* Heather Zak, Psychologist

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:15):
Yeah, I don't know if you'll see any wolves when
you're out there hunting. Hunting season is upon us, but
maybe I don't even know if you're allowed to shoot them,
though I think they're protected in Michigan. That's been a
battle that's been going on back and forth for a
long time.

Speaker 2 (00:31):
Now.

Speaker 1 (00:31):
You're listening to Michael Patrick Shields. The morning you can
hear dawn breaking is Saturday at first light. And while
we're talking about deer and pheasant and duck and bear
and all the rest of it. The Siege of Sarajevo,
if you remember that in the sort of Yugoslavia at
the time, was watched with horror in the early nineteen nineties,

(00:54):
and the Serb and Bosnian militants shot innocent civilians in
what was called human safaris. Thirty years later, the prosecutors
in Milan have opened an investigation into Italian tourists who
are accused of paying seventy thousand pounds sterling to join

(01:16):
a human safari, shooting and killing innocent Bosnians, if you
can believe such a thing. On weekend trips, they paid
the Bosnian army to go on the rooftops and shoot
people in the city below, there was an additional fee

(01:37):
to kill children with sniper rifles, according to the court filing. Now,
this is gruesome and awful and shocking, but I say
this just to remind you that there are monsters that
walk among us, and people don't like to believe it.
They like to close their eyes to such things and

(01:57):
they say, nah, nah, that's the stuff of horror movies. Well,
I'm telling you to be careful. I recently installed an
app called Citizen kind. I'm I learned from it, but
sometimes I regret it. A little buzzer goes off when
any kind of crime or any kind of trouble happens

(02:18):
within the area that I'm in, because it's you know,
got the GPS kind of thing. It will pop up
and it'll say there was a car accident two blocks
from you, or there's a sexual offender that's within one
mile of you, or whatever. There's a man on fire
on a corner of blah blah blah. It's all happening
around the world, all around all of us. Pretty grim topic.

(02:43):
This morning, it's Michael Patrick Shields with you radio stations
across the state of Michigan and worldwide. Am I Big
Show dot Com. I'm seeking a transition here. I don't know.
Let's bring in the psychologist, doctor Heather Zach. There would
be people who would hear that story. Now it's not
a story, it's a real thing that apparently happened. That

(03:04):
would be shocked, and maybe you know, when you watch
a horror movie, it's shocking. But to hear that that
really happens is beyond, isn't it, doctor? And I don't
blame her. Yeah, no, you must have been you must

(03:25):
have been speechless.

Speaker 3 (03:28):
I actually was speechless there for a minute. I was
thinking it. It's mortifying, it's horrifying. It's it's it is
the thing that we don't want to think about that
human nature provides upon this earth. So that is a
horrific story.

Speaker 1 (03:48):
It's one thing to have rage and say I want
to kill that son of them. It's another thing to
go and do it for sport.

Speaker 3 (03:56):
Well, I mean, it's it. It's almost inconceivable. You know.
Sometimes my daughter I'll say I'll say something like, oh
my gosh, how can that possibly happen? And my daughter
will say, well, Mom, you're a psychologist, And I chuckle
because I go back to if I just take off
my psychology hat. There are times that I am absolutely

(04:21):
mortified at the way that humans treat other humans and
the thinking that must take place in one's mind in
order to justify and rationalize those kind of treatment and behaviors.
And then I put my psychology hat back on and
try to understand and try to figure out as we

(04:43):
all need to because we want to stop that type
of behavior and that those type of actions, whatever that
type implies quote unquote anything that is, you know, disseminating
of another human life.

Speaker 1 (04:59):
So, yeah, that story is mortifying to you know, what
I think is kind of kind of weird to it.
It lends one to wonder how in the world the
Nazi Germany could have happened, or Japan for that matter,
where humans under the guise of war I guess were
far more inhumane than they had to be in fighting
a war exterminating Jews, and the Japanese were absolutely horrible,

(05:22):
torturing people and killing them. And then you get into
you know, were they soldiers who were doing what they
were commanded. Let's bring it home here to Chicago and
some of our other cities where we have the immigration people,
the ice people who are carrying out their police duty

(05:42):
and yet vilified to the point by other people that
they're willing to enact violence against those who are there
doing their job trying to enforce the law. It's tricky,
isn't it.

Speaker 3 (05:54):
Well, again, I think it goes back to the story
that we're telling ourselves. And I think people have to
tell themselves a story in order to do certain things,
be it in their work or otherwise. And so it's
always interesting to me, and this is the clinician me
that wants to understand the story that they're telling themselves.
Even in a situation where someone is told to do

(06:17):
something somehow, one has to wrap their minds around the
story and believe the story and or create their own
story in order to justify the action. So, whether we
look at horrific times in our world or we look
at horrific acts by particular individuals, the story that they're
telling themselves is what we want to try to understand,

(06:39):
and not try to understand necessarily in terms of placative
or dismissive, but understand it to prevent, to help heel,
to help move humanity forward. So the stories that we
tell ourselves can be authentic stories, but where we lose

(07:00):
the conceptualization of human beings having value. That's a story
that we can see being told in humanity in our
society now, over and over again. And it's not a
good story that we're telling ourselves.

Speaker 1 (07:15):
You couldn't shoot a deer, could you?

Speaker 3 (07:18):
I could not shoot a deer, Oh my goodness.

Speaker 1 (07:22):
And yet intellectually you realize that we are told that
they will suffer unless a certain number of them are harvested.

Speaker 3 (07:31):
Yes, and so they're in lies the story right.

Speaker 1 (07:36):
Same way if you've got an animal, a puppy, a
dog who's at an advanced age, who's suffering, and they
call it, you know, taking to put the dog down
in a humane way, that's very painful for people, but
they know intellectually it's the best way.

Speaker 3 (07:55):
Right, and so that again therein lies the story. We
all have to find a story in order to live with, justify,
make reasonability, and people tell themselves all sorts of stories.
And we can listen to people's stories and sometimes we think,
oh my goodness, that story fits, you know, it makes sense,
even though it might be a hard outcome or decision.

(08:18):
Other times people will look at someone's story and say,
what how you know the story is inane, it doesn't
make any sense. There's no rationality, it's not a one
plus one. And obviously there's a continuum line right where
some stories you can find rationality and then you go
down the continuum line and you find you can't even

(08:38):
begin to touch it.

Speaker 1 (08:41):
Be safe today, and thank you very much for your expertise.
You're not a vegetarian, are you? Or are you? No?

Speaker 3 (08:48):
I tend to not eat a lot of meat.

Speaker 1 (08:51):
Something told me that doctor Zach and east Lanson can
help you too. It's Michael Patrick Shield's.

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