Welcome to Back from the Abyss. I'm Dr. Craig Hecock.

As a social tribal species, one of our most critical attributes is the ability to form

interpersonal bonds, to build trust, to listen, to connect, and to believe.

We all tend to think that we can tell when someone is being open and honest with us and when we are being deceived.

And this belief emanates both from our body, our gut level response response, that involves feeling and others' energy and

relative level of sympathetic arousal, while unconsciously interpreting nonverbal cues,

such as micro-expressions of the face.

And this belief that we can detect truth comes from our conscious mind, our analytical,

slow, logical, methodical system of thinking and mulling and

remembering. When our gut or somatic response matches our conscious analytical assessment,

then we tend to default to believing, but when they don't match, we shift to disbelieving.

I recently watched the Netflix documentary Amanda Knox,

which explored how and why she was convicted of a murder

she didn't commit.

Amanda wasn't believed because she didn't seem stricken

or devastated enough by the murder of a roommate.

She kissed her boyfriend passionately outside

as the Italian police investigated the crime scene.

She winked at her boyfriend in the courtroom.

She smiled and giggled at the wrong times and then even made up a false story at one point to try to deflect the brutal heat of the interrogation.

In today's story, we hear Janine describe the awful consequences of not being believed.

Not being believed about sexual trauma, not being believed about emerging psychotic symptoms,

...