More thoughts about the GTiCP: Saw another tweet yesterday about the need for the "facts" to make up their mind. A couple of things on how facts have been used a strategy to avoid dealing with the impact of what occurred.

Here's some facts that are publicly obvious: People who were personally and historically impacted were distressed. We could sit with this distress rather than debate it's validity?

People who were personally impacted expressed feeling silenced online. We could reflect on how we are complicit in silencing, again rather than debate where it has or hasn't happened.

Others expressed guilt. We could sit with guilt and ask ourselves what we have been guilty of, how and why? Rather than dissociate from it through trying to determine facts.

We could ask ourselves why our personal opinion and need to form one based on our personal judgement of facts supersedes listening to the interpretations and voice of lived experience.

And whilst I've seen others say words to the effect that controlling anger is a fundamental skill of a psychologist; I'd like to argue that repressing it isn't. Being asked to squash your own healthy anger as a response to trauma and oppression isn't psychological mindedness.

What is a fundamental skill to being a psychologist however is empathy; being able to sit with the sadness, anger, grief, trauma of what someone has experienced even if you have no lived experience to give you factual "truths" about why they feel like this.

What makes you an even better psychologist is being able to empathise and sit with and attend to these emotions when you know you've been part of and benefited from a system that is complicit in contributing to them.

When we're able to hold our own grief, guilt, sadness and still hold empathy.