Chapter 44 — When the Observer Becomes Part of the Event

How courts, clinicians, investigators and institutions can influence the behaviour they later interpret, and why observation is not always neutral when authority, fear, questioning and survival responses are already present.

The Observer Is Not Always Outside the Event ↑

There is a comforting picture of observation in which one person watches and another person behaves.

The observer stands outside.

The event happens inside.

The observer then describes what happened.

Human beings are rarely that simple.

The presence of another person can change behaviour.

Authority can change it further.

Fear can change it further again.

By the time somebody writes down what they observed, the interaction may already have become part of the thing being described.

Not Quantum Physics ↑

I should separate this immediately from another idea which is often used too loosely.

I am not talking about the observer effect in quantum physics.

I am talking about something much more ordinary.

People react to being watched.

They react to being assessed.

They react to being judged.

They react to what they think the other person expects.

Psychology and behavioural research have long recognised forms of this under terms such as reactivity, demand characteristics, social desirability and evaluation apprehension.

The names differ because the mechanisms differ.

The simple point is that observation can alter behaviour.

Authority Changes the Room ↑

A friend asking:

“What happened?”

is not necessarily asking the same psychological question as a police officer asking:

“What happened?”

A doctor.

A psychiatrist.

A judge.

A priest.

A parent.

A teacher.

The words may be identical.

The consequences attached to the answer may not be.

The person being questioned may know that.

Their nervous system may know it before they have consciously formulated the thought.

Being Evaluated Is Itself a Stressor ↑

Research has repeatedly shown that social evaluation can itself produce a stress response.

The effect is not simply that another person is physically present.

Being evaluated matters.

Being judged matters.

Not knowing what will happen matters.

Losing control over the situation matters.

That should not surprise anybody who has sat an examination, attended a job interview, appeared in court or waited while somebody decided whether their account would be believed.

The body is already participating in the interaction.

Then We Assess the Behaviour Produced by the Assessment ↑

This is where the problem becomes circular.

A person enters an assessment.

They are frightened.

The authority makes them more frightened.

They hesitate.

They become guarded.

Their speech changes.

They lose words.

They become compliant.

Or angry.

Or silent.

The observer then records:

guarded,

hesitant,

hostile,

evasive,

overly compliant,

poor historian,

emotionally labile.

Sometimes those descriptions may be accurate observations.

The more difficult question is:

How much of the behaviour existed before the interaction, and how much was produced within it?

The Room Belongs in the Evidence ↑

When somebody behaves differently in different settings, we can treat that as inconsistency.

Or we can ask what changed between the settings.

Who was present?

What power did they hold?

Was the person free to leave?

Did they know why they were being questioned?

Did they believe they could safely disagree?

Were they being recorded?

Were there uniforms?

Was there an audience?

Had somebody already described them before they entered?

The room is not always background.

Sometimes the room is part of the evidence.

When Asking for Help Becomes Evidence Against the Patient ↑

There was another hospital experience which made this problem very concrete for me.

A young woman across the ward was in severe distress.

Day after day I heard her crying out to God or Jesus to come and kill her, to take her away immediately.

I do not know what was happening inside her beyond what I heard.

What I did know was what those words were beginning to do inside me.

My history with religion was very different from hers.

I spoke with nursing staff about that difference.

I explained that I was concerned about how vulnerable I was becoming to the repeated religious language and distress around me.

I asked whether I could be moved.

Nothing changed.

After a week or more, I could feel dissociation becoming increasingly difficult.

Eventually I asked one of the doctors, Dr Pen, whether there was some way of helping me through the woman's episodes.

For reasons I did not understand at the time, two psychiatrists were present.

One of them responded with certainty that I was suicidal.

I objected immediately.

That was not what I had said.

I had been asking for help managing what the environment was doing to me.

The Interpretation Changed the Event ↑

Once the word suicidal entered the conversation, the original problem was in danger of disappearing.

The sequence had been:

repeated exposure to another patient's distress,

my attempts to explain the effect upon me,

my request to be moved,

no effective environmental change,

increasing dissociation,

and finally my asking a doctor for help coping with it.

But the interpretation threatened to compress all of that into:

patient is suicidal.

That was a very different story.

I rejected it.

The environment remained largely outside the diagnosis, while my response to the environment threatened to become the diagnosis.

“For the Moment” ↑

I was discharged within hours.

Later, one of the psychiatrists telephoned me at home and again asked whether I was still suicidal.

I rejected the description again.

I told them repeatedly that I found the accusation offensive because it was not what I had said.

Eventually I was told that the issue would be put aside “for the moment.”

I remember that wording because it did not sound like a correction.

It sounded provisional.

The interpretation had not been demonstrated.

Yet neither had it disappeared.

That is another way an observer can become part of the event.

The person asks for help with an environment.

The request is interpreted through a different framework.

The new interpretation then begins to acquire a life of its own.

A Second Rapid Discharge ↑

There is another episode which I keep under the working name the Ulin incident.

It occurred during my New Year admission to RBWH.

The exact spelling and identity of the doctor I remember as “Ulin” still needs to be checked against the record.

What I remember clearly enough to preserve is the sequence.

I had concerns about what was happening and about not being heard.

I indicated that I wanted to make a complaint.

My recollection is that discharge followed very quickly — approximately within an hour.

That timing does not prove that the complaint caused the discharge.

It does, however, belong in the chronology.

A concern had not been resolved.

The patient was moved out of the setting.

That is similar enough to the earlier incident for me to keep asking the same question:

when a patient raises a difficult need, disagreement or complaint, does the system resolve the underlying problem — or does it sometimes resolve the immediate difficulty by moving the patient?

A Pattern Is Not the Same as a Motive ↑

I need to be disciplined about what these examples establish.

I do not have direct evidence of a policy or coordinated intention to discharge me because I complained, or to move me because my needs were difficult to accommodate.

What I can preserve is the sequence of events.

Request.

Challenge.

Interpretation.

Then rapid movement or discharge.

The pattern deserves examination without pretending that the pattern proves motive.

Questions Are Not Neutral Containers ↑

A question does not merely extract information.

It can organise information.

It can narrow attention.

It can imply what the questioner expects.

It can introduce possibilities the person had not previously mentioned.

It can make one detail seem more important than another.

It can also signal that the previous answer was unsatisfactory.

Children Made This Impossible to Ignore ↑

Research into interviewing children exposed this problem particularly clearly.

A child may be trying to remember an event.

At the same time the child is trying to understand the adult.

Why are they asking?

Was my last answer wrong?

What answer do they want?

Am I in trouble?

Will they be angry?

Should I agree?

That is why modern forensic interviewing places so much importance on open-ended prompts and avoiding suggestive questions.

“Tell me what happened”

leaves more of the account with the child.

A forced choice places more of the account in the mouth of the interviewer.

The Second Question Can Change the First Answer ↑

Repeated questioning creates another problem.

Adults often repeat a question because they want greater precision.

A child may hear something different.

My first answer must have been wrong.

So the child changes it.

Then the changed answer is later treated as inconsistency.

The questioning process has helped create the very feature later used to challenge the witness.

Cross-Examination Can Become Part of Memory Retrieval ↑

The courtroom presents the same problem in a more formal setting.

Cross-examination is designed to test evidence.

That is an important function.

But the method used to test evidence can also affect the person producing it.

Stress can impair retrieval.

Repeated challenge can make a person doubt what they know.

Rapid questions can privilege people who think and speak rapidly.

Demands for exact dates can disadvantage somebody whose memory preserved an event more strongly than its calendar position.

A distressed witness may perform badly under questioning.

Poor performance under questioning is not automatically proof that the underlying event was invented.

The Wrong Test of Truth ↑

We often judge truth through performance.

Did the person look confident?

Did they answer quickly?

Did they maintain eye contact?

Did they become emotional?

Did they remain unemotional?

Did the story arrive in a neat sequence?

Did they remember the number of buttons?

Those things may influence how believable somebody appears.

They are not themselves reliable tests of whether the central event occurred.

Emotion Can Mislead the Observer ↑

There is no correct theatrical performance for trauma.

One person cries.

Another becomes flat.

Another laughs at an apparently inappropriate moment.

Another becomes intensely detailed.

Another loses detail.

The observer may nevertheless carry an internal picture of what a truthful victim is supposed to look like.

Once that happens, the witness is not merely describing an event.

They are unknowingly being compared with a script.

The Observer Has Expectations Too ↑

So far I have described the person reacting to the observer.

The influence runs in the other direction as well.

Observers have expectations.

They have previous experiences.

They have hypotheses.

They have institutional cultures.

They may have read somebody else's report before meeting the person.

They may already expect:

psychosis,

deception,

drug seeking,

attention seeking,

trauma,

danger,

or innocence.

Expectation can affect what gets noticed.

The Observer Brings Their Own Life Into the Room ↑

The observer brings their own life into the room.

That life does not disappear when somebody acquires a qualification, a professional title, public office or institutional authority.

They bring their own childhood.

Their relationships.

Their beliefs.

Their loyalties.

Their fears.

Their ambitions.

Their financial pressures.

Their institutional obligations.

And sometimes their unresolved personal difficulties.

Professionalism does not mean that none of those things exist.

It means, in part, recognising when they are beginning to influence what is happening to the other person.

What I Knew at the Time Was Different ↑

I need to make an important distinction in describing my own experiences.

In many instances I did not understand what was happening at the time.

I was responding to the immediate event.

I was not necessarily aware of the other person's personal difficulties, religious loyalties, institutional conflicts, political interests or other pressures which may have been entering the relationship.

Some of those connections became visible only much later, when I reviewed records, reconstructed sequences, described events in detail and compared one experience with another.

The later understanding should not be confused with what I knew contemporaneously.

The event happened first.

My understanding of what had entered the event sometimes came years later.

This Has Not Been Confined to One Profession ↑

Across my life I have encountered this with psychologists and counsellors, lawyers, doctors and nurses, police, public servants, politicians and individuals standing for election, as well as with other people exercising institutional or public authority.

Some of those experiences go back to childhood.

In later episodes involving Jason, Dan Toombs and Craig Mattocks, matters arising from their own conduct or circumstances became entangled with my life in ways that I experienced as serious and damaging.

There were similar problems in my dealings with lawyers.

I can presently recall four separate instances, and there may have been more.

There have also been significant experiences involving doctors and nurses, police, public servants, politicians and people standing for election in which a person's own beliefs, loyalties, conduct, interests or circumstances appeared, on later review, to have become relevant to what happened to me.

A striking feature of that later review is that many of these experiences appear to have had some connection with the Catholic religion, Catholic institutions, or people whose religious or institutional loyalties may have been relevant.

I did not necessarily recognise those connections when the events occurred.

Nor does the pattern by itself establish motive, wrongdoing or criminal conduct in any particular case.

Each event still has to carry its own evidence.

Selecting the Person Who Will Interpret You ↑

My experience also taught me that choosing a counsellor, psychologist or psychiatrist is itself part of psychological safety.

Following Alice Miller's recommendations, I contacted a substantial number of possible practitioners in Toowoomba while trying to find somebody I believed could work safely with what I was bringing.

My present recollection is that around fourteen of those contacts were women drawn from a larger pool of possible practitioners.

There may have been one or two men among the broader group, but I no longer trust myself to state the exact count.

What remained clearer was the predominance of women and the very different ways in which some of those practitioners engaged with what I was telling them.

Some encounters struck me as unsuitable almost immediately.

One practitioner appeared overwhelmingly concerned with money.

Another asked how my mother dressed and behaved and later presented herself in a way which I experienced as resembling the description I had given.

Another reacted to discussion of the sexual aspects of my history with such visible intensity that I did not feel safe placing the work in that relationship.

I cannot retrospectively diagnose any of those people, and I cannot know what was occurring inside them.

I did not need to.

The relevant question was whether I could safely work with them.

Eventually that process led me to Sandy Collins.

Shared Experience Can Become Interference ↑

I have come to regard one principle as particularly important.

Having related personal experience does not automatically make a practitioner unsuitable.

It may sometimes deepen understanding.

The danger arises when the practitioner's own unresolved or currently active experience begins to enter their judgement, boundaries, emotional response or interpretation of the client.

Shared experience is not automatically therapeutic expertise.

Unexamined shared experience can become interference.

The question I learned to ask is not simply:

Has this therapist ever experienced trauma?

It is:

Can this therapist hear my trauma without needing me to help resolve theirs?

When the Practitioner Recognises Their Own Boundary ↑

More recently, when I was attempting to improve my relationship with my son, the process began with several individual sessions with a psychologist.

Near the end of my last session, the psychologist explained that some of the professional and family difficulties I was describing were very close to circumstances he was currently experiencing in his own life.

He concluded that this made him unsuitable to continue in the role I needed.

He also told me that our conversations had given him a better understanding of aspects of his own relationships with his children, neighbours, and medical and other professionals, and that he felt he personally might gain from further conversation with me.

I left it there.

I did not regard his decision to step away as a failure.

In many respects it demonstrated precisely the professional self-awareness I had wanted to find in earlier encounters.

He recognised that his own current experience had become sufficiently close to mine that the boundary between helping me and processing aspects of his own experience could become uncertain.

Rather than pretending professional training made that irrelevant, he acknowledged it.

Once a practitioner begins to recognise that the person who came to them for support is also helping them understand their own life, the direction of benefit can begin to reverse.

A therapeutic relationship exists primarily for the person seeking help.

Professional self-awareness sometimes means knowing that you are not the right person to continue.

Institutional Conflict Can Enter the Room Too ↑

I remember a different kind of acknowledgement from a male practitioner who was employed within the Catholic Church.

My recollection is that he told me, in substance, that I would probably do better going elsewhere because he was not confident he could provide me with the right service while also keeping his job.

I remember the exchange because the difficulty he identified was not primarily his personal history.

It was his institutional position.

In that instance, acknowledging the boundary was more useful to me than pretending it did not exist.

Authority Does Not Neutralise Private Life ↑

Professional or public authority does not neutralise the private life of the person exercising it.

Neither does a title guarantee that personal material has remained outside the relationship.

Sometimes the safeguard is supervision.

Sometimes it is disclosure of a conflict.

Sometimes it is referral.

Sometimes it is simply the professional recognising that they are not the right person to continue.

The observer is part of the event partly because the observer is a person.

Confirmation Bias Does Not Require Dishonesty ↑

This does not require a dishonest clinician.

Confirmation bias is more ordinary than that.

Once we form an explanation, we tend to notice information which fits it.

Contradictory information may receive less weight.

A preliminary diagnosis can become an anchor.

A later observation is then interpreted through the earlier label.

Medicine has names for some of this.

Anchoring.

Premature closure.

Confirmation bias.

Framing.

The names matter less than the warning.

The first explanation should not be allowed to decide what every later observation means.

The Label Can Enter the Room Before the Person ↑

A clinician may meet a patient for the first time while already holding a record.

The record says:

difficult,

paranoid,

non-compliant,

aggressive,

anxious,

confused.

The patient then walks through the door.

The meeting has already begun.

The description may influence what the clinician expects.

The clinician's manner may then influence how the patient responds.

The response can appear to confirm the description.

A loop is beginning.

Diagnostic Momentum ↑

A description can gain strength simply by travelling.

One clinician writes it.

Another reads it.

A third sees that two previous clinicians apparently accepted it.

Soon the number of records can look like the number of independent observations.

They may actually lead back to one original interpretation.

The record has reproduced.

The evidence has not necessarily multiplied.

The Interview Is a Relationship ↑

The same words can produce very different answers depending upon who asks them and how.

A person may disclose something to one interviewer and not another.

That does not automatically mean one version is false.

Trust changes disclosure.

Fear changes disclosure.

Shame changes disclosure.

Language changes disclosure.

Culture changes disclosure.

The perceived consequences of the answer change disclosure.

The interview is not simply a pipe through which facts travel.

It is a relationship in which facts are being retrieved and communicated.

Compliance Can Be Produced ↑

Authority can also create agreement.

A patient may nod because disagreeing feels unsafe.

A child may accept an adult's wording.

A person in custody may try to end an interview.

A believer may confess what the priest appears to expect.

A frightened person may become unusually helpful.

The resulting agreement can then be recorded as though it arose freely.

Again, the observer has become part of the event.

Resistance Can Be Produced Too ↑

The opposite response can occur.

A person who feels misread may become more forceful.

The more forceful they become, the more threatening they may appear.

The more threatening they appear, the more controlling the authority may become.

The more controlling the authority becomes, the harder the person may push back.

At the end of the interaction the record may describe an aggressive or difficult person.

The sequence which produced the escalation may disappear.

The Sequence Matters ↑

That is why chronology matters.

What happened first?

What did the observer say?

What did the person do next?

What changed after the intervention?

What happened when the pressure was removed?

A description of the final behaviour without the sequence can be deeply misleading.

Recording the Interaction ↑

I came to value recordings for this reason.

A recording is not perfect.

It does not capture every thought.

It may not show everything happening outside the microphone or camera.

People may behave differently because they know they are being recorded.

But it preserves something that memory and summary can lose.

Sequence.

Exact wording.

Tone.

Interruptions.

The question before the answer.

The pressure before the reaction.

That can be crucial when a later report contains only the observer's interpretation.

A Report Is Already an Interpretation ↑

A clinical note is not the event.

A police statement is not the event.

A judgment is not the event.

A psychological report is not the event.

They are records produced after somebody selected what mattered.

Selection is unavoidable.

No report can contain everything.

The difficulty begins when the record loses the conditions under which the behaviour occurred.

The Observer May Have More Power Over the Record Than the Observed ↑

This imbalance is easy to miss.

The clinician writes the note.

The police officer writes the occurrence.

The lawyer drafts the affidavit.

The judge writes the reasons.

The priest may write the institutional correspondence.

The person being described may never see the wording until much later.

By then the observer's interpretation may already have travelled.

The observed person may be left trying to correct a description which has acquired institutional authority.

The Observer Can Be Observed Too ↑

One safeguard is remarkably simple.

Turn the question around.

What did the interviewer do?

What information did they have beforehand?

What hypothesis were they testing?

What alternatives did they consider?

What language did they introduce?

What happened when the person disagreed?

What evidence would have caused the observer to change their mind?

The professional should not be invisible simply because the report is written in professional language.

Good Authority Makes Room for Correction ↑

This is not an argument against interviews.

Or assessment.

Or diagnosis.

Or courts.

Or professional judgment.

It is an argument for better observation.

Open questions where possible.

Awareness of power.

Attention to context.

Separation of observation from interpretation.

Alternative hypotheses.

Accurate recording.

And a pathway for correction.

The Observer Is Part of the Data ↑

Perhaps that is the simplest way I can put it.

When one human being assesses another, the observer is part of the data.

Not because the observer invented everything.

Not because the person being observed bears no responsibility for their behaviour.

But because interaction has consequences.

Power has consequences.

Questions have consequences.

Expectation has consequences.

The conditions under which behaviour appears belong in the explanation of that behaviour.

What Happens When the Observer Intervenes? ↑

There is another step beyond observation.

Sometimes the authority does not merely question.

They intervene.

They prescribe.

Medicate.

Restrain.

Sedate.

Admit.

Discharge.

Withhold.

Change the environment.

The person's behaviour then changes.

Memory may change.

Speech may change.

Movement may change.

Emotion may change.

Judgment may change.

And then the changed person is observed again.

What happens if the effects of the intervention are interpreted as further evidence of the condition which supposedly required the intervention?

That is more than an observer effect.

It can become a loop.

That is where I want to go next.