Can Focusing on Harm Reduction Increase Risk?

There’s a lot of talk about harm reduction in our society today. Not just in the psychedelic community, but also in regards to general drug policy, trauma and grief work, and in many “healing” communities.?

Regardless of the fact that the Hippocratic Oath is now really just hypocrisy (though usually simply because they know not what they do), “Do No Harm” is a basic tenet of many healing professions and modalities. But, in my experience, the very expectation of this harm is often what calls it into being.?

I’m going to assume that I can skip the explanations of the law of attraction and attention, vibration, and frequency, and give you some IRL examples from my nearly 20 years in one of these “healing” professions.?

Many times in my many years as a nurse, others have been amazed by the outcomes of the care I’ve offered. I honestly can’t remember how many times I’ve “defused” a tense situation- a combative patient, code blue (or red or black or…), people traversing the altered states of psychosis, drug withdrawal, dementia and delirium…much to the shock of colleagues around me. Probably shock and disbelief at the LACK of effort or intervention on my part.?

Especially as healthcare professionals trained and practicing in Western medicine, we’re trained to DO, to FIX, to act. I’ve seen countless frail, 90-something-year-old ladies get attacked and restrained by the SWAT team that healthcare has become. I’ve had security guards tell me not to get in between them and the “combative” person, only to be swung on themselves. I, then, smile (and perhaps bat my eyes if it’s an older gentleman), gently take their hand, and then go for a walk or something. Without issue.?

Why? Because I don’t perceive them as a threat. I’m not afraid of them, and, well, I can’t recall a time when I later thought I had needed to be. To be fair, this may be in part to my personal experiences with these “altered” states…I’ve had a Near Death Experience, periods of psychosis (including a really weird one when I was diagnosed with Covid once), ICU delirium during hospital admissions, trance and meditative states, and many other experiences. Usually, when the thing we fear the most happens, it’s not actually all that bad.?

It may also be because when you don’t expect to see something, you most likely won’t. I like to utilize my observer bias to my benefit. I expect people to be easily soothed, emergencies to come and go, and discomforts to abide by their seasons, as well. It’s a confidence that I can relate to the person or group, a knowing that it can be handled with ease and calm, and that very result being the one that comes.?

This has many applications. One is all the recent “news” I’ve seen and heard about healthcare workers experiencing increased violence from patients and families. Having been on the other side of this, if you come at me 10 dudes deep and try to hold me down, I’m going to flip out, too. The militarization of healthcare workers is the very thing that increases this violence. We’re bringing it upon ourselves.?

Another is war and fighting on a larger scale. When our first inclination is to attack and quell, it is met with resistance. And often this resistance causes more harm than the original offender. Let’s say you’re in a situation of domestic abuse or perhaps trafficking. Not that it can’t happen to males or any other identification, but many women learn that when they try to escape these situations, it incites the anger of the offender, thus escalating any unwanted abuse or actions. I’ve often heard, “Why don’t you call the cops?,” or “Why didn’t you fight back?” Well, if you’ve ever been in this situation, you would know that this can make it more dangerous. By the time law enforcement gets there, you could be dead. If you fight back during an assault, you could fuel their fires and make the attack worse. It’s like playing dead when you get mauled by a bear.

This also applies to disease, as well. “Fighting back” is actually usually counterintuitive to the desired result. Instead of fighting what you don’t want, perhaps supporting what you do want to see? I support people in expressing what they need to, safely, and support them in finding out what they need. If we look at, say, cancer…can we perhaps shift from fighting this dis-ease that arose from our own cells, to asking what the healthy cells need? Can we support the body’s own healing system and trust that it will perform as it is intended to do??

Our society is very reactive. The emergency-preparedness training and diffusion techniques I, and many others, have been trained in usually escalate the situation. Instead of responding in a calm, confident way, moving with ease through the flow of life, we sound alarms and immediately shift into fight or flight (or freeze). Take the recent pandemic, when the entire world was purposely put in this reactive mode of fear. Fight the disease! Take flight from others! Stop life as we know it! How did all that turn out?

So how do we balance this out? How do we go from focusing on and looking for problems (trust me, you’ll find them that way), to a quiet knowing that we have the inherent ability to deal with them? Our fear is so deeply seeded in our society as a whole. It pretty much drives the majority of human behavior in our current state, in my opinion. So maybe we just look at it. Really look at it. Turn towards it, invite it in. Have space for that feeling, acknowledge it, and then see what can balance it, support our natural state of ease and well-being.?

Perhaps, with harm reduction, we need a better understanding of what harm actually is. Is it being afraid of things that might happen? Or is it scaring people into certain actions or patterns of behavior based on an emotional reaction to the illusion of the past or future that may not ever actually be now? Perhaps we should also learn the art of non-action, and let the muddy water clear on its own.