What if your reaction to harm doesn’t look the way people expect?
If you’ve experienced a toxic workplace, intimate partner violence, or other long-term mistreatment, that trauma can shape how you respond, and how others read your behaviour.
In difficult situations involving mistreatment, it’s natural to wonder:
- What if I didn’t speak up right away?
- What if I stayed in the situation?
- What if my story doesn’t come out in a neat, linear way?
You’re not alone in asking these questions. At Greenwood Law, we work with many clients who’ve experienced trauma, and we understand how it can shape memory, behaviour, and how someone presents themselves in an investigation.
Here we’ll discuss how trauma can affect perceived credibility, why that matters legally, and what you can do to protect yourself.
Why does “credibility” matter so much?
In legal investigations, whether handled by your employer or through a tribunal or court, how credible you seem can influence the outcome.
Investigators often look for consistent timelines, calm and logical explanations, “reasonable” reactions, and stories that feel believable.
But trauma doesn’t always look the way people expect. And the law doesn’t require it to.
How trauma can affect behaviour and memory
Complex trauma happens when someone is exposed to harm over time: often in situations where leaving doesn’t feel like a real option.
That includes workplace harassment, intimate partner abuse, systemic discrimination, or other chronic mistreatment.
As a result, people may delay reporting out of fear or shame, maintain contact with someone who harmed them, or struggle to recall timelines clearly. Others might freeze during interviews, appear overly polite to the person causing harm, or even blame themselves.
These aren’t signs of dishonesty. They’re protective responses: and they deserve to be understood, not dismissed.
When trauma is misread as “unreliable”
In investigations, small details can carry a lot of weight.
If you’ve filed a complaint or are being interviewed, you might worry about how your behaviour will be judged.
Maybe you stayed at your job even after the harassment began. Maybe you sent a friendly email to someone who mistreated you. Maybe you froze up in a meeting or couldn’t remember something important. Maybe you got frustrated, emotional, or went quiet.
These are human reactions. But without proper context, they’re sometimes seen as red flags, even when they’re anything but.
Your rights under Ontario law
In Ontario, both the Human Rights Code and the Occupational Health and Safety Act (OHSA) require employers to investigate complaints of discrimination and harassment.
That duty includes:
- Responding promptly to concerns.
- Taking your experience seriously, even if your response doesn’t match a “typical” pattern.
- Protecting you from retaliation for participating in the process.
Investigations are also expected to be procedurally fair – which means training investigators to recognize trauma responses and avoid unfair assumptions.
You don’t have to be the “perfect victim” to be taken seriously
Some people leave. Some stay. Some fight back. Some go quiet.
There’s no single way people respond to harm, and no one way to appear credible in a legal process.
How Greenwood Law can help
You don’t have to navigate this process alone.
At Greenwood Law, we regularly support people on all sides of investigations, whether you’re making a complaint, responding to one, or hiring us to run the investigative process in a procedurally fair and trauma-informed way.
If you’re involved in an investigation and worried your trauma might be misunderstood, reach out. We can help you move through the process with clarity, compassion, and strong legal support.
