Beck Institute was recently contacted by Seddiq Weera, a physician and antiwar activist from Afghanistan who has spent decades observing and intervening in hostilities in his home country. Now living in Canada, he is hoping to design and test a scalable protocol using Dr. Aaron Beck’s landmark book Prisoners of Hate to examine and address cognitive distortions that maintain hatred and discord between groups of people. We recently spoke to him to learn more about his journey and future plans. 

Beck Institute: I want to start by giving you space to tell us in your own words about your background and what brought you to where you are now in your life and in your career. 

Seddiq Weera: I trained and practiced as a physician in Afghanistan. During my time as a student and as a physician, I encountered two phenomena which are worthy of mentioning here. Number one was inter-group hostility as a lingering problem with immense human and economic cost to the country that occurred during three periods in Afghanistan. The first period was almost ten years of the Soviet occupation during which I spent four and a half years in captivity as a political prisoner. The second was eleven years of civil war, during which I worked as a physician in refugee camps. And the third was 20 years of unrest despite the presence of NATO and American forces in Afghanistan during which I tried to promote national reconciliation.  

The second phenomenon was a shortage of awareness-raising and education resources to help individuals cope and recover and societies to heal and reconcile.  

As an individual member of the society, when I was going through my own struggles and sufferings, I could hardly find resources to help me cope with perpetual fear and hopelessness associated with my role as an antiwar activist working under brutal autocratic regimes. As a 19-year-old medical student I had to live in hiding for almost a year with constant fear of arrest, torture, and subsequent death. Over three years later, immediately after graduation from medical school, I was arrested for secretly treating anti-government fighters and kept behind bars for over four long years. 

Seddiq Weera

Realizing the sharp contrast between the scarcity of information and resources in mental health prevention and the relative abundance of preventive resources for medical conditions such as diabetes and cardiovascular illnesses, I become strongly interested in prevention (primary, secondary, or tertiary) of psychosocial challenges and mental illnesses. 

That may be why, during my post-graduate studies at McMaster University and University of Toronto, public mental health, preventive psychiatry, and finding peace within remained my focus of studies and research. Appreciating the connection between psychological well-being and inter-personal and inter-group relationships led to expanding my career focus from “Peace Within” to “Peace within and Peace with Others” that coincided with my work at McMaster University’s Centre for Peace Studies. 

Beck Institute: Can you speak more about your work with the Centre for Peace Studies and how that work led you to Prisoners of Hate? 

Seddiq Weera: The job I held at the Center for Peace Studies allowed me to prepare educational packages on prevention of mental conditions and to promote psychosocial well-being. I took those packages to the Afghan refugee camps and shared them with refugee teacher educators. The feedback reaffirmed the empowering potential of psychosocial education to better manage stress, fear, anger, sadness, and grief and to prevent violence through effective communication, problem-solving, conflict resolution, and reconciliation.  

One year later as I, along with other McMaster colleagues, was leading a project on “Peace Within, Peace with Others,” in Afghanistan, I read Dr. Aaron Beck’s book, Prisoners of Hate. Wow, it was a moment of enlightenment for me to understand the lost compassion and empathy among hostile groups in Afghanistan and the deep hatred that continued for decades. It reminded me of warring factions who didn’t care about the other parties’ children, women, elderly, or their basic rights. Many eyewitness accounts matched the description of homogenization and dehumanization of “the other” followed by mass killing and merciless torture, exactly as described in Dr. Beck Prisoners of Hate. 

I understood more how the loss of empathy and biased views in Afghanistan might have grown to become serious national challenges that could at least partially explain the August 15, 2021, collapse of the republic. Reading Prisoners of Hate was indeed a lightbulb that went off in my head.  

Beck Institute: How did reading Prisoners of Hate impact you as a peace worker? 

Seddiq Weera: When I went back to Afghanistan as a peace educator in 2002, I observed two levels of dynamics in the government. On the surface, different groups, some of which were former enemies in the civil war, were working together in the same offices and treated each other with respect and decency. However, in private and behind each other’s backs, some of these groups were plotting for domination or defending against perceived threats. This unhealthy dynamic gradually took over the entirety of the Afghan government at a time when there was a critical need for joining hands for vital national and people’s priorities.  

Intriguing is the role that cognitive distortion as a remnant of former hostilities might have played in driving such a pathologic dynamic within a government that was receiving tremendous amounts of international support and could have used such a golden opportunity to end the suffering of over forty years of war. 

I’ve been ready and willing to dive deeper and examine the cognitive components of hostilities in war zones as well as divides in peaceful societies suffering from racism and injustices. I’m also willing to explore some cognitive awareness-based interventions in both war zones as well as war-free societies in North America. My vision is to see Prisoners of Hate find its place not only in conflict analysis and conflict resolution, conflict transformation, national reconciliations, but also in preventing primary, secondary, tertiary social fractures and the divisions that we face in Canada and the US.  

Beck Institute: It’s interesting that you brought up the US and Canada because I think many people would agree that our society feels increasingly divided and hostile—there is a real sense of “us” vs. “them” individually, but also nationally and internationally. I wonder how you see Prisoners of Hate fitting in outside of conflict zones. 

Seddiq Weera: One thing I know for sure is the perception of another group as “bad” or “not as good” is often based on a distorted cognitive image, which we don’t talk about enough. We need to uncover the mystery of cognitive distortion (beyond calling it stereotype and prejudice) through research so we can advance the quality of interventions to help people see humanity in one another. I strongly believe in a cognitive enlightenment to help us deal better with the many superfluous social and political divides.  

As well stated in Prisoners of Hate, at some point in the intergroup dynamics when blame triggers anger and anger evolves into hatred, compassion is lost and if nothing is done, empathy is lost. This is when the healthy differences between cultures turn into lines of hatred and dangerous hostilities. It is legitimate, in these circumstances, to ask and find answers through systematic means, whether these hostile groups really understand one another and have close to real images of one another.  

The legacy we must continue was started by Dr. Beck and I am willing to spend the rest of my life to take his cognitive model from a clinical to a societal level. Dr. Beck successfully demonstrated the cognitive behavioral model in a clinical context and it is time to experiment with societal applications to address and prevent colossal challenges like civil wars and racial and religious divides. 

Beck Institute: Would you be able to talk a little bit about your plans for research in this area? 

Seddiq Weera: My ideas are to explore deeper layers of the cognitive dimension of problems like racism and social divisions in North America as well as lingering animosities in war zones. I want to document and uncover evidence about the depth and the breadth of cognitive distortions and how they interface with group and societal behavior and I want to examine some prototype cognitive interventions.  

For example, I’d like to test cognitive enlightenment-based educational approaches aimed towards mutual understanding and building empathy. I think the compassion probably will follow once you bring back the empathy—because when you see the humanity in each other, the compassion will come back. 

Resources from Seddiq Weera: 

Are you interested in learning more about Seddiq’s work, or do you know of resources to help him with his research? Please reach out to him at weeras@mcmaster.ca.