Brain Food for Pioneering Spirits: how do you actually recognize psychological violence, something that leaves no bruise and no visible trace at all? Dr. Yasemin Yazan is joined by two guests, Asya and Mo, for a genuinely rich exchange on the invisible side of violence — from the unsettling detail that some people flinch at nothing more than a raised hand mid-conversation, to Mo’s striking distinction between “advice” (a hidden blow disguised as help) and a genuine tip freely offered. Mo also shares a strikingly disciplined personal practice: rewriting an angry message a second and third time before sending it, checking whether it actually serves him or just his own sense of being wronged. The room also confronts social media’s cruelest twist on old-fashioned schoolyard mobbing: today there is no retreat space left at all, and Sabine’s own son is already counting down the days until elementary school ends.
Note: This session was recorded live in German as part of the Deep Talk Club, so the video above is German-language audio only. What follows is an English translation of the conversation, lightly edited for readability — the back-and-forth between the moderator and participants is preserved, but the original timestamps and speaker names have been left out.
Good morning, the host said, opening today’s room continuing the theme of invisible violence, this time with the question: how can we recognize and fight psychological violence? She was genuinely looking forward to today’s room, since it would zoom in specifically on the psychological-violence nuance. As always, everyone was warmly invited to join and bring their thoughts and impulses into the exchange, so the room could work through it together and see where the conversation would lead. For first-time visitors, a reminder that the room is recorded throughout and published afterward, so joining counts as agreeing to that. Three small room rules: a profile photo you can be recognized in, a first and last name, and at least one sentence in the bio. Anyone who’d rather not, or can’t speak right now, is welcome to use the chat instead, and she’d pick up comments from there along the way.
After a quiet stretch and a gentle warning that from now on the room would close on time rather than run over, one listener, Asya, jumped in as the room’s rescuer for the day. Asked to share first thoughts on psychological violence, Asya said she experiences it constantly through her partner, who keeps hearing from her ex — a genuinely unpleasant pattern where someone tries to permanently wear another person down mentally, throwing negative things at them, trying to gain a kind of power over that person and mentally affecting them deeply. That’s roughly what she keeps hearing about secondhand.
Thank you so much, the host said — genuinely unpleasant. A quick follow-up: does Asya have any concrete markers for identifying psychological violence at all? It’s so hard to pin down, whereas physical violence shows itself through something visible, like bruising. Psychological violence tends not to be recognized or seen immediately. So the real question is: what do you actually anchor it to?
Asya said she’d anchor it to what it does to the person experiencing it — symptoms like visible distress, that anxiousness, that fear of “oh no, another message, it might be negative again,” where the person starts seeing more of life’s negative sides than the positive ones. She personally tries to redirect people back toward positive thoughts whenever she notices that. Other signs: things like insomnia or a kind of exhaustion — it affects the body too, since a healthy mind needs a healthy body, as she puts it. And once it works its way into someone and starts shaping their personality, that’s a sign this person has experienced some form of psychological violence. There are also people who scream at women constantly, right at the edge of physical violence, where someone flinches just from another person raising a hand mid-conversation. She hasn’t experienced that herself, thankfully, but she’s witnessed it in others — someone just casually raising a hand while telling a story, and the other person visibly flinching. That, for her, is already a telling sign.
Wonderful, the host said — especially that last point about flinching at a raised hand, that hadn’t occurred to her as a first thought at all, which is exactly why she loves opening up different perspectives here. Googling “psychological violence,” the first result she found, from a Bavarian anti-violence initiative, describes psychological violence as taking many forms — from insults, mockery and humiliation to threats and blackmail. Stalking and mobbing also count as psychological violence. Did Asya want to add anything there?
Asya said stalking definitely goes quite far — there are plenty of Hollywood films built around exactly this, and it’s definitely something that can influence people significantly. Stalking involves that constant calling, that constant “I want to keep messaging you.” She’s had stalkers herself who genuinely wouldn’t let up — you keep telling yourself not to let it scare you, but it’s really about the nerve-wearing aspect, where at some point you’ve simply had enough. She’s experienced this personally — you send someone one message and get ten back. And if someone isn’t entirely psychologically stable, that can genuinely weigh on them, or affect them in everyday life. She thinks that’s genuinely dangerous, and there are men — she wanted to speak gender-neutrally here, since it happens on both sides — who exercise exactly this kind of psychological violence through stalking, even showing up wherever a person’s new partner happens to be, or refusing to let go once someone has moved on. That, she thinks, is definitely a form of psychological violence too.
The host agreed — things like insults, mockery, humiliation seem relatively identifiable, as do threats or blackmail, depending on how pronounced they are, but still fairly visible. Stalking or mobbing, though, come in degrees, meaning it might not be immediately recognizable at all, depending on how subtly it plays out. There are also aspects like being sidelined by a boss, or passed over for promotion, which feed into mobbing or psychological violence without being immediately obvious — sometimes requiring a certain history to build up before it can even be properly recognized and placed in reflection. How did Asya see it?
Asya agreed this can be genuinely unpleasant too — workplace psychological games, as she called them, something she experienced herself for several years, with direct bullying from a boss. When a supervisor specifically has it in for you and constantly bullies you through small things that others barely notice, that’s genuinely unpleasant — things like being told to complete certain trainings, with the person constantly hovering nearby asking “have you done it yet, have you done it yet,” even before she’d officially started the job. She was expected, in her own free time before even starting, to complete various trainings — and she pointed out she hadn’t even begun working there yet. She has nothing against a reasonable expectation of personal commitment, but pushing it that far and forcing it like that felt genuinely extreme to her. That kind of extreme mobbing, she said, definitely edges into psychological violence too.
Wonderful, thank you so much, the host said. Mo had also joined — good morning, what were his thoughts, or where did he want to pick up on what had already been discussed?
Good morning to everyone, Mo said. He found the topic genuinely interesting and complex, which is why he wanted to bring in a perspective: that the exact same circumstance can be perceived as violence in one case and not in another. He offered a physical example — if someone shoves another person, we’d likely perceive that as violence, since physical force is acting on another body. But an osteopath could apply the exact same force, at the exact same intensity, to realign or manipulate a vertebra. Purely observed from outside, there’d be no difference at all. But the person experiencing it is the one who determines, in that moment, whether it’s violence or not. On the psychological side, he’d add that a person can inflict violence on someone else even without meaning to — through, say, well-intentioned advice that still lands as a blow, in the sense that the other person perceives it as violence regardless. So, he thinks, violence is ultimately a self-assessment above all.
Wonderful, thank you so much, the host said — they’d touched on the aspect of subjective experience the day before in this room too, and what Mo had just laid out fit beautifully with that. It has a lot to do with how we experience, perceive, and evaluate certain things, likely shaped by our own past experiences too. And here it’s worth differentiating further — with physical violence, there are indicators that let us, at least from outside, distinguish relatively cleanly what counts as violence and what doesn’t. With the psychological side, it gets harder; the complexity seems considerably greater, at least on the surface. Which is also why, thinking legally, the question of where mobbing begins and ends often genuinely requires witness testimony and similar evidence, precisely because it becomes “difficult” through subjective experience alone. And Mo raised a genuinely important point too: what about the case where someone doesn’t even intend to exercise violence, but the other person still experiences it as psychological violence, in quotes, which can still leave scars? He’d connected that to unsolicited advice, where the “vice” in “ad-vice” carries its own hidden blow — she found that a genuinely great way of putting it. Asya, anything to add?
Asya said she personally always gives people tips rather than advice, since she doesn’t think much of advice, exactly as Mo had so nicely put it — that it always carries a bit of a “you’d better” undertone. So when it comes to that kind of thing, she thinks you can give people pointers or tips instead. That’s how she’s always approached it, and she found it genuinely wonderful how Mo had articulated it — he always has such a great way of looking at these different things, and she found herself completely aligned with his thinking.
The host wanted to ask: what’s the actual difference for Asya between advice and a tip or a suggestion?
Advice, Asya said, is something you’re trying to impose on someone — a “you have to think about it this way too” kind of thing, or trying almost forcefully to convince someone of something. It could be something ordinary, or it could be, say, matters of faith — she’s seen various religious groups try quite forcefully to press someone into their beliefs, which can be genuinely unpleasant, and honestly reflects rather poorly on that particular belief community too. She wanted to stay completely neutral there, but it can also be someone so utterly convinced of something that they insist, “you have to do it exactly this way, because I believe it’s right.” That’s almost like putting a noose around someone’s neck and saying, “I say so, and I’ve experienced it this way, and that makes it correct because I believe it.” It carries that overreaching, intrusive quality, whereas by comparison, saying “hey, just so you know, I’ve experienced it this way, take it or leave it, entirely up to you” is how she personally handles things — not “I did it this way, so you have to too,” but a genuine tip: “here’s something you might try.”
Mo, did he distinguish between the words tip, suggestion, and advice too?
Absolutely, Mo said. He found something Ulle had written in the chat genuinely lovely, and wanted to read it out: solicited and unsolicited advice, tips, or someone simply being enthusiastic and recommending something — he too tends to hear the word “advice” as carrying a certain condescension. It’s like taking on the role of observer, noticing that you, in my view, didn’t handle a situation quite as well as I would have, and so I give you advice so you’ll do it better next time — while possibly disregarding that failure itself is an experience that matters to you in that moment. And I can really only give that advice because I myself once had that failure. Whereas if he’s genuinely enthusiastic about something, because it truly fills his mind and spirit, it becomes more like: “here’s a new perspective from me — whether you take it on or not isn’t my concern, I’ve simply shared it, do what you want with it.” With advice, he thinks there’s a small expectation baked in — a hope that the advice actually gets followed. A second thing he wanted to bring in was something the host had said so nicely, distinguishing physical from psychological violence. Very recently, a year or two ago, there was the Oliver Pocher case — Pocher got slapped, by a comedian nicknamed “Fettkomediker” if he remembered right. There, you could say quite clearly: a line got crossed, and even measurably so — he had a bruise, cells were damaged, so you could clearly state that violence was inflicted on him. And that opened a genuine can of worms: how much had Oliver Pocher himself, and he wasn’t excusing physical violence here, provoked that situation by psychologically humiliating people online? That’s where the difficulty lies in saying what kind of scars, on a synaptic level even, get left by words, when they’re said deliberately to humiliate someone.
That’s a genuinely fascinating point, the host said — because it’s not just about psychological violence potentially escalating into physical violence, we could also play this out entirely within the psychological realm itself. How much did some prior psychological violence provoke a psychological reaction in return from the other side? And is that reaction, that response in kind, actually justified? On one hand you could ask that question, and on the other, what does that mean in terms of escalation? They’d touched before on escalation stages in conflict, using Glasl’s model, and if the response to a boundary violation is itself another boundary violation, or physical violence gets met with physical violence, shouting gets met with shouting back — you can apply this to plenty of different scenarios — then there’s a real possibility of further escalation rather than de-escalation. Did Asya or Mo want to weigh in, whoever wanted to go first?
Mo went first: he finds the whole subject of boundary-setting genuinely fascinating. Setting boundaries is his own personal responsibility, but for that he first needs to know what his own boundaries actually are — something he can set either through his own experiences, or through experiences he’s absorbed from people close to him. But then it’s also his job, he thinks, to clearly state, “this is a boundary.” If he doesn’t do that, he’s essentially expecting, or relying on, some general societal norm that this is simply an accepted boundary by default. But that normalized version of boundary-setting is really just a narrative, he’d say — not something that works on an individual level, in his view. It’s hard to expect things from people if you’ve never actually named them. Example, in a relationship: I might expect something from my partner based on various past experiences, but if I never actually communicated it, and then get angry or escalate because that unspoken expectation wasn’t met — that’s on me. He thinks boundary-setting should always be clearly communicated. And if he’s in a new job and the boss takes a tone he doesn’t like, he’ll say clearly, doesn’t matter whether you’re my direct supervisor or not, this tone doesn’t work. Setting that boundary clearly. But we’re often raised to be humble — though he doesn’t think “humble” is quite the right word here — to hold back modestly and, above all, avoid confrontation. And his last point: he thinks confrontation is actually the best route to medium- and long-term harmony. Because if I avoid confrontation in the moment, sure, I might prevent that particular situation from escalating right then, but the unspoken issue keeps quietly sitting inside me regardless.
Genuinely fascinating point, the host said, and it suggests we might need a certain conflict-readiness in order not to stay silent in these situations, or simply endure them, but to actually communicate. Asya, thoughts?
On this idea of conflict-readiness, Asya said, she’d noticed several times, including recently with a close friend, that very few people actually have it. That thing where someone tells you something because they genuinely think you’ve done well by them, versus being told, hey, maybe something went wrong here — she found that whenever she voiced criticism, it was almost immediately met with a personal attack instead. She and her partner, who were both affected by this, were genuinely shocked — they’d addressed something diplomatically and politely, and got a real personal attack and boundary violation right back, leaving them wondering whether the other person was genuinely capable of handling conflict at all. She believes most people aren’t. We’re all human, and doing something wrong, in quotes, is simply human. But the question is whether you’re able to acknowledge that, accept feedback when it’s given, and actually talk it through — or whether you go the extreme route and reject it outright simply because it doesn’t go your way, exactly the way you’d like. In this particular case, it went so far that it led to a genuine cutoff of contact and worse, along with clear influence from this friend’s girlfriend, who he ended up fully deferring to. Asya said she was genuinely shocked, watching a man behave this way after a ten-year friendship — genuinely extreme, in her view. She thinks it’s important to be open, conflict-ready, and to address things directly, as Mo had said — just because a boss is a boss doesn’t give him the right to shout at me, cross boundaries, or humiliate me in front of the team, or similar.
Worth distinguishing here too, the host added, between situations where boundary violations happen unintentionally, even from the other side, such that once you address it, things can actually change. Violence also shows up in a different way: even when something does get addressed, and it’s not about a lack of conflict-readiness, but out of a real need for harmony, so to speak, the underlying situation never actually gets resolved — particularly in mobbing scenarios, where victims reaching out for help, engaging in dialogue, still find that it simply doesn’t stop. Worth examining more closely, she thought. Sabine, she’d wanted to speak too — go ahead, and then they could draw connections across everything discussed.
Good morning to the room, Sabine said. She wanted to return to the topic of mobbing — they’d once had an incident at her children’s school, not involving her personally, where the police came in and held a session with the parents to explain things. The officer used a genuinely simple example: picture a school class like a football field. There are always people standing in the middle, with a circle around them, and then there are people standing outside that circle — but they’re still on the field. Then the field shifts a bit, and suddenly those people end up standing further outside. And she said, purely as a thought exercise: those on the outside now, the kids inside have to ask themselves, do I want to belong with the ones outside, or would I rather belong with the ones inside? And she said this dynamic has always existed, long before social media. Of course, with social media, it’s become something else entirely. Today, they’ll simply tell a struggling family: switch schools, we can’t manage this here. And then the child goes to a new school, and the story has already arrived there before them. Sabine’s own daughter switched schools too, not because of mobbing, just a normal switch — but she spent one week trialing at a new school, and the other school already knew about the trial week, because people had run into her in the schoolyard and it spread instantly through social media. That’s part of the problem, she thinks — back in the day, there’d be some small-scale mobbing you either weathered or didn’t, but it largely stayed contained. Today it spreads out into the world with real velocity, which is genuinely wild. She knows this is a smaller-scale example, but she thinks it’s essentially no different at a larger scale either.
Thank you so much, the host said — and especially with social media, things do spread remarkably fast. She knows this firsthand too, experiencing it at home: their son is in the last year of elementary school, fourth grade, and is already essentially counting down, looking forward to elementary school being over, because he feels bullied. She finds it genuinely fascinating that a ten-year-old already faces real challenges in this sense. Certain things have happened where he feels teachers haven’t adequately intervened, to the point of actual physical scuffles, since he felt he had no other way to help himself in the moment, given that teachers, from his perspective, don’t do enough or anything at all. It escalated to the point that these ten- and eleven-year-olds, most of whom already have phones, ended up moving schoolyard scuffles off school grounds to right in front of the main building after school, since phones aren’t allowed inside. This led to someone filming a video, which then got uploaded into a WhatsApp group these kids have access to — not all of them, but those whose parents allow phones and WhatsApp access — specifically to spread it further through the class. It’s genuinely wild what’s already happening at such a young age, and how quickly it spreads.
She wanted to pick something up from the chat too, then hand it back to Asya and Mo: is what was just discussed actually violence, or simply toxic? Toxic listening, someone suggested, would be advisory listening as opposed to helpful listening — with “coaching versus advice-giving” thrown in as a related keyword; coaching being, hopefully, solicited and therefore helpful. Asya, thoughts?
On the whole mobbing subject, Asya said, she finds social media genuinely intense at this point — you sometimes witness conditions that feel almost medieval. This already happened on Instagram, but she’d also witnessed similar dynamics on Clubhouse in earlier times, both in others and firsthand. It genuinely requires real strength to rise above it and not let yourself get pulled in or influenced by it. Many people massively underestimate the damage they can inflict on someone this way. And in some cases, she’s seen it go quite far without people really thinking it through — she’s opened rooms herself before specifically to say, people, you need to be careful here, because if you catch someone who genuinely can’t handle it psychologically, and boundaries get crossed that far, real harm can result. As has happened via Instagram and similar platforms — people have taken their own lives because the pressure simply became too much, from being caught up in some group dynamic. Most people fall into that group dynamic without really thinking about what they’re doing, because the target is no longer just some abstract thing — that shouldn’t happen to a child or an adult — where a whole crowd turns entirely against one person. And with social media, there’s an added danger: once someone goes offline, or leaves the app, whether Instagram, Clubhouse, Twitter Spaces or whatever, you have no idea what actually happens to that person afterward. In some cases, it’s genuinely untraceable, and only close family members would know whether that person is doing okay, whether something happened. She finds that the more dangerous part.
The host wondered whether this also connects to anonymity — whether comments online veer more quickly into personal attacks rather than staying on a factual level, precisely because of that anonymity. Something else that came to mind: Andreas Wollermann, who focuses on Gen Z as his specialty, had pointed out in a previous room that with social media, there’s often a lack of any real retreat space. Unlike in the past, where mobbing certainly happened too, including at school, but at least once you were home, you had that retreat space, some distance and options. Today, through all these social media channels, that has to be reassessed, since kids often carry their phones almost 24 hours a day and keep checking them constantly — whether checking likes, wondering if a post landed well, or genuinely something set in motion that they can’t properly switch off from, since they’re checking every few minutes. That retreat space no longer seems as clearly defined as it used to be, unless someone has the self-efficacy to actually go offline deliberately. Mo, anything to add?
Gladly, Mo said. He thinks the internet, and social media specifically, is fundamentally neutral. The internet can teach you languages, but it can also, through the dark net, teach genuinely violent things. Social media can connect you with people — he’s made wonderful contacts all over the world while traveling — but it can just as easily let people in your own town start bullying you. What social media does, how best to put it, is erode your impulse control if you’re not fully in command of your own senses. What he means: in the past, if he was genuinely furious with someone, he’d imagine taking pen and paper and starting to write out his anger, letting his frustration flow freely. He’d bet a few spelling mistakes would creep in along the way. He’d start the letter, read it back over while writing, to make sure it stayed consistent with how he originally felt, and reading it a second time he’d notice, actually, that doesn’t sound very kind at all, and doesn’t really help — it’s just insulting, and doesn’t communicate what he actually wanted to get across, that something genuinely hurt him. So he’d rewrite the letter, then send it, having created some real distance in the process. As the host just put it so well, today we’re on our phones 24 hours a day, and it’s just one tap away. So does his reflection on what he’s actually saying help him? Not the other person necessarily, but does it serve his own inner need, his own sense of justice, being confirmed? Does the message actually serve that, or not? Sorry, he had a bit of a thinking-and-speaking hiccup there, caught in a mental loop for a second. His point: before sending a message, it’s worth reading it over a second or third time, through different internal filters — from the perspective of “okay, I’m the hurt Mo right now,” does this text actually serve me, or is there another Mo underneath, one who wants justice, as an example, and does the message I’m about to send actually deliver that? So, worth pausing to ask yourself: does what I’m about to say actually benefit me, or not?
Thank you so much, the host said — she genuinely relates to this too, asking herself exactly that question when certain posts get her worked up. And it’s worth distinguishing here between people who’ve already learned to manage their impulses and children who are still on that learning path, not quite there yet, and therefore have real difficulty with impulse control, since it’s genuinely a learning process. She noticed Sabine wanted to add something, and then she wanted to move toward the closing round, since they’d continue this umbrella theme, Power & Violence, over the coming days, and she’d make tomorrow’s announcement afterward. Sabine, go ahead.
Sabine said she’d practically been applauding, since Mo had almost taken the words right out of her mouth — what he said was genuinely great. She had to learn this too, letting a full day pass before responding, or reading something over again before replying. The question is just whether children are capable of that yet, and whether things escalate online that really didn’t need to. And of course, that happens much faster online than it used to — back when her kids were still in elementary school, they’d occasionally scuffle on the playground, likely a result of some mobbing dynamic or whatever else, and that was that. Today it doesn’t even happen that way anymore — it goes straight online, and stays somewhat under the radar there. So the question becomes whether kids are strong enough to say, I’m switching this off for now, letting a day pass, confiding in someone, talking to someone about it — or whether they withdraw alone and let something fester inside instead. She thinks that’s the truly troubling part. And in the end, as that police officer had said, you really have to ask yourself individually: where do I actually want to stand? Do I place myself with the one standing outside the circle, or with the ones standing inside? Everyone can ask themselves that, and it’s probably a question children answer very clearly through how they actually behave. A great topic, she admitted, if a bit difficult. She wanted to add her closing word right here too, since she needed to head off soon — she couldn’t join earlier, but it’s worth thinking about what connects you to something, or where you’ve already had contact with it. Another wonderful room, thanks.
Wonderful, thank you so much, the host said — and with that, let’s move straight into the closing round, which they always use, at the end of a room capped at 60 minutes, from 8 to 9 for Deep Talk, to highlight or underline something, or pick up on one last point before naming today’s highlights. And, as she’d mentioned, this umbrella theme would continue across further rooms addressing further angles and areas of focus, so these rooms shouldn’t be seen as isolated from each other, but eventually connected back together. With that, she wanted to ask Asya first — anything else to add, and definitely her highlight or takeaway for today?
Her highlight today, Asya said, was definitely this room itself, and getting to hear Mo again, which genuinely delighted her — she hadn’t heard from him in a long time, and it was, as people used to say, a real inner bouquet of flowers. Lovely to hear him again. She wished there were far more people in the world who shared this kind of self-reflection, like what he’d described — reading a message over a second and third time before sending it. She thinks very few people genuinely have that self-reflection, and that we should act less out of emotion and anger, sending off messages in the heat of the moment, and instead genuinely ask ourselves: does this actually help me, and what effect does this message have if I send it while full of emotion, and specifically, what does it actually do to the person on the receiving end? That’s something she genuinely admires — she once heard that there are different perspectives available to us: your own, the other person’s, and if you’re a bit further along, that of a third observer watching the two of you, and if someone’s truly advanced, a fourth perspective observing all three from a distance. She personally thinks that’s the best place to form a judgment from — though “judgment” isn’t quite the right word, more like simply having observed something and formed an opinion from it. From the perspective of that fourth observer, she thinks, you can stay genuinely objective, try to keep your emotions in check, question yourself here and there, and stay open to constructive criticism. That alone could genuinely change quite a bit in the world. A wonderful room, thanks to everyone.
Thank you so much, the host said — and with enough practice, it’s genuinely possible to shift between these perspectives even in your own interactions in real time. That’s something worth trying and practicing too, and it really is one of those overarching key competencies. So we have the option of engaging with the actual content in an interaction, but we can equally take an observer position, reflecting on the situation or interaction from a meta level, stepping outside it to look at the exchange itself. Genuinely fascinating too. Mo?
Two points, Mo said — one for Sabine, then his closing word. He’s 100% convinced, fully certain, that children are capable of this. He thinks whoever ruins that ability in them is usually their own parents. Quick example: if a child wants to climb a tree and the mother immediately says “careful!” — shame she can’t hear him right now, but for the room’s sake — “careful, don’t climb up there!” instead of maybe asking, what’s your goal here, or do you feel safe right now? And if the child says yes, that reinforces their own self-confidence. If he applied that same principle on a communicative level, he’s fairly confident even elementary schoolers or kindergartners could maintain that distance and not fall into the impulse. He thinks they only fall into it when that’s exactly the model they’ve been shown at home. And for his closing word: he always finds this room wonderful. He’s often here listening, and finally had the time today to actually come up and speak himself. He’d say everyone is allowed to look at their own wounds, their own traumas experienced in life, rather than always looking outward for blame, even when someone genuinely did inflict violence on you — but maybe also pause and analyze why a situation unfolded the way it did. And maybe, to circle back to the room’s title, invisible violence, perhaps his own unconscious pain bled onto other people, triggering a reaction, and it’s worth starting with himself there too. There are always multiple reasons — it’s never just one side’s fault entirely — but he’s a firm believer in proactivity, in at least being able to take the wheel himself.
Wonderful, thank you so much, the host said — and that’s exactly where our own contribution comes in. Every interaction, every act of communication, doesn’t happen with just one person — unless we’re talking to ourselves, or examining our own thoughts, which is also genuinely worthwhile, and something they’d touched on in other rooms too. But specifically when looking at communication and interaction with others, the question always arises: what contribution have I made to this? Which is exactly why this kind of self-reflection matters so much. And there’s that aspect of self-efficacy too — the moment I’m actually capable of stepping back, reflecting, and doing that, I might find answers, or new answers, and then have the option to change my own contribution, which in turn might change the other person’s contribution, or at least open the door for them to change theirs too. Genuinely wonderful, she thought. Thank you so much — a genuinely, genuinely fascinating room, and she was already looking forward to tomorrow, when they’d continue with the power of mass media — to what extent do media shape our understanding of power — that’s what they’d dig into tomorrow. Everyone with the time and interest was warmly invited to join again at 8am. Thanks so much for participating, including through the chat, and see you tomorrow. Ciao!
