People like to pretend “professional distance” is a moral virtue.

As if you can stand in a room where power is misused, where stories are edited to protect the adult, where consequences fall predictably on the same bodies—and remain untouched by it. As if neutrality is a clean state. As if your history doesn’t sit in your nervous system like a second set of eyes.

But some of us don’t enter this work as blank slates.

Some of us arrive with receipts.

I can do the job. I can hold a client’s account without swallowing it whole. I can track behaviour without falling in love with explanations. I can observe, document, and refer without turning my empathy into a private rescue mission.

But I cannot pretend I don’t recognise what I’m seeing.

Because the workplace version of harm is rarely new. It’s simply better lit.

“Stay Unbiased” Is Not the Same as “Stay Unmoved”

Bias is usually framed as a failure: contamination. An unprofessional tilt.

But the bias I have to manage isn’t ideological. It’s experiential.

It’s the pull toward the delinquent and the victim because I have been both—at different times, sometimes in the same season. The way one person can carry culpability and coercion in the same body. The way a file can read “non-compliant” while the reality reads “exhausted, cornered, dissociated, ashamed.”

Unbiased doesn’t mean unaware.

It means I don’t let my recognition become a verdict.

It means I don’t punish people for reminding me of myself.

And I don’t romanticise them for it either.

The Fear Voice

There is a particular tone that enters a room when someone believes they’re about to lose their life again.

Not metaphorically. Practically.

When they think they’ll be taken. When they think the system has already decided. When they try to sound calm because sounding scared has never helped them. When they bargain with language because they don’t have leverage.

You can call it anxiety, escalation, dysregulation—whatever label helps the notes look tidy.

But I know what it is.

It’s the body remembering what happens when people with power are done listening.

And the part no one likes to say out loud is this: systems train that voice.

They create it. Then they penalise it.

Shame Isn’t a Symptom. It’s a Consequence.

Relapse is often treated like a moral rupture or a personal failure—especially in systems that need a simple storyline to justify their next decision.

But shame isn’t proof of bad character.

Shame is proof someone still believes they were meant to be better than this.

And shame is also what pushes people back into the behaviour that will briefly silence it.

I know that loop because I’ve lived versions of it: the self-disgust, the hiding, the urge to disappear so no one can look at you long enough to call you what you fear you are.

When a client collapses under the weight of their own mistake, the temptation is to meet them with consequence alone. Tighten the frame. Repeat the policy. Move the case along.

Sometimes consequence is necessary.

But consequence without comprehension produces repetition.

Because the point isn’t to punish the person until they become compliant.

The point is to identify what keeps making life unlivable until escape becomes rational.

“Adult Rights” as a Shield

There’s a line I keep hitting, both at work and in my own life history: the system’s obsession with adult rights as a substitute for child safety.

It’s not that rights don’t matter.

It’s that rights are too often used as a shield for adults who refuse responsibility.

So the conversation becomes procedural instead of moral. Legal instead of developmental. Fair on paper instead of safe in practice.

The child becomes a secondary stakeholder in their own life.

Their fear becomes “conflict.” Their withdrawal becomes “behaviour.” Their clarity becomes “coaching.” Their distress becomes “alienation.”

And the adults—especially the ones most skilled at presentation—are granted endless room to continue.

A child does not need perfect adults.

They need predictable care.

They need protection that is not negotiable. Not earned. Not dependent on whether the adults can be civil in a room.

When the system prioritises adult entitlement over child wellbeing, it doesn’t stay neutral.

It takes a side.

It sides with the adult who can perform stability.

Gaslighting Isn’t Confusion. It’s Strategy.

People misuse the word “gaslighting” to mean disagreement or miscommunication.

But real gaslighting has a function: it makes reality unstable so accountability can’t land.

It is “that didn’t happen,” “you misunderstood,” “you’re too sensitive,” “you’re imagining things,” said with enough confidence that the target begins to audit their own memory instead of the other person’s behaviour.

You see it in families. You see it in court. You see it in institutions.

And you see it in clients who have spent years being told their perception is the problem. They arrive already apologising for their own clarity.

They arrive already trained to distrust themselves.

That’s not a personality trait.

That’s conditioning.

The Work is Not Separate From my Life

The reason this work hits so hard isn’t because I’m “too emotional.”

It’s because the patterns repeat.

A person harmed by coercion being labelled difficult.

A person trying to survive being labelled manipulative.

A child being asked to adapt to what no adult should be allowed to continue.

A system rewarding the most polished narrative.

A file being treated as the truth.

And in the middle of it: the demand that the workers remain neutral as if neutrality is a lack of history rather than a disciplined practice.

Here is the real line:

I can be professional without pretending I’m untouched.

I can hold nuance without abandoning moral clarity.

I can see the delinquent and the victim in the same person and still require accountability.

I can hear the fear in someone’s voice and not confuse my recognition with permission.

And I can fight for the wellbeing of a small human without pretending the system is automatically just because it is official.

Because the purpose of “unbiased” is not to protect the system from critique.

It’s to protect the vulnerable from whoever has learned how to sound credible.