the power of lies, The cost of truth.

There was a time when I believed I knew my path. It stretched out before me like a winding trail through the hills, clear and bright, leading me toward the life I thought was meant to be mine. Psychology/Psychiatry. The mind. The heart. A healer of the soul or so these names imply. People found their way to me with their stories, their sorrows, their tangled thoughts, and I held space for them. What better calling than this? To sit with another human being and listen. To be the lighthouse when their waters turned rough.

College was my foundation, my proving ground. I threw myself into my studies with passion, devouring textbooks, theories, and the intricacies of human behavior. But the real learning came not in the classroom but in the hushed, fluorescent-lit halls of the Neuropsychiatric Institute at UCLA, where I was part of a research team. We studied the mind and its ability to learn.

It was there, in that world of sterile labs and whispered conversations, that I first glimpsed a darkness I could not unsee.

The Experimentation of Souls

The institute was at the forefront of something new in the dawn of the 70’s, something cutting-edge, something that, at its core, chilled me to the bone. The Violence Control Center. A government-funded project, pitched as a solution to societal unrest, a way to predict, contain, and control human aggression. It promised advancements in psychiatric treatment, but beneath the polished words, I saw it for what it was.

Control.

Manipulation.

Experimentation, not only on animals—who suffered in ways I could not bear to witness—but on people.

My professor, one of the few voices of reason, raised the alarm. He saw what I saw, but louder. He warned of the ethical abyss into which this project would descend. The things they proposed, the methods they justified, turned my stomach. I had grown up in nature, surrounded by animals who were more family than pets, trekking through the vast wilderness where life pulsed in pure, untamed beauty. To see such life—any life—reduced to an experiment in control and subjugation was more than I could stomach.

And now, to extend that to a person—lobotomies, forced compliance, and experiments not yet named but already in motion, cloaked in the language of treatment and progress—was a horror beyond words. The mind, the soul, the very essence of a human being, reduced to something to be altered, subdued, controlled. What had begun in laboratories on the bodies of the voiceless—animals, the institutionalized, the forgotten—was now being refined, repackaged, legitimized.

The experiment had always been about control.

And when control is the goal, truth, choice, and humanity are simply collateral damage.

So I walked away.

From the research. From the world I had believed would be mine.

I told myself I was done.

But life has a way of leading you back to the very places you swore you would never return to.

The Circle of Voices

Not long after, my personal world changed in ways heretofore unseen.

My parents had been in a plane crash—one that, by all logic, they should not have survived. They had been flying over the vast, untamed landscapes of Southern Utah when the small plane went down. The wreckage should have been their grave. And yet, my mother walked—twelve miles through the wilderness, guided, she would later tell me, by something unseen. An angel’s hand on her shoulder. A presence leading her, step by step, to safety.

By some miracle, they all lived. And I drove across the desert with my grandmother and a friend from church to bring them home from the hospital, to see with my own eyes that they were still here, still breathing.

The experience had barely settled inside me when I found myself back in class. It was a course on Group Process Theory & Practice—one that encouraged us to share, to expose the raw, beating hearts of our personal lives so we could understand how to work with others in their vulnerability.

That day, we sat in a circle, waiting for our turn to speak. One by one, my classmates unfolded their struggles, their griefs. A girl, barely holding herself together, broke down as she spoke of her parents' divorce. The pain in her voice was real, tangible. The room held its breath with her sorrow.

I hesitated.

The weight of my own story still pressed against my ribs, too fresh. Should I speak? Should I hold it inside?

In the end, I spoke. I told them. Of the crash. Of the impossible survival. Of the miles my mother walked through desolation, led by something unseen.

And then—

The professor.

She brutally dismissed me, her words sharp and cutting. Accused me of fabricating a grander tragedy, as if grief were a competition, as if my truth had no place in the room. She had already decided what was real, what was acceptable, what fit within the tidy borders of her perception—and anything beyond that, anything that disrupted the narrative she had constructed, was simply not allowed to exist. This was the moment I learned what truth costs. It is not met with curiosity or understanding but with hostility.

The air thickened. The world shrank.

Disbelief.

Shock.

Betrayal.

I stood there as the weight of her accusations pounded against me like stones, each word a strike meant to silence, to wound.

“I am not a liar,” I told her, my voice steady despite the storm inside me. “My parents were in a plane crash. I just brought them back from the hospital in Utah.”

And then—I walked out.

I never went back.

I washed my hands of those who could look at life—at suffering—and, with so little regard, discard a truth simply because it did not fit their narrative. A story stolen, silenced, left unspoken.

Until now.

The Other Side of the Table

That was the moment I turned my back on psychology/psychiatry.

I was done.

I thought I had seen the worst of it at the research institute, but this was something different. If those tasked with guiding others through their pain could be so callous, so dismissive of truth, what place did I have or want to have in this world?

And yet—

Years later, life led me back.

Not as the practitioner.

As the patient.

Locked inside a mental ward, I saw the machine from the other side. The gears turning, the mechanisms of power and control grinding against those caught within them. I saw the same cold detachment in the eyes of those who held the keys, the same quiet certainty that their version of reality was the only one that mattered.

But this time, I could not walk away.

Once again, the all-too-familiar pattern unfolded. Their certainty drowned out truth. Their authority rewrote reality. My story did not fit the one they had already created.

Again, I was told I was a liar.

Again, I was told my story wasn’t real.

And yet—

It was.

Full Circle

Life is strange. It loops back on itself in ways we can never predict or even imagine.

I once believed psychology/psychiatry was my calling. I walked away from it in disgust, knowing I wanted no part in a system that treated people as subjects to be controlled rather than souls to be understood. And yet, years later, I was forced back into it—not as a practitioner, not as someone seeking help, but as a captive in its machinery.

Not because I needed healing or their so-called treatment.

Because the system itself had never changed.

What I had witnessed—and what I was later subjected to—was only the tip of the iceberg. A world where practitioners and professors believe they know more than the person speaking their own truth. A system that manufactures its own version of reality, rolling over personal agency and rewriting stories to fit its own designs. Just because a story seems improbable does not mean it is untrue—it simply exists beyond the limits of another’s understanding, outside the narrow parameters of what they believe possible, and so they reject it, not for its falsehood, but for their own inability to grasp it. What I once saw from the outside became even more apparent when I was caught inside its web—a system and practice that knows no boundaries, that justifies its power at the expense of the very lives it claims to serve.

But one thing remains clear:

Stories matter.

Telling the truth matters.

And when someone bares their soul, the only answer—the only one that will ever matter—is to listen.