Bearing Witness

Many years ago, I was asked to speak at a hostage negotiation conference, organized by a local police agency. The second speaker, a SWAT officer from that agency, was scheduled to present on a hostage rescue event that had happened a day or so before. The negotiation team sent me their recording of the incident, asking if I had any suggestions on tactics that they might have tried, because it truly was a horrendous situation. I did not; they did a tremendous job. [AUTHOR’S NOTE: I have always admired negotiation teams’ willingness to seek out outside critique to make their work better. They are, in my experience, ruthless with themselves in their after-action reviews. Nobody speaks for life with more integrity than a crisis/hostage negotiator]. This is not why I am telling this story, however. You’ll see.

This account is several decades old, and I will tell it to the best of my recollection. My apologies if I got any detail wrong.

There was a woman with a five-year-old daughter and a baby. She invited some friends over for the one-year-old’s first birthday party. She did not invite his father. He burst in the house, brandishing a knife. The mother grabbed her daughter, and she and the other adults ran out of the house, leaving the baby behind. Negotiators got him on the phone, while SWAT was called out. SWAT teams are police officers (with additional specialized training), usually doing ordinary police work. On a call-out, they muster, gather the equipment they need and go to the event as quickly as they can. This can take time, particularly in a county-wide team where the officers may be widely dispersed. Police had secured the grounds of the house, and while SWAT was arriving, the negotiators made contact. The man was snarling on the phone, the baby screaming in the background, and he said, “You want to hear a baby die for fifteen seconds?” He began strangling the child, and you could hear choking sounds over the phone as he counted down the seconds, the negotiator yelling “Stop! Stop!” At fifteen, he stopped and after a silence, there was a tiny sucking gasp and the baby started crying, hiccupping, gasping for air. The negotiator tried again to speak with the man, and he said, “You like that? How about twenty seconds?” And he did it again, with the same result.

I don’t recall if he did that a third time, but he dropped the phone and the next thing anyone knew, he was in the window of the third story of the house, dangling the baby outside by, his neck in a noose made from an electric cord. They couldn’t shoot him—the baby would fall to the concrete below. All they could do is scream at him to stop, to bring the baby back inside.

He did, and SWAT immediately entered the house. At this point, I will shift my account to my memory of the SWAT officer, who was up on stage, clicking slides on a screen as he told what happened next. “We entered the house. I was on point. I just knew he was still up on the third floor, so I told my guys, ‘Watch my back,’ just in case, and ran up the stairs. There was a hallway at the top of the stairs and a half-open door at the end. I ran down the hallway, pushed open the door, and he was sitting on the toilet with the baby on his lap, the noose still tight around his neck, his knife on the floor beside him. He looked like he wanted to talk to me, so I shot him in the face. He was still moving, so I shot him again.” At that moment, he clicked the projector and there was the head of the man, slumped against a wall, with bullet holes in his cheek and forehead. The officer had to stop talking for a few minutes because the entire room burst into cheers and applause, myself among them.

“I grabbed the baby and the cord was so tight around his neck that I couldn’t get my fingers underneath it. I pulled my knife, intending to pry it loose or cut it, and one of my team grabbed him, found the knot and got it off. The baby started crying immediately.

“We went to the street, and got the baby to the EMT’s. For those of you who aren’t familiar, we had a protocol in any shooting. We do not speak to anyone other than peer support about the incident on scene, beyond issues relevant to safety.” [AUTHOR’S NOTE: Research has shown that during an adrenaline dump and the immediate crash afterwards, your account of the incident will be patchy, and in some cases, inaccurate. This can be problematic in any subsequent court case. So, the protocol is that the peer support team runs interference for the involved officers, as well as provides a listening ear if there is anything they need to say right then. This communication, with the exception of a duty to warn in case the individual presents risk to others or to themself, is confidential, just as communication with a therapist. Genuine after-action review is done later, generally after twenty-four hours]. “They are good guys, and I’m glad they are there for us. But I had nothing to say. I just wanted to go home.

“So, finally, hours later, I walk in the house, and there is my wife, standing in the kitchen, making dinner. She hadn’t been watching the news, and she heard me come in and she said, ‘How was work today?’ I said to her, ‘Honey. I had a good day at work.’”

Afterward The First

My presentation—creating several scenarios in front of an audience with a team negotiating with me on speaker phone from another room—had gone well. From a presenter’s perspective, though, I was glad I’d gone on before the officer. That would have been tough to follow. Upon my return home, I turned on the news and there was an interview with the mother, her five-year-old shyly standing nearby, the baby whom she and her friends ran out on, apparently unharmed in a stroller. She was angrily denouncing the police for murdering her ex, saying that they didn’t have to do that, he wouldn’t have harmed him (pointing at the baby). I sat there thinking, “That kid is fucked.” She later sued the department—and lost, thankfully.

Twelve years later, I was discussing this case in another locale with a sheriff’s deputy and she said, “Oh. You mean X. He’s twelve years old and he’s the scariest kid in the county.” She went on to give me some truly troubling examples, which led me to ponder the nature of the development of evil, because this child sounded well on his way to being an equal to his father.

• Is this genetic? There is certainly robust research evidence, including twin studies, that psychopathic traits are, in part, genetic. [In twin-studies, researchers locate identical twins who were, for various reasons, separated at birth and adopted by different sets of parents. Because neither is subject to the nurture of their birth parents, and because they are raised in different home environments, we can see, in general terms, to what extent their personality is a product of nature, and what degree it is a product of nurture].

• Was he neurologically damaged by the repeated strangling(s) he suffered? I once walked through a youth detention facility with a neuropsychologist who administered a “Mini-Mental Status Exam” to eighty teenagers who had committed felonies, and he walked out with me, stunned, saying, “Over half of them show signs of neurological damage.”

• Is this due to his upbringing, because as I said then, listening to his mom on TV, “This kid is fucked.”

• Or does the spirit of evil stalk our world, entering into the willing, who openly invite its presence within themselves?

And a final question: What, then, had happened to his father? And his mother? And his father before? And his mother before? And before, and before and before?

Afterward The Second

I have used this story as a teaching device when working with social services professionals. Some people—not all, by any means—have denounced me, saying that my recounting of the story was traumatizing to them, that I didn’t have to be so graphic, or that I shouldn’t have told that terrible story at all. Others are disturbed by the officer’s statement, “He looked like he wanted to talk to me, so I shot him in the face,” as well as denouncing all the audience for cheering the death of a human being. I ask them to consider how awful it was to be in the room listening to the recording of the baby choking and nearly dying and most of us not knowing if he survived. Were they willing to ask why members of the audience might be applauding.

Beyond all that, however, I use this story to teach differentiation: the story of something happening to someone else, no matter how awful it sounds, does not make it happen to you. A therapist is responsible for having a clear sense of self-and-other, to be able to bear witness to the worst that might have happened to someone, as well as bearing witness to the worst that individual, themselves, might have done. If there is no one to bear witness to either our wounds or our sins, there is no hope of healing.

And there is a second teaching in this story. I ask my students if they think the officer suffered from Post-Traumatic-Stress. The majority confidently asserts that he surely did. I ask why. They reply that he shot and killed a human being, and depending on their personal perspective, he either suffered the experience of moral injury, of being a perpetrator in doing such a terrible thing, or was wounded, a victim, in being required to do such a terrible thing.

But trauma is not defined by how horrible something sounds to us. It is not defined by either our imagination about what something would do to us, or our memory of how something similar affected us. Psychological trauma is defined by one’s reaction to an event. Trauma is not memory. Memory may be a scar; trauma an unhealed wound. I point out to my students that if we define the nature of others’ psychological and physical injuries through our own beliefs and expectations, and furthermore, if we try to bring them to our point of view, we are doing a kind of spiritual violence to them. When we impose our narrative upon an event, the other individual must now muster their resources to resist what is not true for them, or through a toxic kind of psychological alchemy, accept our alien viewpoint, because we have succeeded in convincing them that it is the therapeutic thing to do.

Returning to the concept of bearing witness, this is only accomplished through powerful receptivity. In establishing this stance, we prove to the other person that we have enough integrity to “stand” them as they are. The root words of “compassion,” mean to “stand in the face of another’s pain.” As far as the other person is concerned, they may see themselves as damaged, corrupted, cowardly, or evil. They may also experience themselves as honorable, decent and having done the only right thing possible in the circumstances. An empathic stance does not mean that one rescues our client like some kind of “therapeutic hero,” nor does it mean that one claims to understand how the other feels. A true empathic stance means, “I can stand in your presence.” 

I wish to be very clear that the helper should not assume a passive open stance, in which one says nothing of substance so as not to “get in the way of the other person’s process.” That kind of communication is inhuman. Who ever talks to us in that manner? Any individual who has passed through a devastating event needs to be informed that, in the eyes of others, their soul still exists. The soul, that aspect of the person that lives for something greater than themself, can survive anything—but it best survives when directly spoken to. True empathy occurs when we do not distract or confuse the other person by twining our fate around theirs. In bearing witness, we do not become “one” with them in some enmeshed fantasy, nor push them into an agenda of our own. Rather, we become the truth—two separate beings, in some ways unknowable to each other, nonetheless in dialogue, face-to-face.

Therefore, I reply to my students that although I do not know that officer, I do know people who do, and as far as I can tell, he is not suffering in the least. He is described as a fine parent—some people see him at sporting events—and he still loves his wife. He has had an exemplary career in law enforcement, with no reports of unethical behavior, losing his temper or over-reacting or under-reacting in situations (all of which could be a manifestation of reliving a traumatic event).

There are times when a person is required to act in a fraction of a second in the service of life, and they must use violence to do so. Those who can react so impeccably are admirable, truly meriting the term hero. I think he was telling the truth—”I had a good day at work.”

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