when I was just finishing grad school, 24 years old, had never had a job, had no idea what I DIDN\’T know about being a therapist (just about everything), I was tying up loose ends at my field placement.
I\’d been training in family therapy, and seeing what we then called \”multi-problem families\” (read: poor. black. live in the inner city. bad education, yadda yadda). It was a great educational experience, and I was insecure and nervous at the time. But looking back-I had NO idea what I was doing. Which is fine, really, but it bothered me. A lot. My supervisor\’s evaluation at the end of the year concluded with something like: \”You know, you have what it takes to be a therapist. Like, the innate stuff you cannot learn or acquire. But you have got to learn to trust yourself, or you will never develop into a true therapist.\”
As part of tying together those loose ends, I was referring a family I\’d been seeing in family therapy for their treatment to continue elsewhere. I called the community clinic in their area, and the person I spoke to happened to have worked with them before. She was a grown-up, older and more experienced than I. She was a REAL therapist. And when I told her that I had been working with the family-all of them-for the prior six months, she was super impressed. \”How did you keep them all engaged for that long?\” She asked. She knew I was an intern, but in my field that does not necessarily mean a green, 24yo kid who has never worked before.
I literally felt my head swelling. I felt like: \”Ha! I *am* a good therapist! I must just have that GIFT my supervisor was talking about.\” It was an off-the-charts reaction, all things considered. But a happy hormone cocktail got released in my brain from her praise.
Still incredulous, she asked: \”I mean….what did the daughter do when the sexual abuse came up??\”
My heart dropped, my mind went blank, and I think my body got a little tingly.
\”Sexual abuse?\” I asked, in a tiny, timid voice. It hadn\’t. Happy hormone cocktail drained out of my brain, and I felt the warmth of shame spreading down my body.
That was my introduction to being a social worker and a therapist. And at the time, I was mortified. Now, I could not be more grateful.
My social media has completely blown up today with posts and comment threads and twitter threads and expert opinions and people stating their theories as facts about the death of Jeffrey Epstein.
Here\’s the thing: WE. DON\’T. KNOW. WHAT. HAPPENED.
And I want to be crystal clear about two things, here.
- I\’ve always felt this way. At least since grad school, which was almost 30 years ago. Over those decades I\’ve seen what my clients or my agency shows the world, and what I see in private. I\’ve been told I\’m the only one clients have shared information with (obviously I don\’t know if that\’s the case). I\’ve changed diagnoses of clients after six months because new (or perhaps masked or dormant) symptoms appeared. I\’ve heard five different people all involved in the same crisis give five different accounts of the SAME event. I\’ve heard accounts of events I\’ve witnessed and thought: WHAT? How did they see/hear/think/observe that? I was THERE and I didn\’t. So I\’ve held this view since way before this morning, way before 45 was elected, way before the division in this country became something that we can no longer ignore, and has basically split into two realities. I say regularly that if I had to summarize all of my professional experience in one sentence, it would be this: We never KNOW the whole story, except what we experience, and even then, it holds our bias.
- I\’m not saying anyone is right or wrong about his death, or that I myself believe a particular theory about what happened to Epstein. I\’m actually saying the OPPOSITE: we have no idea, right now. NO ONE does, unless of course there was a witness or someone involved-information we do not have.
Here\’s another thing I\’ve learned a lot about in working in behavioral health: snap judgments, especially about things like this, generate actual emotion, based on the assumption. Not based in reality-but on our assumption. It can actually release brain chemicals. And the arguing I\’ve seen, among dear friends and total strangers, about the CERTAINTY that he committed suicide or the CERTAINTY that he didn\’t–that activates fight-or-flight in the brain. The survival response. That feed *right* into confirmation bias-because the more invested we are in our story, and getting others to believe it, the more we look for confirmation that it\’s \”true\”.
and we DO. NOT. KNOW.
I think what concerns me the most about social media is the instantaneous way we form our views. I have also had the good fortune of teaching implicit bias (to cops, no less). The brain science of bias can be boiled down to this: bias is what kicks in when there is ambiguity. The brain doesn\’t like not having clarity, or having an empty space there, so whatever matches our world view/life experiences/fears/feelings/beliefs slides right on in–and this is the scariest part–before we know it. (Google implicit bias if you want to see the research-one big one is the Princeton study.)
I realize the court of public opinion is not an actual court of law, but remember due process? There are a number of tenants on which a fair trial are based, but one of the most basic ones is that when you judge before you have all of the evidence, hell, all of the necessary and relevant information, you are circumventing due process. And the more that happens, the further away from a democratic, just system we stray. We form our opinions SO quickly, we don\’t actually allow the time that is needed for the brain to process the information, even if we have enough to make a fair evaluation.
Amy died unexpectedly at 31. In an ER. She was not being treated for any health conditions. We didn\’t find out for almost a MONTH what her cause of death was (heart attack, undiagnosed/asymptomatic congenital condition) because it takes TIME to rule everything out. (and believe me, we were fucking GOBSMACKED.)
I don\’t know what happened to Jeffrey Epstein. And neither does anyone else, at this point. No one can say for sure if he died of suicide or something more nepharious happened.
The not knowing is a bit uncomfortable, but I accept that. It\’s the folks on all sides digging in, and worse-the infighting and conflict that, IMO, can be so harmful in a time where so much harm is already flying around.
Every time I think I KNOW something, I think of that phone call to that grown-up, real therapist, and how I felt finding out that the most significant clinical issue had never come up in six months of weekly sessions. I don\’t feel ashamed anymore, though. It just reminds me–again– that we really, really don\’t know.