The myth of the objective expert

Take no one’s word for anything, including mine

- but trust your experience. 

― James Baldwin

I pitched my book, It’s Not You, It’s the World, to over a hundred literary agents, persistently sending emails into the silent abyss of presumed rejection for years. When I finally celebrated my first response back—albeit still a rejection—they suggested I present myself as less of a hot mess and more of an expert. You will establish more trust with your readers this way, they said.

It’s feedback I’d heard before. “Trust your own authority as an expert,” my writing mentors kept advising. “I want more Jo and less quotes from everyone else.”

But what even is an expert? Can any one person have the authority to understand someone else’s experience? And does hiding my own vulnerabilities under the opaque polish of the objective expert make me any more trustworthy?

Over a century ago, sociologist Patrick Geddes defined an expert as someone who knows more and more about less and less. As someone who’s spent years bunkered away in classrooms, laboratories, hospitals, and clinics, I may be an expert in inhabiting the role of doctor and therapist, but not in living the unique experiences that dictate your distress. Only you are.

And even if I could claim to be an expert in the circumstances of your suffering, I’d never be objective in how I explore it with you. We can’t deny the immeasurable influences that shape how we interact with our experiences, from the biology we’re born into to the environments we’ve learned from, such as the complex cultures of the people around us and our intersections of power and privilege. We’re quietly conditioned to have unique lenses about every domain of life, from how we express emotions and thoughts, to how we love, connect, consume, work, play and share. The best we can do is acknowledge that many realities can exist at the same time. Everything’s subjective.

Recognizing our own biases and blindspots is murky at best, and more like trying to find a lost contact lens without wearing any glasses. When scientists study how well we know our own minds, the short answer is not very well, concludes psychologists Timothy Wilson and Yoav Bar-Anan.^[1] This is why social psychologists study “implicit bias,” the automatic attitudes and associations that arise outside of our awareness. “Curiously, people seem to be unaware of their own unawareness,” explains Wilson and Bar-Anan. Adding to the challenge, we often assume that our own views are objective, while those of our opponents are not.^[2]

So, while I hope to allow as wide an audience as possible to feel seen and supported by my work, I can’t pretend to be a neutral expert in the process, nor will my personal experiences alone resonate for many of you. I’m not an objective observer of the world that’s making us sick: I’m uniquely impacted by it too. Even more, the intent of my work is to inspire us to disrupt and drastically transform the old systems that keep harming us all. That’s not neutral. And as a queer psychiatrist, even my identity is political, from scientologists picketing at my profession’s meetings to anti-2SLGTBQ+ protesters opposing the inclusive curriculum of my kids’ schools.

So how can a white Canadian settler, who’s a cis-gendered, able-bodied physician, residing in the relative safety of the unceded and stolen Indigenous homelands of Ləkʷəŋən speaking peoples of the Songhees (Ləkʷəŋən) and Esquimalt (Xwepsum) Nations (colonized as Victoria, BC) marinating for decades in my position of so much unearned privilege and power, attest to being a neutral expert of your mental health? I can’t. Especially when mental health symptoms are experienced most heavily in the bodies and minds of those afflicted by personal, collective, and intergenerational inequities and adversity.

The limited lens of one person will never be enough to help us understand what it means to be human, in both sickness and health, especially from those who traditionally hold too much power and privilege. Nor will distancing myself as the benevolent and unaffected “helper” over here serving sick “patients” over there. There is no us and them. While the harm is not distributed equally, we are all afflicted by the dysfunction of a world built on unfair systems that make everyone sick.

While I’m professionally a psychiatrist, psychotherapist, meditation teacher, and clinical professor of medicine at the University of British Columbia, I identify most with the role of facilitator, someone who creates space for others to explore what makes us sick, and what makes us well again. Facilitator adrienne maree brown teaches that her role is “meant to be part of the container…walls, doors, and windows…not the centerpiece, not the boat.”^[3]

In this way, I hope to move beyond my limited lens of a single life’s experience, listening and learning from others to integrate and elevate the voices of those who are living and breathing real life solutions to our collective problems. I especially magnify voices who have been marginalized because they intensely understand the impacts of the harmful systems we live in and are most urgently finding solutions to survive. At the same time, we can’t let those most hurt by our systems do the heavy lifting: We must all rise to the huge task of resuscitating our ailing world.

I often disclose the mess in my own body and mind to push me off any imagined pedestal and show that I too am stumbling along with you, often ruled by unconscious forces and defense systems wildly outside of my control. I’m not painting a hero’s journey in my story as I haven’t arrived at any glistening destination, nor is there a static place to arrive. I’m a work in progress, just like everyone else, practicing self-compassion for all my imperfections on this bumpy journey of constantly shifting ground, adapting and unlearning, and then learning and relearning.

Showing up means messing up. A lot. My politics may feel too radical or not radical enough. I’ve mistakenly caused harm before and my good intentions can’t protect me from making mistakes again. As our language evolves daily and is specific to cultural context, my words likely won’t age or travel well. Despite trying desperately to learn from and prevent any negative impact in the world, I don’t even know what I don’t know, just like you. And as a white settler, I’m indoctrinated by Canada’s dominant culture and its dark history of marginalizing others. I continue to benefit from my power and privilege, while still figuring out how best to see it, feel it, redistribute it, and help transform our systems into ones that promote life and justice. I hope my unavoidable biases and mistakes as the messenger don’t obstruct the value of my work's messages.

This work feels risky. Revealing ourselves vulnerably can lead to rejection. At the same time, true belonging requires it. Right now, more than ever, we need to come together and belong to a broader movement of shared interests if we hope to survive. The intertwined goals of creating an equitable and sustainable world require lots of people to join our team. Yet building diverse, intergenerational movements always creates conflict, teaches organizers Kelly Hayes and Mariame Kaba in Let This Radicalize You: Organizing and the Revolution of Reciprocal Care. “But the desire to shrink groups down to spaces of easy agreement is not conducive to movement building,” they teach.^[4]

Today’s culture of zero-tolerance for mistakes deprives us of learning from constructive feedback and repair within relationships, Hayes and Kaba warn. Instead, they ask, can we support each other’s growth with compassion and curiosity so we can come together to build movements large enough to fight the forces that, left unchecked, will destroy us all?

Practicing empathy and compassion for each other’s imperfections allows us to become gentler towards our own so we can keep them in the light long enough to learn from them and grow. At the same time, compassion doesn’t give us a free pass to harm without accountability and boundaries. I would like to be in relationship with any harmful impact my writing causes, in particular, to those who hold less privilege and power than me, so I can acknowledge, learn, repair, and try my hardest to prevent it from occurring again.

In these moments, I lean on the words of Maya Angelou, who taught, “Do the best you can until you know better, then when you know better, do better.”

Whenever I find myself spiralling in guilt and shame from the inevitable missteps of being human, I turn to the work of artist and activist Alok (ALOK) Vaid-Menon, author of Beyond the Gender Binary, for support. “Being alive is about messing up gloriously,” ALOK offers.^[5] “What we do then is say, ‘I'm sorry, I'm learning. It won't happen again.’ And then if it happens again, we say, ‘I'm sorry, I'm going to try even harder.’ And that's what love is for me: trying harder for each other.”

In the years to come, I hope I will look back at my past writing and cringe at all the unconscious biases I haven’t yet uncovered, all the ideas I haven’t yet understood, all the mistakes I haven’t yet the opportunity to know better. Because then I will have succeeded in growing. As Muhammad Ali argued, “A man who views the world the same at fifty as he did at twenty has wasted thirty years of his life.”

More than ever, we need a world where we can celebrate our capacity to see where we’ve gone wrong and then pivot towards a healthier path. It’s never too late to acknowledge our mistakes and change: The survival of our world depends on it.

So please help me grow by sending me a message about any missteps, harms, or areas that I have yet to learn so I can do better and try harder in my deep love for each other and our world.

^[1] Wilson, T & Bar-Anan, Y (2008). The Unseen Mind. Science. 321(5892):1046-7.

^[2] MacCoun RJ. Biases in the interpretation and use of research results. Annu Rev Psychol. 1998;49:259-87. 

^[3] Brown, adrienne maree (2021). Holding Change: The Way of Emergent Strategy Facilitation and Mediation. AK Press: Chico, CA.

[4] Hayes, K. & Mariame K. (2023). How much Discomfort Is the Whole World Worth? Movement building requires a culture of listening—not mastery of the right language. Boston Review.https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/how-much-discomfort-is-the-whole-world-worth/

^[5] Vaid-Menon, Alok (2022). ALOK: The urgent Need for Compassion. The Man Enough Podcast. manenough.com/podcast