Meanwhile, Appeals Court Judge Brett Kavanaugh insists the teenage incident never happened. Six years ago with her husband (they have two sons), she went into counseling and, because the assault involved a powerful person, she submitted to a lie-detector test administered by an experienced FBI agent, a test she passed with flying colors. Given she works in the area of trauma, it’s not out of the realm of possibility that the sexual assault she tells of kicked off her own psychological education - in the spirit of the ancient adage, know thyself. Blasey (who chooses to be known by her maiden name only) says she was so traumatized at age 15 by the sexual assault she experienced 36 years ago that it negatively affected her life for many years.
Christine Blasey Ford, a 51-year-old research-oriented professor of psychology in California. The point is the exact same incident can mean wholly different things to different people.Ī lot of synapses went off in my brain when I heard about the charges of attempted rape leveled at Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh by Dr. Counseling helps re-direct these improperly-stored records to the proper filing location in the central brain. So we know how really scary events can get locked up in remote parts of the nervous system, which means they never made it to the proper filing cabinet in the brain and they sometimes trigger unexpected flashbacks. Thanks to things like the Vietnam War, there’s been a lot of research on Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. Once one accepts the idea that memory is not a pure copy of reality, the issue quickly becomes the integrity and credibility of the person doing the imagining. Of course, trained psychologists can explain this better than I can. Somehow, the brain takes orders and responds to provocations and turns these filed records into re-imagined words, sounds and pictures - a virtual theater of the mind. To accept the idea of imagination as a tool useful “to penetrate” a wall of dishonesty one has to first accept the idea that memories are not fact, that memory is actually nothing but the imagining, or re-imagining, of experience filed somewhere in the brain as micro electro-chemical charges. Imagination is a tool given to each and every one of us by either God or Nature, depending on your choice of metaphor for the abiding Great Mystery. These days, politics and culture are irretrievably mixed up. He even acted on the show as the president’s father in flashbacks he played an attorney on the HBO show Big Love.
Besides his nightly show on MSNBC, he was an aide to Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, then for years he was a writer/producer on a fictional TV show, The West Wing. There’s so much bald-faced lying going on among Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee that the media needs to stop accepting this condition as normal and “to penetrate that lie.” That’s the view of Lawrence O’Donnell, a self-proclaimed mainstream socialist who isn’t afraid of controversy, a man who has worked in a number of roles inside the American political/cultural machine.