Well, this blog got awfully serious quick. I was going to write this one about addiction and alcoholism—not the lightest topic either—but with the release of the Torture Report, also known as the Senate’s highly-redacted executive summary from the Committee Study of the Central Intelligence Agency's Detention and Interrogation Program, I realized it would be morally remiss of me not to take this brief hot minute when the public eye is trained on this issue to share some information with you.You see, I wrote my dissertation on psychologists’ involvement in the creation and implementation of the torture program at Guantanamo and other CIA “black sites” during the War on Terror. I was immersed in it for an embarrassingly long time (the dissertation that is), and I frankly had hoped the whole issue would be resolved by now—the perpetrators would be in prison, the system would be reformed so that it could never happen again, psychologists would have organized and taken a powerful stand against this misuse of power in their name. Yet here we are, 10 years after the first revelations of torture appeared in the media, my dissertation long since bound in obscurity in my school’s library, and not only are the revelations still coming, there is only now the first hint of a real investigation into the specific role psychologists played in this process. But as psychologist Steven Reisner states in his new piece in Slate , there would be no torture without psychologists. Also, just this morning there was a very informative and comprehensive segment on Democracy Now! featuring both Steven Reisner and Alfred McCoy, whose book A Question of Torture: CIA Interrogation, from the Cold War to the War on Terror provided the original road map to many of the issues I covered in my dissertation. I was at the 2007 APA Conference in San Francisco shown in this segment, where psychologists made a desperate plea to the APA to put an end to these practices, while military officers in full camo fatigues stood menacingly around the room and Col. Larry James (chief psychologist at Guantanamo) made the case that "if you remove psychologists from these facilities, people will die."I’m obviously not going to be able to dive deeply into this issue for purposes of this blog, but I want to offer a few key points for you to keep in mind as the discourse around this recedes out of public consciousness and we all go back to business as usual.I will argue in various ways in upcoming blogs that psychotherapy is fundamentally about love. It is through love that we connect and heal one another and is, in my humble opinion, what is being referred to when we talk about the “therapeutic alliance,” or refer to the ineffable healing process in therapy that scientists just can’t quantify, try as they might. But we mustn’t be content to keep our love confined to the therapeutic hour or the individuals with whom we work. Just because our work with clients is private and confidential doesn’t mean that we must live private and confidential lives. As Martin Luther King, Jr. said, “Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice. Justice at its best is love correcting everything that stands against love.” As a group we tend to be conflict-averse and we’re used to holding a great deal of space for complexity, can imagine the inner lives of perpetrators and victims alike, and have trained ourselves to reflect instead of react. In this way we have a great deal to offer the suffering world, but we must step out of the confines of our cozy offices and actually find one another first. Otherwise we are just passing each other in life’s hallway for a quick pee break between sessions.And for any of you brave souls who would like to know more about the dark side of the psychology profession and its role in torturing people the world over, feel free to request a copy of my dissertation. I’m hoping to turn it into a book, but if the dissertation was a slow process, well—let’s just say it might be awhile.Until the next " Bad Therapy " installment, just know that torture is really the worst therapy of all.*The ideas expressed here are those of the author and not necessarily of Psychotherapy.net, which is gracious to offer a platform for their free expression.