Educational Disclaimer: This article discusses sensitive educational concepts and training topics. It is provided by Open College UK Limited for informational purposes only and does not replace professional medical or psychological advice.

Public auditing behaviours on the street. You often see these mainly in utube videos, on social media triggering intense emotional distress and potentially explosive anger along with the fuelling of paranoia, discomfort in unsuspecting members of the public.

It is essential that you gain a deeper understanding of the psychology behind these distressing and confrontational encounters for mental wellness and emotional healing because you could be next. The auditor’s parasitic loathsome behaviour stems from subconscious shame, masking a deep and desperate need for control.

By observing and interpreting these very high stress interactions through modern therapy, mind, science, psychoanalysis, and psychology. Additionally professional qualification standards. We can work towards diffusing intimidation, stress, paranoia, and anger without resorting to verbal explosive abuse. By exploring the root causes of human feelings in these moments allows members of the public to prepare and regain their psychological grounding.

Additionally, for those pursuing student education and CPD training in behavioural improvement of the self and wellbeing, by unpacking this hostile dynamic, offers you powerful insight into your own mind and reading the human nature of others and their behaviour. By cultivating strong awareness of these public stresses and threats. Empowers you and communities to deepen your healing and set firm boundaries to elevate your collective wellness.

Victim’s Emotional Recovery

Why am I using the word victim you may ask or should it be survivor. This word establishes the power imbalance and makes it clear that first and foremost people are victims to these auditors because they experience the real trauma, the distress and lack of consent involved in being targeted, irrespective of any laws involved. Therefore, the word victims of public harassment and its effect on that person is suitable for this article.

Other words we could use to describe a person approached by an auditor is the targeted individual or we could call that person the subject of the auditor. In therapy and trauma informed training, we move away from the word victim, because it helps people see themselves as active survivors working through healing material rather than powerless targets that the auditors pursue.

When a member of the public is approached or targeted by a public auditor and after the chaos settles. When the confrontation ends the psychological mental aftermath lingers, and this is very real and wrong.

Unbeknown To The Auditors

Unbeknown to the auditors, let alone they even care. The experience for the victim can cause lasting damage to a person’s baseline sense of safety which can leave them to explore and navigate an unfair burden of what is commonly called hypervigilance in their everyday life, especially out in public, for fear that this whole thing can happen again. This is commonly called post incident stress.

The brain’s amygdala remains on high alert every time that person goes out in public, they view ordinary public spaces as active dangerous or threatening zones.

For some, depending what they’ve already stored up in their mind, the state of chronic and emotional distress can lead to ongoing flashbacks, paranoia and unresolved, undealt with anger. I should have done this, or I should have done that, or I shouldn’t have reacted like I did. I should have just walked on, which is a persistent feeling of vulnerability and frustration. Making normal everyday routine activities like walking down the street or entering any public building or space deeply uncomfortable, let alone disturbing.

Obviously depending on the trajectory of the emotional recovery, depending heavily on that individual’s pre-existing mental and psychological setup or framework, including any past traumas and experiences they’ve had. Each person is individual and unique in this recovery.

For some people with a resilient mindset and a strong character, or having already had prior training in emotional regulation due to their own past experiences, the stress or the distress may fade as they process the event as just an isolated act of unpleasantness or hostility. For those with existing vulnerabilities that are already in place, the trauma can deep seat itself turning into a chronic state of anxiety and social withdrawal.

True healing and behavioural improvements require targeted therapies and wellness practises to retrain the mind to regain its equilibrium, helping the individual dismantle this unfair vigilance, public scrutiny and shaming, embarrassing and intimidating people.

The auditor has unknowingly projected their own subconscious shame on to them.

Who Are Auditors?

Public auditors are becoming increasingly common across social media especially in America and now in the UK at a rate of knots. A complete stranger stands silently and still in public filming people from very close up space without any explanation, not answering any questions and just waiting for a reaction.

Legally, they are usually in their rights. In both the UK and the US there is generally no expectation of privacy in public spaces. Auditors are well versed in the law in this area and often describe themselves as civil liberties activists defending the freedom of expression, public filming and photography rights, and Government Accountability!

Their Legal Argument Is Real

Legality and psychology and the effects on the actual victim or member of the public they film are two completely different conversations and arguments to be had, and in fairness to all concerned, both sides of the argument have a valid place.

These auditors are not wrong. They’re right in what they do. But what they do is cruel to others and they don’t care whatsoever. They couldn’t give a damn to the psychological and mental turmoil they’re creating in the person being filmed.

For those that don’t know, a behaviour can be lawful while it still produces emotional distress, anger, intimidation and psychological discomfort and more.

Most arguments around public auditing practises focuses on their rights and completely, absolutely and totally ignore the human nervous system standing in front of their camera.

If your nervous system fires up because someone is standing there silently filming you, then from their viewpoint, that’s your problem. That’s up to you to learn and educate yourself to understand what they’re doing. And if you go crazy or run into emotional frightened chaos, they don’t care. Because you’ve just given them what they exactly wanted – a reaction. Without that reaction they will move on and film someone else.

We as a species are deeply wired to monitor any threats, social judgments and unpredictability in our external social spaces. And when someone deliberately violates the normal social boundaries by standing weirdly silent, not answering any questions and appearing to be emotionally detached and filming complete strangers from close range then your nervous system instantly starts scanning for danger, and this is why I think they are cruel, irrespective of the strength of their argument to exercise their legal right to film others in public spaces.

Your emotional reaction, whether it be paranoia, rage, even violence on them, proves in their view that society and its citizens need better educating.

A psychologically calm and stable person does not stand in the street filming others and hiding behind the law, because that’s the only thing that allows them to do this as they would not get away with it elsewhere.

There is not really any one person who likes what they do. They naturally aggravate and irritate everybody, because they are actually yielding a power over you, and they know you will react.

Without your heated reactions, nearly all of their videos will fail to satisfy their needs. Your reactions are not separate from the reasons they stand holding the camera in accordance with the law and what they believe in.

According to Freud, psychoanalysis and psychology each auditor suffers from unresolved, subconscious shame and a fear of being exposed, judged and being powerless, along with feeling small and ineffective. This is held at a subconscious level and is revealed in the behaviour of the auditor holding the camera.

The auditing is actually reversing the feelings and the unresolved conflicts, and placing that shame onto that member of the public, and the camera has become a coping mechanism.

In psychoanalysis and psychology by filming complete strangers and provoking to say the least, defensive reactions. The auditor temporarily is moving themselves out of the vulnerable position that they live with. Which are the effects of inner shame. The person being filmed becomes the exposed and scrutinised one instead. The auditor then becomes the observer and the controller and the judge. This reversal creates psychological relief from that subconscious unresolved material which the auditor is unknowingly living with.

This Behaviour is Called Projection!

According to psychoanalysis and mainstream psychology. Projection means projecting or dumping your issue as I call it, onto other people. Dumping something that you hold inside your mind which is the effect, pain of unresolved material held at an unconscious level.

It is easy to identify unresolved and conflicted material held in people’s minds. Not by what they are saying with the use of their words, but by the psychological, mental and emotional state they are repeatedly or obsessively creating in other people. Auditors who hold cameras in public are constantly creating feelings of self-awareness, tension and exposure along with intimidation on members of the public, strangers to them.

Beneath the self-righteous mask of the public auditors there is a toxic and subconscious unresolved shame. This persistent filming behaviour indicates they seek escape from their own internal deep-seated feelings of inadequacy and unresolved defects.

To survive each day with this toxic internal activity, the psyche deploys a basic but primitive defence mechanism or reaction called projection. The auditor is weaponizing the camera to discharge or export, their own internal constipated and often rotten material onto an unsuspecting and innocent member of the public.

And by aggressively staging a confrontational situation to occur, they are transforming the innocent citizen into a scapegoat and presenting them as the rule breaking and hostile villain. This is called a desperate psychological eviction, where the auditor projects their own repressed chaos and shame onto the target or the victim. And in doing so they are purging themselves of guilt by

attacking it in someone else they do not know and not themselves.

It is an absolute and inevitable delusion that they must publicly destroy that person’s peace and safety in the public space they are filming. By doing this they are keeping their own fractured ego from imploding under the weight of their unspoken hidden worthlessness feelings.

Please note:

Everyone has material like this within their subconscious mind, but not everyone discharges it like auditors do. And it’s the same with the common school bully scenario. Persistent bullying is another form of projection where the bully is creating the very intimidated feelings in the victim which they themselves are carrying and live with, bullying has its roots in fear and feelings of inadequacy in that bully.

And that the bully is discharging the effect they have experienced or the belief they hold in that area of extreme intimidation onto somebody else by using a certain type of intimidating, exposing and harassing behaviour. This type of general psych evaluation related to this type of behaviour is 100% accurate.

Sceptics of psychology

Critics and sceptics of psychology and even psychoanalysis often ask how this can be the same across thousands of different auditors or hundreds of thousands of people. The evidence actually lies in the persistent, rigid and repetitive uniformity of the behavioural patterns or scripts being expressed.

Is it 100%? The answer is no because everyone is unique and individual and there are all sorts of hidden material and variables that we cannot say, but on the whole, on the surface it’s fairly accurate!

For example:

If someone is repeatedly behaving the same way over time and provoking people, and enjoys or appears to enjoy emotional reactions and creating strong disturbances in people and then escalates behaviours when ignored and loses interest or walks away when nobody reacts.

Then over decades of observation and cataloguing and recording human behaviour in the science of psychology, then the conclusion is that they are obtaining some sort of psychological hit or reward and this becomes increasingly strong, to the point where you could say this is accurate and unless some other information comes along to override this then it stands very strong.

Within all walks of life from country to country. Every unrelated individual doing this type of behaviour, including bullying, in however form or shape it takes use the same triggers, the same hyper vigilant defiance, and the same desperate hunger to take dominance and power over the other person.

This type of behaviour only becomes this universally identical when driven by a universal subconscious archetype. So, in psychology, the ultimate driver or driving force of compulsive overcompensation is a deep and existential shame. That has never been dealt with and it’s been pushed or held outside of conscious awareness deep within the mind.

And because that shame feels (forms as a belief) that it is a threat to that person’s survival, therefore the mind or the subconscious has no choice but to build the exact same external defence mechanism which becomes a loud, noisy, demonstrative, performative, externalised attack or crusade on others to prove they are the ones in control over this ‘stuff’ that they hold and feel.

The Loop!

Every single auditor, irrespective of their legal justification or reasons that they will argue, is trapped in this identical loop. The same as the school bully, the workplace bully, the intimidating, domineering person. They are literally fighting, an internal war and conflict inside of and against their own hidden feelings which start with worthlessness and shame.

Everyone – for want of description, a subconscious pandora’s box. Everyone has toxic dark material in it. But not everyone, builds, structures and defences to release it or remove it onto others like bullies, intimidators and auditors do.

This actually is not a decided or conscious thing that is done. This is an unconscious thing that forms, and we’re all vulnerable and subject to the same compulsive, impulsive driving machinery that makes us behave the way we do as humans.

No human being is free of projection and at an incredibly deep level of observation you will see small pockets of projection taking place in everyday society, in every social interaction. For many people it becomes all-consuming. In other words, it becomes a full-blown ongoing project or behaviour which brings in many rewards for the person.

The Solution!

What should you do? If you don’t want any form of a scene, a consequence or a drama of you in a video posted online showing you making a complete hysterical fool of yourself and losing that argument verbally or worse, having yourself arrested for trying to hit the camera out of their hand and so on. Then the answer would be to do absolutely nothing.

How does doing absolutely nothing pan out?

Quietly and slowly move away, quietly walk away or quietly turn around or put your head and eyes down and start working on your smart phone and don’t lift your head or look up at them again. I promise you within 60 seconds to 2 minutes, they will move on and seek someone else to film.

If you struggle with doing nothing and say to yourself – why should I? Then you will fall into your own ego and the consequences of that which you will regret later. In this scenario, there will only be a consequence for you, and that consequence will be your teacher, to develop some prudence and wisdom and turn away or cast your eyes down onto your phone, however it makes you feel. That’s all you have to do and it will pass.

If The Tables Were Turned!

If anyone in public were to approach the loved ones of the auditor, at any time, including family members, husband, wife, sister, brother, son or daughter, mother or father with a similar encroaching and invasive behaviour like the auditors do, where someone could just stand, look and quietly observe completely legally, yielding all that power, and then cause the auditor’s family member to go into a frenzy of anger, threat, fear, anxiety, paranoia and psychological discomfort or disturbance.

If that were to happen, most auditors would be livid and possibly confrontational and demand the law do something about it, if they didn’t sort it out themselves.

And that’s today’s fact!

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