Doctors Who Torture

[napoleon_in_rags]

1. That's the problem.

Such a carefully orchestrated torture raises the question of how health professionals — including psychologists and psychiatrists — could have participated in it.

The problem is that each advancement in healing can have a shadow, a way to invert it. For instance, in psychology there's a simple technique to help people, called reflective listening. Basically what you do is listen closely to someone, and then rephrase what they said, and say it back to them as they speak to show them that they are being heard. For whatever reason, this simple act of the individual feeling heard and understood is incredibly powerful in helping people feel better, and de-escalate from intense bad emotional states. However, once the power of this is understood, so is its inverse: the systematic misinterpretation and re-contexting of an individuals words to cause emotional damage, make the individual feel misunderstood. Sadly I've seen this at work in the political scene and out in the world.

So just as a powerful technique to promote understanding and healing is born, so is a powerful psychological weapon to do damage individuals, simply by inverting the technique. At this point there's such a long history of this kind of inversion happening, that almost any one who comes up with a way to heal and help needs to think first about the inverse of their technique, and possibly how to mitigate it before they release their work.

PEace