Theresa attended a town hall at work to hear the new VP and department head share his strategic vision for the coming year. When he put up the organizational chart, she noticed something was missing: her name. In fact, her entire team had been left off.
When it came time for Q&A, Theresa stood up and asked whether she should read anything into that omission about the organization’s future strategic focus.
The VP simply said that her team was no longer lucrative.
His answer shocked Theresa, not for its brutal honesty, but because it dismissed everything her team had achieved over the years: “It felt like the VP invited us to dinner and didn’t set a place for us at the table.”
What Theresa experienced is called erasure—the quieter cousin of rejection, and sometimes the more painful of the two.
Why erasure hurts more than rejection
Rejection tells you that you weren’t chosen. Erasure makes you wonder whether anyone ever saw you. Rejection at least confirms you exist. Being erased tells you your reality doesn’t count.
Social psychologist Kipling D. Williams spent his career studying ostracism, the experience of being ignored and excluded. One of his key contributions is Cyberball, a simple online ball-tossing game. A participant plays catch with two other “players” who, after a few throws, stop passing the ball to them.
It’s a trivial game played with strangers. Yet being left out reliably makes people feel hurt, angry, and diminished within minutes. Brain imaging studies using Cyberball found that social exclusion activates some of the same regions involved in processing physical pain. Our brains register being ignored as a kind of injury.
Williams found that ostracism threatens four basic needs: belonging, self-esteem, control, and a sense of meaning in our lives. People tend to respond in one of two ways. Some make desperate efforts to be seen, while others withdraw gradually. When exclusion persists long enough, many reach resignation: a state of alienation, helplessness, and a quiet conviction that they don’t matter.
Erasure and shame
Erasure doesn’t only happen in conference rooms. For a child who is abused and then not believed, or a gay kid who never sees himself reflected in the world around him, the lesson is that the true self must stay hidden.
That’s toxic shame, almost by definition. Erasure teaches, “Something about me is unspeakable.”
When we erase ourselves
Erasure isn’t always imposed externally. Over time, many of us learn to do it to ourselves.
Self-erasure often begins as a survival skill and then becomes a trap. Hypervigilance, excessive people-pleasing, and numbing with alcohol or other substances can all be ways to make yourself smaller, so you’re less of a target. These strategies work in the short term but cost a great deal over time.
When institutions erase
Psychologist Jennifer Freyd coined the term “institutional betrayal” to describe what happens when an institution fails the very people who depend on it. When an organization minimizes or hides abuse, the survivor is harmed twice: first by the abuse and then by being written out of the record. Silence becomes policy.
I know this firsthand. When I finally told my parents my Scoutmaster was molesting me, they confronted the troop’s senior leaders, but were shamed into silence. Decades later, I was among more than 95,000 survivors who filed claims against the Boy Scouts of America. As part of the process, I was asked to complete a 47-page questionnaire recounting in detail my years of abuse.
The pattern is unmistakable: abuse, silence, and revictimization, all over again.
The antidote is witnessing
Being seen, named, and believed reverses erasure. That’s why testimony and support groups heal, not just inform. Telling the story puts a person back into the record
I can only speculate why the VP thought it was OK to omit Theresa and her team. He should have acknowledged the team’s accomplishments instead of dismissing their value. At the very least, he owed them an apology for omitting them from the org chart.
By standing to ask her question, though, Theresa forced the VP’s hand and put herself back on the org chart. What eventually happened to her or her team is beside the point. What matters is that Theresa refused to shrink so someone with authority on stage could feel big.
