"Oh, Elk Blood Heart - Tastes like the great white north and I hope you found that I hold all the keys to open up every single door"
With trepidation...
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Not sure where I'm going with this, so I will just write and see..
Someone pointed me in the direction of Kendra, a woman who posted a succession of films about falling in love with her psychiatrist.
I've only watched two YouTubes about her story so far - one from an expert in AI who was commenting mostly on how the 'magic mirror' quality of LLMs can reinforce error, as Kendra took to talking to two AIs about what happened. And the other YouTube is from a Dr in Seattle.
Briefly, Kendra's story begins this way:
Kendra believes that her psychiatrist had feelings for her, and 'bread crumbed' her into staying in therapy with him for four years. So, it is vital to try to understand if boundaries have been crossed because this is a serious allegation. But what if all the usual questions about boundaries and ethical conduct fail to address the real issue that underlies the problem? What If the psychiatrist acted in the best and most ethical way and despite all good intentions the outcome was a problem? And if everything was right, what went wrong?
Could there be a problem with the interpretation of what constitutes ethical behaviour in therapy?
The assessments made by the people in the videos, focused on only two questions:
Was Kendra deluded or not - Blame the client.
Was the psychiatrist's behaviour ethical or not - Blame the therapist.
They are reasonable questions and yet, as I try to understand this story I keep hearing this phrase in my mind, the operation was a success but the patient died.
The only things I am sure of is that:
Kendra believes she experienced "weaponized neutrality".
An AI expert believes that now Kendra is being led deeper into psychosis by AI chats.
The Dr in Seattle didn't accept a term Kendra used: weaponized neutrality. Because neutrality is seen as neither good nor bad. The harm the Dr was concerned about would have been physical contact. My argument is that deprivation of information, the neutrality much favoured by those of a psychodynamic modality in particular , but it isn't confined to them, can be harmful.
We are back to epistemic injustice here: neutrality can also be the withholding of information to maintain an unequal power dynamic.
Is an unequal power dynamic harmful? Obviously there are situations where inequality of power is warranted. Is this one of those situations?
I don't believe so.
Epistemic injustice destroys informed consent. Hence Kendra's view that her psychiatrist was withholding information to keep her hooked and paying him. And that really is a serious allegation, it points to an error by the psychiatrist, even if everything he did was for what he imagined were good reasons. Even if what happened to Kendra was unintentional. Even if Freud himself started it!
People associate the term catfishing with complex narratives designed to create an alternative reality. And catfishing fits Kendra's narrative. Withholding critical information keeps the client swimming, trying, trying harder to get to the truth, trying, trying harder to prove what a good match they are, trying, trying so hard to make something meaningful out of some gesture or word that could be interpreted as significant if the ambiguous hoped for context is true. Then when it is over, having been so powerless it feels safer to tell ourselves that uncomfortable details don't matter. Self blaming, self attack. In my case, Kit's refusal to talk about his feelings, and indeed blushing when I asked him directly to be more open with me, certainly didn't do me any good! As much as I understand the constraints of the profession, at some point there needs to be more openness about the fact that therapy techniques such as neutrality, certainly act in the same way as prejudicial denying information.
Diverting a subject, sidestepping, avoiding, acting as if one doesn't feel?
Ghosting.
It's impossible to know what happened with Kendra and her psychiatrist. But I assume that his neutrality felt defensive, and harmful hence her term: weaponized.
Well here we are. And I have managed to avoid this book for over a year. I bought it way back, it accompanied me when I did my training in conflict resolution, May 2024. I tried to read it. Simply couldn't do it. A year and six months later here I am. Dinner time. Tesco sandwiches . Library. Fortunately only three cases this afternoon because yet again something I've seen, heard, read, to do with 'erotic transfer ' has filled my eyes with tears. I am angry, saddened, I think the aim of true person centred therapy is awesome actually. But, it hurts me to read... Brian Thorne describes an experience of therapy that echoes my experience of ' The man of stars '. That when both people are vitally present, vulnerable, open, there is access to an almost external dimension of healing. I don't have much time to write. But in the final chapters Brian describes his therapeutic relationship with Emma, how he fearlessly allowed himself to be completely honest with h...
It has taken me four years to get enough distance on what happened to me, to begin to make sense of it. The importance of this is, now I know from the inside that it is unreasonable to think that victims instantly seek justice, or that they will be able to identify, name or explain what happened to them, straight away. The greater the impact of the emotional disturbance, the greater their bewilderment, shock and desire to just hide away. And making sense of it? Sometimes it takes decades. Sometimes it is never. It took me years to name the cause of the harm done to me during therapy as epistemic injustice. The inequality of power underlying the withholding of information was a real problem. The therapist and I both suffered because of it. But I was also risking my life. My need for him to see and hear me was so great. I felt threatened each time he became tight lipped. Each time he said 'this isn't working' it was as if acid had been poured over me. I imagine that he w...
Non engagement , 'keeping one's dignity' in the face of outrageous adversity, not ' feeding the trolls ', keeping your head held high, and 'not letting the b******s grind you down, are each a time honoured strategy used to maintain one's power. Except it turns up as a client struggling with self attack and self abandoning . Silencing oneself because it is supposed to control others, often comes from anger. A feeling of anger indicates a need to protect oneself, playing dead - avoiding/disengaging - is a serious level of autonomic (dorsal vagal) affect. As an off the shelf answer it is avoiding your answer. Silence as a strategy to control others is a cold anger portrayed in movies as strength, yet it so often contains contempt, and it is dehumanising... I don't see strength there. I see a mouse overwhelmed by fear and paralysed, but not running away when fight flight (self protection) kicks in. Silence, a paralysis framed as neutrality, isn't ne...
