Epistemic Injury

Epistemic injury occurs when an authority figure erodes an individual’s confidence in their cognitive faculties—especially their ability to interpret sensory, emotional, or social cues. Coined within feminist epistemology, the concept builds on Miranda Fricker’s theory of epistemic injustice (2007), where marginalized people’s testimonies are discredited due to prejudice.

In the clinical context, epistemic injury emerges when a therapist, under the guise of ‘challenging distortions,’ delegitimizes a client’s lived perception.

This form of harm becomes particularly pernicious in trauma treatment, where survivors have often already experienced systematic invalidation of their reality. As Judith Herman (2015) notes in Trauma and Recovery, “The ordinary response to atrocities is to banish them from consciousness. Certain violations of the social compact are too terrible to utter aloud: this is the meaning of the word unspeakable” (p. 1). When therapy itself becomes another site of epistemic invalidation, it compounds rather than heals the original trauma.

References

Fricker, M. (2007). Epistemic injustice: Power and the ethics of knowing. Oxford University Press.

Herman, J. L. (2015). Trauma and recovery: The aftermath of violence—from domestic abuse to political terror. Basic Books.