1335: Protecting Your Kids from the Evil They Hid | Feedback Friday

What It Covers

Jordan Harbinger and Gabriel Mizrahi tackle three listener dilemmas on Feedback Friday: a corporate employee doing two jobs for one salary, a sexual assault survivor navigating a Buddhist organization's cover-up while protecting her children, and a financially dependent 60-year-old woman trying to escape her manipulative mother's control. HR expert Joanna Tate and clinical psychologist Dr. Aaron Margolis contribute professional guidance throughout.

Key Questions Answered

• •Workplace Capacity Framing: When stuck doing two roles for four months without compensation, reframe the conversation away from fairness toward business risk. Tell leadership: "This structure creates risk for the business — I need clarity on which responsibilities to deprioritize." Document current tasks in a bulleted list with estimated weekly hours, stored on personal devices, not company computers. Capacity arguments move corporate leaders; fairness arguments rarely do.
• •Corporate Compensation Language: Asking for back pay directly puts leadership on the defensive and typically fails. Instead, use the phrase: "Given the expanded scope I've been covering, I'd like to discuss how that will be recognized — whether through compensation, bonus, or a formal role adjustment." This opens negotiation without triggering defensiveness, making it more likely leadership will act rather than dismiss the request entirely.
• •Protecting Children from Institutional Abuse: When children regularly attend an organization with a documented pattern of sexual misconduct and cover-ups, age-appropriate safety conversations should focus on three concrete messages: most adults are safe but some aren't; if something feels wrong, find another adult immediately; and adults who say "keep this secret" or "something bad will happen if you tell" are never to be trusted. Empower children to report anything to you without fear.
• •PTSD and Parental Paralysis: Dr. Margolis identifies avoidance as a core PTSD symptom that can prevent survivors from taking practical protective steps — filing police reports, pursuing custody changes, or joining class action lawsuits. Personal trauma healing and external protective action are directly connected. Survivors who address their own PTSD first become significantly more capable of executing the concrete legal and custodial strategies that actually protect their children from ongoing institutional harm.
• •Reporting Assault to Police Years Later: Filing a police report years after an assault still carries strategic value even when prosecution is unlikely. Multiple reports about the same person or location increase the probability of future charges being taken seriously. Bring all supporting evidence: texts, emails with leadership, the organization's public admissions, and news coverage. A public admission of wrongdoing by a senior figure, as occurred at Shambhala, constitutes key supporting evidence that distinguishes a credible report from a personal grievance.
• •Financial Dependency and Agency: Accepting a parent's money while framing the resulting constraints as things happening to you creates a disempowering cycle. Recognizing that each financial decision — quitting a job, staying nearby, not moving — involved a personal choice is the starting point for change. The practical choice becomes: accept the financial arrangement consciously and stop resenting its conditions, or gradually build independence. Shame about dependency is a signal pointing toward unexamined agency, not just a symptom of manipulation.