Reducing Implicit Bias
“‘Cause I, I and I nuh expect to be justified
By the laws of men, by the laws of men
Oh, true they have found me guilty
But proved, through Jah proved my innocency”
Bob Marley – So Much Things to Say
Introduction
What is implicit bias? What does “reducing implicit bias” mean for professions and professionals who are legally mandated to account for their own biases when working with citizens in precarious life situations– especially when even psychology cannot agree on what is actually happening or what to do about it (HERE; HERE; HERE)? This leads us to ask: What does having to “reduce” implicit bias imply for those required to do so? What does eliminating implicit bias mean for the professional rationalist and the professions that are home to emotions? How can reducing or eliminating implicit bias be approached by two different parties, schools of thought, and professional philosophies? Is there a decision tree or protocol for that? Yes, there is: see HERE.
Is reducing or eliminating the so-called “disease” of implicit bias a metaphor, like addiction is a disease, or is there an agenda? Based on the current DSM classification for addiction, we argue “no” because the true issue is not knowing or believing that addiction and dissociation are solutions/survival strategies. Since addiction is a dissociative healing response, and dissociation is a normal response to all-too-common adverse and traumatic events (O’Brien, 2023a), it becomes clear how rationalists may struggle to identify who is who in the story of psychology, particularly given their limited understanding of dissociation (HERE). A deeper examination of human souls reveals implicit reasons why dissociation-informed and recovery-informed care must begin to bloom in the fields of corporatized law, polarized politics, and industrialized psychology–given the abusive relationship that exists among them (HERE).
We have already witnessed the disastrous public consequences that arise when an industrialized medical system tries to eradicate physical diseases– including those iatrogenically created– through industrialized medicine. Similarly, when we examine psychological processes and the implications of implicit bias in treating so-called psychological conditions, we must confront how the frameworks of modern science fail the common sense test (O’Brien, 2023a; O’Brien, 2024c) because of their historical conceptualization or mislabeling of addiction and dissociation (HERE). Contemporary psychology relies on the rational mind as a systematic tool to address “diseases” that are not truly diseases (HERE). If modern science were as profound as it claims, perhaps it should teach us how to properly implicitly treat people for diseases they are unaware of having (e.g., perfectionism, altruism, and ambition addictions; O’Brien, 2023a).
Drawing on the addiction and dissociative concepts explored in our doctoral work (O’Brien, 2023a), we see that the operationalized meanings of these terms and definitions could support mass community healing and peace in our time. Yet, this is impossible under current definitions because the legal interpretations of these words contradict their moral implications (HERE; HERE). For example, since the healing response relies on the endogenous opioid and cannabinoid immune/healing systems, policy and professional standards should be shaped by those who have been there and come back– not just by academic credentials. Recovery-based professions and individuals with lived experience should be considered equal to those with advanced degrees or specialized training on particular topics. Consider the contradictions: Why does the law mandate child abuse training for professionals who have already studied, identified, assessed, diagnosed, and treated the very conditions that cause such abuse? Why is there a legal distinction between “confidentiality” and “client privilege”? Why are “good faith estimates” exempt for lawyers (HERE)? What do these discrepancies reveal? What implicit biases do they reflect? And what if an entire class of so-called “drugs”–actually just plants and foods–were criminalized despite evidence they are agents of healing, simply because those in power lack psychological understanding?
As Licensed Mental Health Counselors (LMHCs), we grapple with a contradiction: We were trained in diagnosis during graduate school, yet in practice, we cannot diagnose without a state-sanctioned “privilege”–nor testify in court without “diagnostic authority.” If the State could clarify the implicit bias behind this restriction–or explain what value clients should assign to our license–we might better understand this disparity (O’Brien, 2024b; HERE). The hypocrisy deepens: Even when a “higher ranking” licensee and professional “friend of the court” presented the alienation theory, their testimony was dismissed because it does not appear in the DSM (HERE). What double standards are at play here? In a nation founded on separation of church and state, imprisoning citizens based on the dominant class’s subjective morality is itself criminal. Meanwhile, the professionals shaping these systems are presumed to possess a moral superiority unprecedented in human history (O’Brien, 2024b; O’Brien, 2024c). But we must ask: How they actually wielding this purported moral authority? And how valid–or transferable– are their standards? We argue they are indeed transferable, particularly to addiction (O’Brien 2023a).
When one profession can dictate–under threat of penalty– what another must do or learn, it reveals much about the quality of the relationship that exists between them. When public health mandates are imposed, not because of medical necessity, but because the law is misaligned with its own moral requirements (HERE) and psychology does not have proper diagnostics (O’Brien, 2023a), both professions urgently need to provide accurate definitions for terms. In the name of science (which we apparently all have to follow), mandating citizens to do anything is unconstitutional and an expression of someone who is sick in their psychology. We must therefore assess clinically: Is the legal profession itself developmentally, spiritually, and morally mature enough to legislate behavior for society (O’Brien, 2024b; O’Brien, 2024c; HERE)?
If we are not allowed to question the relationship between citizens, professionals, and the government–when the professional power and control dynamics are not aligned historically with the public good (HERE)–unnecessary traumas to the citizenry occur. This is because bureaucratic rhetoric is imprecise and a way to assert power through law and order terminology (HERE). They are implicitly implying a lot to citizens who would be charged to defend it to the death. As professionals, we must all be willing to do the same and look at: what the government is requiring of us; how much we are paying in taxes and for what purpose; and whether their actions align with the demands they ask of us. This conversation is the start of dissociation-informed and recovery-focused care (O’Brien, 2024a) to say the least. At this point in Western Civilization, the professional family and relational dynamics between the law and psychological professions need healing because the law still believes that citizens need a dissociative exorcism and prison instead of healing (O’Brien, 2024a).
We must start evaluating professions and what they think they know. Addiction and dissociation hide in plain sight of professionals who refuse to see them; for those who do, it is all they can see. Particularly around the psychological dimensions of unconsciousness, psychedelics, dissociation, addiction, and abuse, we find reasonable and sensible answers to supposedly unanswerable questions (HERE). How psychologically or morally developed can professions be when they fail to define or live by their own terms and cannot see what is in front of them, yet still dictate other professions (HERE)? Dare we remind Americans about our legal record with the Native Peoples of the Americas? The law exists to regulate other professions under the guise of justice–but when it comes to drugs, moral decrees, and the abuse of children, that line between maltreatment and systemic betrayal becomes dangerously thin. What is happening in our professional dynamics right now isn’t just a failure– it’s institutionalized betrayal trauma.
Since American citizens are implicitly treated as parens patriae (i.e., legal term meaning that people are deemed incapable children of the State), it is time to confront our “parents” about how this legal fiction enables systemic abuse by the legal system, political structures, and corporate industries with addictions to power and control–undiagnosed conditions that history knows well: absolute power corrupts absolutely. What of the intergenerational victims left to inherit their parents’ unresolved traumas, failed learning curves, and futile wars on drugs? Observe how science-based terminology weaponizes rhetoric around pandemics, the crack/opioid epidemics, the war on drugs, systemic racism, the debunked chemical imbalance theory of mental illness, gain-of-function research, the revocation of religious exemptions, free speech restrictions and corporate censorship, and unlawful COVID vaccine mandates and shutdowns. Now, AI is positioned as the ultimate parent– tasked with answering humanity’s existential questions and solving all of life’s problems, so citizens need never think or act again.
The solutions to these social issues reside more readily in addiction recovery than in modern industrialized psychology. Since psychology does not own recovery principles, our readers will eventually have to face a moral choice: accept this reality or actively deny why recovery proves more effective. What is implicitly obvious to those who recognize where this argument leads is that implicit biases must exist in a system where professionals legally dictate others’ actions while exempting themselves (e.g., HERE). Here’s the truth we’ve uncovered: Understanding dissociation and addiction brings healing–because the only way you can heal is by living it again. By their own flawed reasoning, those who haven’t healed remain the sick ones.
What we learned in graduate school–confirmed by multiple professionals and peers across the field–was that what they teach bears little resemblance to what is done in the field. This forces us to ask: What is the difference between being trained and being educated (HERE)? Through our doctoral work (O’Brien, 2023a) and a meta-cognitive analysis of our research (O’Brien, 2025), the answers to life’s questions become clear. We now can implicitly know who is psychologically who (HERE), what inherently motivates destructive behavior (and why) (O’Brien, 2023a), and what the unconscious intentions of each person are (HERE; HERE). From this foundation, readers–professionals and laypeople alike–can reach their own conclusions. Our intention is to illuminate, not to master any outcomes other than what will be. These conclusions are recovery-based, meaning that they were earned through lived experience, formal and informal education, and clinical expertise gained from being there and coming back (HERE; O’Brien, 2024a).
We all possess the capacity for recovery honesty–but what has been implied thus far will soon be revealed. May those who mandate implicit bias training for others finally recognize their ethical and moral obligation to hold their own profession to the same standard (HERE). By restricting confidentiality while fortifying client privilege, the system enforces the rational cognitive/conscious mind’s dominance over the body’s unconscious wisdom (i.e., emotional unconscious mind). If the State can force professionals to report child abuse, then citizens must demand ironclad whistleblower protection and a lifetime ban from the government for those who fail to uphold this. When professions refuse to try it themselves first (HERE), prevent others from following their own values and choices (O’Brien, 2024c), depend on compromised scientists (e.g., grants, funders, and debt), and follow developmentally and morally immature researchers who are both explicitly and implicitly-biased (O’Brien, 2023b), we witness the true pathology: addiction (O’Brien, 2023a), coercion, and systemic abuse in the professional parenting system of America (O’Brien, 2024b; HERE). Only when professionals diagnose comprehensively–recognizing addiction’s transdiagnostic nature (O’Brien, 2023a)– can they see the industrialized corporatism and insurance-based system for what it is (HERE). Yet, modern psychology continues its hypocrisy–preaching ideals it doesn’t practice (O’Brien, 2023b).
The following are clearest examples of how psychological and legal professions define and use words differently: addiction/dependence and attachment (O’Brien, 2023a); psychedelics in psychology and spirituality (O’Brien, 2023b); confidentiality and client privilege; diagnostic privilege (O’Brien, 2024b); good faith estimates (HERE), mandated reporter; law and rules, and ethics as morals (O’Brien, 2024d; HERE). Why members of a profession would give themselves a doctorate (Judicial Doctorate) and not call themselves “Dr.” is rather implicitly ironic, don’t ya think? What does that imply to the reader? It may be the same reasons why they made psychedelics illegal – and why they keep them that way. The double standards that these professions uphold are the conditions of abuse that has and is occurring (O’Brien 2024b; O’Brien, 2024c), but the real consequence of this psychologically sick system is abandoning generations of millions of children to dysregulated and addicted parents and emotionally underdeveloped adults. Beliefs are stages of developmental awareness that relate to levels of consciousness, memory reprocessing, dissociative learning, and brainwave activity (O’Brien, 2023a), but not understanding pathology is incompetence and professionally disgraceful (HERE). As we see it, irrational beliefs are not implicit biases that need to be reduced, but lived (muscle memory) to know the difference between what feels good and what is right. Therefore, we know what we know because of what they don’t know because we have been here before (O’Brien, 2024a; HERE).
Orientation
Left to our own devices as humans, we all will learn what the truth is at some point. However, having clinically engaged with implicit biases, how it is defined matters just as much who is defining it. Readers will have to wait for that answer because if these professionals and professions who claim authority tell others what to do, but do not do it themselves, then they are the ones who need what Healing (O’Brien, 2024a) offers instead of what modern industrialized therapy or AI offers because that is where one can find evidence-based practices that amount to meditation (O’Brien, 2023b). If readers believe that psychology is where they can find healing, they are gravely mistaken (HERE) because it comes from within.
Consequently, if the same principles were applied to the professionals who legally require other professionals and citizens to follow unjust laws (O’Brien, 2023b), reduce implicit bias in decision making (HERE), and require moral character (HERE; O’Brien, 2024b), then the professional power and control dynamic is self-serving AND it is something that we can do something about. But since we do not have addiction accurately and operationally defined in the DSM, we observe that this issue is due a lack of awareness of how power and control are addicting. Hence we have proposed that perfectionism, altruism, and ambition (O’Brien, 2024e) are missing positive addictions that deserve to be categorized in the DSM. Because addiction and the psychological unconscious are not operationally defined in the field of psychology, the legal system is due for healing processes that promote emotional maturity (O’Brien, 2023a; O’Brien, 2025) instead of professional and personal survival.
Reorientation
Reducing and eliminating implicit bias in decision making appears to be an important goal of modern industrial psychology, legal society, and Western culture. We assume it is rather important because they are legally requiring (HERE) other licensed professionals and professions who should already know the difference because their professions and education has defined abuse already. Kindergarteners already know the difference because they can feel it. The implicit bias of our observation is the use of the words “reducing” or “eliminating” and what these suggest or imply/infer to the observer reading this work now.
To put it cryptically, implicit bias is your unconscious body that keeps the score and is who consciously remembers what you forgot because they are not you. Your conscious task as the observer is to not remember because that is their job. “Reducing” or “eliminating” means extermination, extinction, and mass death, at least to the implicit mind, which has learned that this is what is true through its lived experience (e.g., human history). When mass death is so the living can live larger or bigger, then this reality is what the reader finally sees, they can become what they know and what they forgot. None of us arrive at the eternal truth of our dialectical truths easily, but while we can appreciate the motivation behind reducing implicit bias in selective matters, eliminating symptoms of physical ill health or having the goal of eradicating unnecessary disease does not translate evenly into psychology. What it implies is that the promoters of this training do not understand what motivates human behavior and why, do not understand the basic premise of psychology, do not understand true pathology or do not have access to their own; they will never understand because they do not believe or trust that another world or truth exists. Even when one proves that 1 + 1 also = 3 and 4… (O’Brien, 2024c), we stand alone waiting for the answer to come to them.
These professionals will never understand because they will always present the case of “the Other” and hold their position or role within the relational dynamic as their truth or reality. In short, their job is their identity; but to us, this is a personality disorder (O’Brien, 2024b). To them “everything is fine”, but their actions and bodies tell a different story (HERE). Their belief is that they are tasked to bring their truth to others because they know it firsthand. However, this implies that the “other” does not know and negates them automatically by suggesting the opposite and standing their ground professionally. By saying and requiring of others but not doing it themselves, they can no longer claim the words they use (HERE; O’Brien, 2024c). Therefore, we must first define what eliminating mental health symptoms means to the client and then the system because what we have historically and psychologically found is that the emotions are the solution and what the government sells is more government.
From a systems perspective, if corporations and governments are people, then they can be sick like people. Lived experience of reducing implicit bias is trying to eliminate emotional context, qualitative knowledge, and creates ambivalence. Lived experience often contains an expression of truth that professions and professionals should be willing to hear (O’Brien, 2024b). Ultimately and professionally, this is what we are paying professionals to do. We are paying professionals to implicitly follow just laws because we have seen how law can be used against people unconsciously, which is otherwise known as implicit bias. From our own lived experience, laws are subjective, elective, and optional for those who write and how “right” they are. As truth emerges, so does knowledge. What the law and psychology are missing is that the implicit bias is the spirit of the law that moral professionals are morally supposed to be following (HERE; HERE; HERE). For what it is worth, instead of selling you what they got, how about we tell them what we need. We all need to be thinking about what they are selling citizens as services, government, facts, and moral values because a lot of citizens are starting to connect the dots and things are starting to add up to a lot of citizens. Since professionals do not have to do it themselves (HERE), we can question the words officials chose to use (O’Brien, 2023a). By doing so we can capture anyone’s implicit biases.
Background to the Problem
As a professional citizen we are also wondering where that implicit bias need comes from, how they are defining implicit bias, and what implicit bias means to people, civilians, and professionals. In our lived experience as a clinician, healer, philosopher, and psychedelic researcher, implicit bias tends to be viewed as a negative thing. But what if our implicit bias is simply our lived experience of unresolved trauma that is predicated on dissociative conditioning that one can become dependent on (e.g., addicted to trauma)? This is what we have found (O’Brien, 2023a). What we contend is that lived experience is what shapes worldviews and informs how we feel about an issue, topic, person, or situation and informs us about what to do. Implicit bias would be based in the implicit memory system that produces and houses emotional content of the body and can be accessed or triggered, depending on the state that the memory is held in. Therefore, we have to ask, what if the physical body is the psychological unconscious and the conscious mind will never believe that the unconscious mind is conscious (O’Brien, 2024c; HERE); how can we convince the side of us that will never give up, to give up?
To our point of writing this, what if the implicit bias of the cognitive mind is to negate emotional existence to the point of elimination or extermination. While the aim of reducing bias may sound innocent enough, the reality of it is that those who would impose such a requirement must be disconnected from the reality that is in front of them because of how they have labeled the terms of the unconscious, addiction, and dissociation historically (O’Brien, 2023a; O’Brien, 2025) Therefore, if addiction is not accurately understood by legal professions because it has not been operationalized by psychology, then the words professionals use have different meanings. If the words they use to define their terms match the meaning (e.g., lived experience), then citizens would need to have address the unprofessionalism of behaving immorally and how it relates to unresolved developmental traumas. What if what they know about addiction is wrong? In some way, won’t that mean that what they are doing is wrong (HERE)?
The New York State Department of Education (DOE) and Office of Professions (HERE) required all mandated reporters to obtain training in prevention of suspected and known cases of child abuse. Our clinical observation (O’Brien, 2023a) is that if there is abuse, then addictions would be involved; but since addictions are not accurately defined in the DSM and in psychology, misinterpretations are bound to happen because the law and psychology are not on the same professional page with the words they chose and our lived experience (e.g., meaning) and ultimately our implicit bias. Our implicit bias is the body that keeps the score. When what the body is holding is released, we are all better for it, but where does that energy go?
What if addiction is dissociation and dissociation is the start to the healing process (O’Brien, 2023a)? What if meditation is evidence based? What if the default mode network turning off with exercise, meditation, or psychedelics is what creates the conditions for psychological healing (e.g., dual attention) (O’Brien, 2023b)? What if there are more addictions than just substance use and gambling (O’Brien, 2023a)? What if addictions are transdiagnostic and can be transferred? What if what is irrational is how the rational mind would label or identify the emotional mind? What if you are dreaming and you don’t know if you have woken up yet?
If you answered these questions to any degree, we suggest our Meeting Area Screening and Assessment (MASA) and our qEEG Path of the Wounded Healer orientation process to confirm what you think you don’t know, but do. From there, you can start to know how you feel about your experience so you can better know that you are able to know. But what if those professions or professionals who are imposing and mandating other professionals to report on child abuse are the ones who are doing it? Would this implicit reasoning and logic go against their rationalist conclusions, moral values, and common sense (HERE) or will it become the reality that they thought or believed they would never see?
DATA
Are all lawyers mandated reporters? Nope, not in NYS: HERE. Google says that lawyers are the opposite of a mandated reporter; therefore they can keep secrets without legally having to tell anyone (HERE). Are confidentiality and client privilege the same in the minds of citizens? Is HIPAA the same or equal to “client privilege”? In therapy, this would be considered psychologically relevant and professionally suspect to the intentions of the person sitting in front of us, but professionally we have to deal with this level of psychopathic behaviors from systematic professional bureaucrats who claim that we are doing something wrong if we do not follow their illegal laws that go against the very same science that they say that we should be following (HERE). Even within legal proceedings, lawyers and all of their professional organizations do not have to tell the whole truth but the truth; but they require us to do so; AND THEY DID NOT THINK TO TELL THE TRUTH FIRST BEFORE WE POINTED IT OUT (HERE)! This double standard is relevant to the outcomes of our nation, but the legal professionals who have had it too good for too long are not going to simply let their addiction to power and control go without making their future known. By any other name, this is dissociative at best; and addictive at its worst because it is how we create emotional safety in our unsafe real world.
Figure 1. Civil Servant’s Protocol for Assessing Implicit Bias when making decisions regarding citizens, public policy, legal proceedings, and unjust laws
By becoming a civil servant or working with governmental agencies, you are choosing to work for and with the government. Therefore, you are ethically and morally responsible to serve the citizens of the country. Each interaction and transaction that you make has to be made to serve of the citizenry. This is not only for the greater good of all, but to preserve the rights of future generations as well. Any decision or indecision is able to be psychologically reviewed through the implicit process we are presenting here. As ethically mandated whistleblowers, you are morally and legally required to break your code of ethics when social and legal injustices are inherent, obvious, and a clear and present danger to all life forms on earth. As a governmental employee, it is your responsibility to disregard your implicit bias for the greater good of the government and to exercise your right to defend your country (there is a difference between these two). Your ability to assess your own level of implicit bias is compromised by your paycheck, so this protocol is here to help you decide whether to whistleblow on your fellow Americans civil servants.
It is important to be aware of the propensity for implicit or explicit bias and to be intentional about making decisions based on the objective facts of a situation. One proven strategy to mitigate bias is to examine whether the facts of the situation would lead you to the same decision to whistleblow if the demographic, mental health history, drug of choice, and personal information for the child, person, or family were different.
For example, would you make the same decision to call if any of the following were different? The child or family’s:
Race?, Ethnicity?, Gender?, Gender identity?, Sexual orientation or expression?, Religion?, Immigration status?, Primary spoken language?, Culture?, Age?, Neighborhood where they reside?, Presence of a disability?, Occupation? (e.g., Lawyer, Police Officer), Socio-economic status?, Drug or Drug Use?, Vaccine status?, Political affiliation?, Hygiene?
If you answered “no” to any of those questions, bias may be impacting your decision to make the call. If you are interested in learning more about what feeds into implicit bias, Harvard University has developed the Implicit Association Test (IAT). You can access a variety of IAT tests here: https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/takeatest.html
Figure 2. Governmental Mandated Whistleblower Decision Tree
As a civil servant you are also a mandated whistleblower on governmental abuses, bureaucratic fraud, and legal injustices. Before deciding to whistleblow, you should answer the questions in the decision tree based on objective facts and implicit information when involved in governmental business and dealings. Please assess for yourself whether your own unresolved trauma, dissociative and addictive biases may be impacting your answers by reviewing the reflection question on the other side of this page. Use the diagram below to determine if you should report a governmental employee for lacking in Moral Character or turn yourself in to the same authorities that you serve and pay you for being morally unfit for duty.
1) Question: Are you in a work situation that is compromising your moral values?
a) If you are, would you report the situation to an authority in your personal life? If you would not report it in your personal life, why would you enforce or report it in your professional life?
2) Question: Does this matter involve a child that is under 18?
a) As dissociation-informed and recovery focused care requires that the law recognize that we are all made of dissociative parts, the law will need to follow morally-ethical (O’Brien, 2024d) principles before determining what is true.
b) If the profession does not know what its implicit biases are, it would be revealing an implicit bias.
c) Are you in an unconscious reenactment or does it feel like history is repeating?
d) Since science shows that children are not fully developed until the age of 25, the legal authorities would have to start following science instead of legal precedent.
3) Do you have reasonable cause to suspect that your employer or you are putting other citizens in imminent danger or financial dire straits with their policies, irrational beliefs, and behaviors?
a) If you are worried about losing your job or cite some existential ethical or moral code of duty, please review your codes of conduct.
4) Do you have reasonable cause to suspect that the impairment or imminent danger of impairment to the child is the result of a person’s failure to exercise a minimum degree of governmental responsibility.
a) When in the course of human events there arises a reason to recognize that the previous generation is abusing the current one, the rights and liberties of all civilians involved are to consult with an outside Healer, instead of using their own logic and reasoning because that is pathology.
5) If your governmental agency fails to exercise a minimum degree of moral competency, recovery principles can be suggested and encouraged, but ultimately, govern-mental employees need to side with citizens over their own best interest, which is summarized in our concept of Moral-Ethics (O’Brien, 2024d). If you cannot, you are a fink: HERE
6) Please act in accordance with the Moral Character Clause and common sense. If you do not know what these are, please act in accordance with kindergarten rules and the Moral Character Clause of do no harm to self or others.
Discussion
Harvard developed implicit research prior to ours, so if you are interested in learning more about what feeds implicit bias, we would suggest reading both. Harvard would be filled with professionals who believe that their way of life or living is implicitly correct and socially appropriate (O’Brien, 2024c). In the dominant culture, their opinion would be true for them, but the observer is relative to the observed; therefore, their implicit bias is that they know what they are talking about and have research to back it up. However, recent themes in modern history like psychedelics and healthcare would say otherwise (HERE).
Academia and science have failed at capturing what is not there, what is there, and why; which is dissociation. The reason why they cannot see it is because they are addicted to not capturing it. If they did know what they were talking about, the Diagnostic Statistical Manual of Mental Health Disorders would have different categories of diagnostics (O’Brien, 2023a), therapists would have legal immunity (HERE), and the law would cover mandated reporters who had to behave morally-ethical instead of legally-ethical (O’Brien, 2024d). The law would also be made to follow qualitative science instead of quantitative research only (O’Brien, 2023a) because if laws were built to last, they wouldn’t need updating.
When implicit biases are impacting intentions, opinions, choices, and decisions, citizens have the right to bring our protocol into their legal process. This can be used to expose the academic and scientific rigor required to be able to study implicit bias. If we apply their addiction to implicit bias to their decisions and indecisions, we would find that citizens are government employees who have turned on their fellow citizens to gain the benefit promised a good retirement and healthcare for life due to governmental employment.
Implicit bias has also been defined as “lived experience” that informs one’s “worldview” (O’Brien, 2023a). This is based on our mixed-methods research on consciousness, trauma, dissociation, and addiction, which obviously challenges the negative bias that assumes that having an implicit bias is negative. Eliminating lived experience is to not listen to emotional logic or moral reasoning (O’Brien, 2024b). When it comes to lived experience, who would you rather be talking to, someone who has been there and back or someone who hasn’t? Following this reason and logic, psychology would get the kind of results from Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) as a psychotherapy (See the Body Keeps the Score (Van der Kolk, 2014)), behavioral modification, or searching for genetic reasoning for addictions. From our dissociative position, our unconsciousness has a consciousness to it, which is the lived experience of the body that can keep the score; therefore those who keep the score, know the score(O’Brien 2023a). Those who cannot remember the score are doomed to repeat it and those who cannot forget the score are doomed to repeat it as well. If one is living dissociated from this truth (the physical body is the psychological unconscious), what expressing one’s side, take, opinion, profession, or expertise on a subject does reveal is who is expressing themselves, what their allegiances and alliances are, their degrees of professional competence, and, ultimately, who they believe the observee is, psychologically speaking (O’Brien, 2023a; O’Brien, 2024c). With this knowledge, the future is now, the past is present, and now is now.
When there are professions upholding imbalances in systems of power and control, they can be manipulated so that dependence can be societally formed. Macropolitics and the field of psychology has a lot of questions to answer in their modernization and their ethically-based professions of “do no harm”, “protect and serve”, and “serving justice”. Psychological implicit systems are the physical body and are psychologically-based expressions of unresolved traumatic material and/or “dissociation parts”, like professions. These are all unresolved implicit memories in the individual, which are influenced and more than likely unresolved trauma, but in society they are personal. Macroeconomics is fundamentally a legal drug and gambling ring of circumstances, predicated on global markets and fads. This is from our trauma-informed and clinically inspired perspective, instead of their profit motive academic/intellectual and training-based programming. However, from our dissociation-informed, healing-inspired, and recovery-focused care we know that addictions are not wrong, they are the solutions.
Our research explores that since modern industrialized psychology has not operationally defined physical unconscious as the psychological body, identified key addiction and dissociation processes, or that addiction is transdiagnostic and transferable as well (O’Brien, 2023a), the professions and the definitions of the words they choose may not align with the meaning or lived experience of those who treat the mental health conditions they claim are scientifically stable or diagnostically sound (O’Brien, 2024c). Laws based on these incomplete and inconvenient truths are what the system needs to be researching and making policies on. We need to either start policing governmental professionals who are not able to be morally competent (HERE; HERE) or pretend like those who chose a government position did it to serve the public good. If they had, whistleblowing would have gotten you promoted.
If a nation is built on laws, then they we must psychological review their laws to see if they meet our standard of psychological importance, appropriateness, and is reciprocal. If not, then we do not need more rule that are laws because that is what is confusing and may be by design. Like a first time babysitter making the rules and turning them into laws, we psychologically know how old the law is behaving (HERE).
Conclusions
Within the context here, the States use of implicit bias is obviously relating to aspects of unresolved racial biases in the dominant culture, but we will apply its protocol to recent public policy decisions. We will do this on the subjects of drug policy, historical context of dissociation, and child abuse. We see the opportunity to apply our protocol to the same system that gave us their “protocol” to “reduce implicit bias” in “decision making” when relating to their mandating of reporting of suspected reporting child abuse to authorities. As we have seen, the implicit irony of their stance before and we restate that they are implicitly biased, morally underdeveloped (O’Brien, 2024b), and pathological (O’Brien, 2024c; HERE); therefore, since psychology is incomplete and law is supposed to follow science, both professions need to consult with a professional Healer to help their professions morally develop since their current actions and behaviors are those of a school aged child (O’Brien, 2025). Since corporations are people, and professionals are people who join corporations or start corporate associations, then professionals who are bound to licenses that uphold unethical legal and immoral practices of business are suspect. This is from our dissociation-informed clinical lived experience, because they are addicted and do not know it (O’Brien, 2023a). Having recently heard of other situations where professionals are calling on passive comments that people say and reporting it to the police or authorities, leaves one thinking about what you are implying when you have to mandate something to people who are supposed to define what you are requiring legally.
Future Directions
Please remember we are living in a society in which trauma is the norm and we are treating traumas as if they were a disease. We are a nation that sells addiction as if it was a disease when it is really an unconscious choice conditioned into their physical body that is living dissociated to heal (O’Brien, 2023a). We have professions who tell other professions what to do but do not take their own requirements (HERE). We live in a society that sells us things we do not need, but tells us that we do. They tell us that psychedelics have “no medical value” when they provide both medical and psychological value (as if these were separate). The fact that they did not see how psychedelics had psychological value means that they did not understand them and that psychology is unwanted. Maybe psychology is being too intrusive for the likes of those who do not know what is right for them. This is coming from the generation that tells kids that they are adults at 18, when science shows that it is 25 years old. If the law is practiced at the developmental age of the preconventional and operational stage of moral development (O’Brien, 2024b), then why are we pervasively following them to our grave? A nation of laws does not mean that they do not have to be inflexible. “Pervasively”, “unwanted” and “inflexibility” are hallmarks of personality disorders and these are the product of a sick family system. Welcome to recovery, America. You are as addicted as you were when you were born. You will be dissociatively born again; once you are able to heal from the original sin of our birth trauma (e.g., when the same psychological professions were borne)(HERE).
References
O’Brien, A. (2023a). Addiction as Trauma-Related Dissociation: A Phenomenological Investigation of the Addictive State. International University of Graduate Studies. (Dissertation). Retrieved at woundedhealersinstitute.org/courses/addiction-as-dissociation-model-course/
O’Brien, A. (2023b). Memory Reconsolidation in Psychedelics Therapy. In Path of the Wounded Healer: A Dissociative-Focused Phase Model for Normative and Pathological States of Consciousness: Training Manual and Guide. Albany, NY: Wounded Healers Institute. Retrieved at woundedhealersinstitute.org/courses/addiction-as-dissociation-model-course/
O’Brien, A. (2023c). Path of the Wounded Healer: A Dissociative-Focused Phase Model for Normative and Pathological States of Consciousness: Training Manual and Guide. Albany, NY: Wounded Healers Institute. Retrieved at woundedhealersinstitute.org/
O’Brien, A. (2024a). Healer and Healing: The re-education of the healer and healing professions as an advocation. Re-educational and Training Manual and Guide. Albany, NY: Wounded Healers Institute. Retrieved at woundedhealersinstitute.org/
O’Brien, A. (2024b). Diagnostic Privilege: Meta-Critical Analysis. In Healer and Healing: The re-education of the healer and the healing profession as an advocation. Re-educational and Training Manual and Guide. Appendix 2. Albany, NY: Wounded Healers Institute. Retrieved at woundedhealersinstitute.org/courses/addiction-as-dissociation-model-course/
O’Brien, A. (2024c). Meta-Critical Analysis: The “Science” of Pseudoscience. In Healer and Healing: The re-education of the healer and the healing profession as an advocation. Re-educational and Training Manual and Guide. Appendix 3. Albany, NY: Wounded Healers Institute. Retrieved at woundedhealersinstitute.org/courses/addiction-as-dissociation-model-course/
O’Brien, A. (2024d). Moral-Ethics. In Healer and Healing: The re-education of the healer and healing professions as an advocation. Re-educational and Training Manual and Guide. Chapter 14. Albany, NY: Wounded Healers Institute. Retrieved at woundedhealersinstitute.org/
O’Brien, A. (2024e). Path of the Wounded Healers for Thrivers: Perfectionism, Altruism, and Ambition Addictions; Re-education and training manual for Abusers, Activists, Batterers, Bullies, Enablers, Killers, Narcissists, Offenders, Parents, Perpetrators, and Warriors. Re-Education and Training Manual and Guide. Albany, NY: Wounded Healers Institute. Retrieved at woundedhealersinstitute.org/
O’Brien, A. (2025). American Made Addiction Recovery: A Healer’s Journey Through Professional Recovery. Albany, NY: Wounded Healers Institute. Retrieved at woundedhealersinstitute.org/
