caution. This is not a sad story. This is an angry one. The anger is the point. And the anger is what healing actually looks like.   Content warning: This episode contains detailed discussion of childhood sexual abuse, therapeutic malpractice, institutional betrayal, religious coercion, and the Epstein investigation. It does not contain graphic descriptions of abuse. If you or someone you know has experienced sexual abuse, RAINN's National Sexual Assault Hotline is available 24/7: 1-800-656-4673 or rainn.org   amyprieb.com insta: @amypriebtherapy facebook: amy prieb lmft