by Christi Baker, L.M.F.T.

FAKE OUTRAGE

I have been thinking about what happens when powerful people harm others and then recast the injury as overreaction. The harmed person names what happened and describes its impact. The authority figure responds by minimizing, distorting, or denying it. With the help of loyal echoes, the story shifts: Nothing really happened. The person who was hurt becomes the problem–too sensitive, too dramatic, making much ado about nothing. Already wounded, they are wounded again.

This is gaslighting. We know it well in our clinical work: the undermining of another’s perception to preserve power. Through repetition and authority, the manipulator induces doubt–about memory, emotion, even reality itself. Words spoken from positions of power carry particular force. When reality is contested by someone who controls the narrative, the destabilization can be profound.

In the public sphere, this dynamic recently played out when the president posted a racist cartoon and dismissed the responses as “fake outrage.” In doing so, he did more than disagree. He invalidated lived experience, erased historical context, and asserted his version of reality as definitive. The message was clear: your pain is not real; your interpretation is excessive; my authority determines the truth. His press secretary echoed the refrain, reinforcing the distortion through institutional voice.

Around that same time, in my consulting room, a patient described telling one of her parents how unsafe she feels around the other parent who had previously been violent toward her. Her avoidance was not dramatic; it was protective. Her parent responded by minimizing the violence and implying that she was overreacting. The subtext mirrored the public one: that didn’t really happen; you’re exaggerating; you are the problem. Already struggling with self-trust, my patient left the exchange more isolated and less certain of her own experience.

When I hear “fake outrage” directed at people who are hurting, whether from a president or a parent, I hear abuse. I hear an attempt to overwrite reality to maintain power. I feel the visceral quality of it in my body–the coercion, the demand to accept a version of events that contradicts lived experience.

As therapists, we sit daily with the aftermath of such distortions. We meet patients whose confidence in their own perceptions has been systematically eroded. Our task is not simply to validate feelings; it is to help restore epistemic trust–to support patients in reclaiming their capacity to know what they know. When powerful voices declare pain to be “fake,” our work becomes quietly radical: we bear witness, we name harm, and we help reality hold.