To Denise, Charlie, Kellie, Manasi, and Jennifer of ChristianaCare Patient and Family Relations:

Since ChristianaCare banned me from contacting any of its employees because I won’t stop talking about the gynecologist who performed medicalized Female Genital Mutilation (FGM) on me, I thought I would write an open letter to you.

You may not remember me, but I remember you. I remember the soft voices, the courteous language, the practiced expressions. I remember the calm professionalism and even the artificial warmth that cloaked the quiet violence of your role.

Because that’s what it was, violence served up as caring. I came to you carrying harm: deep, life-altering harm caused by someone in your institution. I came seeking recognition, repair, and basic human dignity, based on the hospital’s declaration that

“Patient relations specialists can:

•  Serve as your advocate.
•  Encourage communication between you and your treatment team.
•  Address your concerns.
•  Assist in resolving conflicts or disagreements.
•  Keep you informed of your rights and responsibilities.
•  Ensure that your rights as well as the rights of all patients and staff are respected.”

What I encountered instead was a protracted performance intended to convince me to hush up and go away. That performance is a betrayal.

When a person harmed by an institution turns to that institution for help and meets containment rather than compassion, it compounds the harm. The nervous system doesn’t recognize bureaucratic gestures as safety. It recognizes attunement, responsiveness, and acknowledgment. And when it doesn’t get those, especially after trauma, it goes into shutdown, despair, and collapse.

You may think you have done your job. But your work reinforced the original wound: my experience didn’t matter, the pain your institution caused wasn’t real enough to change anything, and my suffering was an inconvenience to be managed. You became the mouthpiece of the system that harmed me.

This is institutional betrayal, and it doesn’t fade. It lands in the body. It disrupts the natural recovery process and locks the injury in place. It keeps people stuck in survival mode. It cuts off access to hope. And it often does more damage than the initial event.

What are we supposed to believe when the people whose title is “Patient and Family Relations” treat us as public relations problems? When we come to you injured and aggrieved, and are told to stop making trouble? That is not care. That is erasure.

While you might not recognize it, I want you to know what you are part of. You aren’t protecting people; you are protecting power. You protected the doctor who hurt me. You protect a hospital’s image. And in doing so, you help ensure that no one will be held accountable, no one will change, and others will likely be hurt again.

You closed the door on every person who might come after. And the worst part is, you closed something off in yourselves. There is no way to do your job without disconnecting from your humanity, learning to numb the part of you that wants to care, and slowly forgetting that real healing requires risk and that empathy is not a script, but a relationship.

If you went into this work because you wanted to help people, I’m writing to say that’s still possible. But not like this. Not by playing defense for a system that rewards silence and punishes truth. Not by gaslighting the people who are already bleeding and calling it “resolution.”

You still have a choice. And so do I.

The culture of disconnection from empathy, accountability, and the real impact on human lives protects predators and other abusers in power. Healing systems would require connection: to one another, to truth, and the shared responsibility of safety and integrity. Without that, the same patterns repeat, no matter who holds what title.

I’m choosing to speak, write, paint, and reclaim what your institution tried to strip from me: my voice, my value, and my story.

You can keep doing what the system asks of you. Or you can remember who you are and why you chose to sit in that seat across from people like me. The people who are hurting. The people who need you to be more than polite. The people who need you to be real.

Sincerely,

Shay Seaborne
Someone your institution deeply harmed and tried to silence