In her final quarter, a doctoral psychology intern was put out of her internship site for objecting to how her supervisor treated her. She had not been paid for her time there. Her university's advice, from the first complaint to the last, was to keep her head down.
The site marketed itself as the gold standard of training. This is what that standard looked like in practice, in the order it happened.
The Night the Lights Went Off
She lived an hour from the site. One day her electricity was shut off. She had been so busy finishing her supervisor's reports that she missed the bank deposit that would have kept it on.
She told her supervisor she needed to leave to deal with it. She was reprimanded. The reports, the supervisor said, were a simple copy-and-paste job.
(If they were that simple, they could have waited. Or the supervisor could have done them.)
Instead, the intern pulled her car over on the side of the road, ran her laptop off her phone's hotspot, and finished the reports before she was allowed to go home and get her family's lights back on.
"I'm the One Doing You a Favor"
On another day, the supervisor called her into the office to explain where she stood. They were not on the same level, the supervisor said. Not peers. Not colleagues. She was the intern.
The supervisor's name was on the business. If the intern didn't like how she was spoken to, she could leave. The supervisor didn't need her, or any intern, to run it.
"I'm the one doing you a favor."
Then, apparently as supporting evidence, the supervisor mentioned that she had told her own sister the same thing, right after her sister told her that her emails gave her PTSD.
The intern took this to her second supervisor. The response: "Yeah, I hate that hierarchy stuff."
Ma'am. You are the hierarchy.
"Sites Are Limited"
Her university's guidance did not change: keep your head down, ride it out, be quiet, do what she wants. Sites are limited.
Nobody offered to speak with the supervisor. Nobody suggested the supervision itself might need correcting. The plan, as far as anyone at the university was concerned, was for the intern to absorb it.
The Final Quarter
By her last quarter, the comments, the demands, and the reminders of the "favor" had built to the point where she said something directly. The supervisor put her out of her final internship quarter at that site.
She did not, and does not, treat that as a failure. She treats it as a receipt.
Since then, the Office for Civil Rights has contacted her about mediation on her complaint involving her university. (A mediation inquiry is not a finding that anything happened. It is, however, the first time in a year that anyone with authority treated the complaint as worth a response.) Because she was never paid, she has also filed a wage claim with the Texas Workforce Commission for what she maintains she is owed. She has been told an investigation is coming.
She Has Seen Accountability Work
This is not the first time someone decided who she was before she walked into the room.
Before psychology, she was a lieutenant in corrections. The officer who handled use-of-force reporting was convinced the lieutenant wanted her job. (She did not.) When a new warden arrived, that officer introduced the lieutenant to him with a use-of-force file that wasn't hers. She had been off that duty for three months.
The warden said he would write her a counseling. She said she disagreed. He said fine, he'd write her up instead. She said okay and left.
Not long after, the warden called her captain's office, heard her voice in the background, and ordered them both upstairs. He was furious. He ripped off his tie, threw it on the floor, let the captain in, and shut the door in her face.
Behind that door, her captain, the Billy Bob Thornton of Gatesville, Texas, set him straight. The assistant warden and the head warden did the same. The warden came out and apologized: he had judged her on what other people told him.
He was gone in less than 15 days.
That is what it looks like when an institution decides to act. One prison system managed it in two weeks. Her university has had a year.
Why She's Speaking Now
She knew what had happened the day it happened. She has never struggled to name mistreatment, and she never once thought she was the problem. What took a year was deciding what to do about it.
Then other students started describing the same treatment. In the most recent account, the institution's energy went into protecting a supervisor who, according to what was shared, had stayed silent. Sitting in an office, hearing that story, she said it out loud:
It shouldn't take more than one student to be believed.
If the first student is believed, the second and third don't have to go through it.
Reviewer Comments
1. "Keep your head down" is not a safety plan.
Edmondson (1999) found that psychological safety, a shared belief that it's safe to speak up, is what makes people ask questions, admit mistakes, and raise concerns. In doctoral training, the person you'd be raising concerns about controls your hours, your evaluations, your letters, and your path to graduation. Telling a trainee to stay quiet under those conditions protects the system, not the trainee.
2. "You're the problem" is a known tactic.
Freyd (1997) named it DARVO: Deny, Attack, and Reverse Victim and Offender. Harsey, Zurbriggen, and Freyd (2017) found that people who confronted wrongdoing and got a DARVO response ended up blaming themselves more. That's the point of it. It didn't work here.
3. This is not one bad site.
In a study of 363 mental health supervisees, Ellis et al. (2014) found that 93% were currently receiving inadequate supervision, and more than a third reported supervision that was harmful. At that rate, this is a training-system problem.
4. Silence is not agreement.
Research on employee silence (Kish-Gephart et al., 2009; Morrison, 2014, 2023) shows people stay quiet because they expect nothing to change, fear retaliation, are protecting careers they've spent years building, or can't afford the fallout. Silence under those conditions is a calculation, not consent.
5. The institution made it worse.
Smith and Freyd (2014) call it institutional betrayal: when an institution people depend on fails to prevent harm or mishandles a report. "Ride it out" and "sites are limited" protect the person with power. That is a second injury.
6. Supervision is not a favor.
The American Psychological Association's (2015) supervision guidelines spell out what the role requires: competence, a real professional relationship, teaching, fair evaluation, and ethical practice. Unpaid labor and "I hate that hierarchy stuff" are not on the list. The power gap is built into the relationship, which is exactly why the ethical bar is higher.
Reject. The "gold standard" does not meet the standard. Resubmit only after believing the first student, investigating, and remembering who took the oath.
The Students Who Can't Push Back
She had the fight to push through this. Plenty of students don't. They're already financially drained, years and thousands of dollars into training, with no cushion for a lost placement or a hostile supervisor. For them, the same treatment can take more than they can come back from.
The ask is small. Believe the first student enough to investigate. Not to convict anyone on the spot; due process matters. Investigate.
On the side of that road, she was made to decide what came first: her family or her supervisor's reports. Every training program faces the same choice when a student reports harm. Protect the student, or protect the supervisor.
If you're a trainee and any of this sounds familiar: you are not the problem, and you are not the only one. She spoke up for you, and she will keep doing it. So will we.
The audacity isn't that someone finally spoke up. The audacity is expecting her to stay quiet.Going through this at your training site? Here's where to get help →
References
- American Psychological Association. (2015). Guidelines for clinical supervision in health service psychology. American Psychologist, 70(1), 33–46. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0038112
- Edmondson, A. (1999). Psychological safety and learning behavior in work teams. Administrative Science Quarterly, 44(2), 350–383. https://doi.org/10.2307/2666999
- Ellis, M. V., Berger, L., Hanus, A. E., Ayala, E. E., Swords, B. A., & Siembor, M. (2014). Inadequate and harmful clinical supervision: Testing a revised framework and assessing occurrence. The Counseling Psychologist, 42(4), 434–472.
- Freyd, J. J. (1997). Violations of power, adaptive blindness, and betrayal trauma theory. Feminism & Psychology, 7(1), 22–32.
- Harsey, S. J., Zurbriggen, E. L., & Freyd, J. J. (2017). Perpetrator responses to victim confrontation: DARVO and victim self-blame. Journal of Aggression, Maltreatment & Trauma, 26(6), 644–663.
- Kish-Gephart, J. J., Detert, J. R., Treviño, L. K., & Edmondson, A. C. (2009). Silenced by fear: The nature, sources, and consequences of fear at work. Research in Organizational Behavior, 29, 163–193. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.riob.2009.07.002
- Morrison, E. W. (2014). Employee voice and silence. Annual Review of Organizational Psychology and Organizational Behavior, 1, 173–197. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-orgpsych-031413-091328
- Morrison, E. W. (2023). Employee voice and silence: Taking stock a decade later. Annual Review of Organizational Psychology and Organizational Behavior, 10, 79–107. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-orgpsych-120920-054654
- Smith, C. P., & Freyd, J. J. (2014). Institutional betrayal. American Psychologist, 69(6), 575–587.
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