As an attorney, I am required to take Continuing Legal Education (CLE) every couple of years in order to maintain my licenses in New York and New Jersey. This year I realized very late that I had to fulfill all my requirements before 2020 rolled around. So I loaded up on all my courses and took them at the last minute in between Christmas shopping, cooking holiday meals, and picking up my kids at bus stations.
It requires a ridiculous amount of juggling between the staggered years and different credit requirements n order to fulfill the requirements of these two states. It is like trying to figure out a jigsaw puzzle. Long story short, I managed to find five CLE courses - in webinar format - that satisfied all requirements for both states in terms of legal credits and ethical credits.
Over the decades of doing this, I have learned that most of these courses - usually led by local attorneys and local bar association committee leaders - are informative but phenomenally boring. It seems that even litigators and trial attorneys seem to have a problem making law "fun" to learn. These classes are mostly loaded with endless citations to local, state and federal statutes, and court decisions, with which all of the non-specialists in those fields are presumed to be intimately familiar. There is a lot of pretentious droning on and on about the legal impact of various decisions ranging from landmark to unpublished court decisions. I have come to tolerate this as some kind of legal racket for the bar associations to make money.
This time around I fulfilled my last requirement (a 7-hour long class taught by only one lawyer and not a panel of lawyers) called "Successfully Deposing the Vague or Emphatically Certain Witness: Getting What You Need Out of 'I Don't Know,' 'I Do Know' and 'I Don't Remember.'" The basic concept was to teach how to recognize and neutralize witness deception during pre-trial depositions as well as cross-examination of a witness at trial. It was a fascinating topic. The lawyer teaching the course, Robert Musante, turned out to be a self-proclaimed teacher more than a practicing lawyer. He was absolutely riveting and despite having a nasty flu, he managed to talk for seven straight hours and hold everyone's attention.
Basically, he was demonstrating - using a lot of examples from Clinton and Nixon impeachment depositions and Bush and Trump press statements - how to understand the internal - let's call it "squirming around" - to give a theoretically "honest" response without lying but also without revealing the "truth." With the benefit of history and hindsight, it was very insightful to watch these deceptive maneuvers in action.
A lot of this witness deception exists around the unbelievably ambiguous use of the words "to know" or "to recall" which are used to get around a lawyer's attempt to lock in the witness with a "yes" or "no" response. For example, "How many times did you meet Monica in the hallway outside the Oval Office?" A response of "I don't know" could refer to not knowing the number of times ever in the history of Clinton's presidency, whether such meetings were in the hallway or elsewhere, or whether such encounters constituted a 'meeting.' The weasel-word of "know" allows a witness to later go back and correct the response by stating his interpretation of the precise "knowledge" to which he was referring. Cool stuff. Clinton was an expert at this in his impeachment depositions. Trump is an expert at this in his conversational style of ambiguous statements. It avoids ever getting pinned down to one interpretation.
At one point during this class, Musante cleverly stated that he could "read Clinton's mind" prior to giving one of these ambiguous "I don't know" responses. Musante then laid out the entire thought process - Clinton's concerns, what was true and what wasn't, and a strategy to be "honest" without being "truthful." I thought to myself: "How interesting! A lawyer announcing he can read minds - just like a psychic!" And, more interestingly, how does this break down in terms of logical deduction, intuitive reasoning, and inexplicable psychic insight?
How does a lawyer read a witnesses mind, I wondered? And how does that differ from what I do, as psychic and intuitive, when I read someone's mind? It occurred to me that I am actually the equivalent of a "Triple Threat" to borrow a term from the performing arts (i.e.g someone who is talented in all three major skills of acting, dancing and singing). I am a Triple Threat because I am 1) a litigator, 2) trained in psychotherapy and 3) a trained psychic.
- LAW: I practiced securities litigation in New York for nearly a decade.
- PSYCHOTHERAPY: I trained in Intuitive Gestalt Psychotherapy in New York for more than 20 years.
- PSYCHIC: I trained as a psychic detective for a decade, as a spiritual medium for several years, and also for several years as a remote viewer in military-style remote viewing techniques.
So, with my Triple Threat background, I wondered: how do these mind-reading techniques differ with each profession? Or are they the same basic techniques?
I believe they are based on intuitive and logical understandings of different aspects of the human psyche.
I believe that a litigator can read a witnesses' mind because a litigator can "smell fear" from far away. When you know how to recognize the "pressure points" then you can track the witnesses convoluted attempts to escape from the trap created by the lawyer. It is like understanding how a mouse tries to steal cheese from a mousetrap without getting caught. It involves a thinking process and a strategy. Litigators can read minds this way.
A psychotherapist can read a client's mind because they can "feel" their way into the choices made by a person to address their emotions and how they distract themselves, empower themselves or believe their own deceptions. A therapist can understand the history of a person's emotional empowerment no matter how illogical.
A psychic can read a client's mind because they can "mind-meld" with the energy of the person and, in some sense, become that person in order to understand the outcomes of the person's existence and choices. A psychic can "see" the emotional imprint of a person and their decisions as it extends forwards and backwards in time.
Briefly, a litigator is trained in fear motivation. A psychotherapist is trained in empathy. A psychic is trained in energy.
This is the true Triple Threat for mind reading almost anyone...
