I blame biology

I'm a big fan of thrillers. I'm not into gore, but I like scary. This has made all my (ex)boyfriends laugh at me, because while I like them, I go through the roof whenever one of these saw-it-coming-miles-away startle moments come up. And I hide when there's gore. The men can stop laughing now though, because it's not my fault - it's just biology!

Your basic emotions are scared and angry - flight or fight, withdraw or approach. The first is controlled by a hormone called cortisol. If your cortisol levels are high you're stressed and scared, and unlikely to approach things that you don't know for a fact are safe. Anger, on the other hand, is controlled by testosteron. That's right - anger is controlled by what is best known as "the male sex hormone", which men have about 5 to 10 times as much of as women. So that automatically puts men at an advantage when it comes to not being scared - they always have so much angry hormone in them, the scared hormone gets less of a chance.

Now while you mostly hear that the female system runs on progesteron and estrogen, on an emotional level, the hormone with the most influence in the female system is really oxytocin. When you're talking physical functions, it kickstarts labor and breastfeeding. Emotionally, it helps promote bonding (want an excuse for lots of good sex? It's good for your relationship: oxytocin is released after orgasm, making you bond with your partner more strongly) and it helps with social recognition. That is, people with high levels of oxytocin (i.e. women!) are better at recognizing facial expression and other signs of emotion in people around them.

See how my system cheats me? Lower levels of testosteron mean I get scared more easily than my boyfriend anyways, and then the higher levels of oxytocin mean that (assuming the actors are doing their job right!) I'm getting more and stronger "danger!" signals from the people in the movie, so I get more reason to be scared.

So really, there are two ways to twist this: 1) I'm being cheated by my system and it's not my fault scary movies scare the hell out of me or 2) *I* don't have a problem! It's the men that are overly aggressive and blind to other people's emotions! Either way, it clearly isn't my fault.

Everyone's an expert in psychology

I spent most of yesterday at a masterclass about a new therapy mechanism for children. It was a post grad course, so I shouldn't have been there, but, as they say, it's not what you know but who you know, and I know the right people, it seems. Of course, said people probably feel the same way because they happily abused me for both feedback and doing small jobs like handing things out for them, figuring out the video equipment and running around grabbing the stuff they forgot.

Anyway, the end effect was that I was sitting there, in a room full of social scientists with years of experience, feeling horribly inexperienced and quite ignorant. After all, all these people had been doing this stuff for YEARS, and I've hardly started.

Until, at some point, one of the teachers started about the basic attitude towards children. She'd copied a line from a book, but, she mentioned, she'd added quotation marks. Could anyone tell her why? Most people there looked at her somewhat dumbfounded. I felt a lot smarter all of a sudden.

The line was something like "The therapist 'plays' the ignorant adult". That's not an exact quote, but it comes down to the same thing. The reason the quotation marks are there? It isn't playing. You aren't pretending to be ignorant about what the child, or any client is telling you. As a therapist and human being, you are ignorant about what another person thinks and feels - even if you can make a decent guess that when someone gives you a look that could kill, he's not currently feeling particularly loving towards you.

Here's the thing: psychologists are experts on the processes. We're the ones who learn that "if you put x, y, and z into a human mind, a, b or c is the likely outcome and m, n, and o are approximately what happens in between." And while that information does pretty much apply to the individual, there are a few problems there:

1) notice the "likely" and "approximately" in there? Psychology isn't hard science, and it's very rare to get one-on-one "x input leads to y output" type of connections. When one of my housemates got home drunk and started walking into other people's rooms and setting off fireworks in the house in the middle of the night, some of us got furious with him, others were scared and one housemate decided that it's a party and joined in. Same input, different outputs.

2) the input goes WAY further than just the one event you might be discussing. The way your mom held you or didn't in the first years after you were born? That's part of the input. Whether you have siblings and how you get along with them? Part of the input. Just had a fight with your partner? Part of the input. Slept badly? Part of the input. Won the lottery? Part of the input. All of those things didn't happen? Part of the input as well. Somewhere, there might be a complete model that predicts exactly how The Person (TM) responds to every single event... But it would need to take so much into account that the human mind would't be able to process it.

The end effect is that the only way to really tell the mental end effects of any event is to be inside the mind in question. A psychologist, with all their expertise might be able to help deal with those effects and give insight in how you might have come to those end effects - but they won't know what those end effects ARE until you show or tell them. And that's no different with children than it is with adults. You are the only true expert on you.

Sitting in that room with about 13 experts in social sciences unable to figure that out, I was somewhat scared. Do these people all really think they know the mind of their clients, whatever age they may be? So I want to give out a general warning: if you're seeing a psychologist or a mental health professional of any kind who insists he knows what you think - not who can make a decent guess after having talked with you about the way you think for several sessions, but tells you what you think with such insistence they'd make you doubt your own thoughts - kick them. For yourself, of course, but for me as well. I'm sick of people thinking psychology makes me a mindreader.