Lies of omission in relationships

In psychotherapy telling the truth is important, since only in the unstable relationship that results from telling the truth can growth occur. To say what you mean and mean what you say, as suggested by Helmuth Kaiser, is a difficult task but ultimately allows people to grow and change.

A patient (ostensibly faithful) asked if he should admit to his wife that three years previously he had had a brief affair, which he described as "meaningless". By that he explained he meant that there had been no emotional involvement with the other person either before or after the sexual event. He states, "I want to be honest with her". (I am for the purpose of this note ignoring the possibility of STD and his responsibility of protecting her against the consequences of his act). He states as justification that if the situation were reversed (which he doesn't believe is true) he would want her to tell him.

What he really means is that he thinks that by confessing his affair he can reduce his feelings of guilt. Of course this would probably work; he would feel some relief and less defensive with his wife. However, she would undoubtedly feel worse, and the relationship would certainly become less stable and more unpredictable. He is willing to feel better at her expense under the guise of "honesty".

On the other hand, if he doesn't tell her (a lie of omission), the relationship goes on as it has in recent months. It remains relatively stable and predictable. However, he would have to go on living with his guilt and defensiveness, recognizing the increase in distance between them (which she may ultimately sense), and limiting any possible growth and change for the better (or worse) in their relationship. She will certainly know him less well than she thinks; he will not discover what changes he needs to make in their relationship to make it better. Over time the relationship may become more stagnant.

He has left himself (and her) no really good alternatives. Each choice will be accompanied by a price, as every choice always is. Each choice results in damage to the relationship. The confession results in acute pain and damage, but the potential for healthy (but not necessarily pleasant) change. The lie of omission results in a slow and chronic pattern of distance, rigidity and loss of intimacy. He simply has to choose which kind of pain he prefers.

I seem to be making the assumption that good relationships must grow, and that therefore honesty is required. I'm not sure this is true, however, One can make the case that there may be times when relationships should be static, where no important changes occur, where individuals in the realtionship may remain consistent and predictable. Acttually, relationships go through periods of stasis as well as of growth. We seem to need both; I don't think many people would like constant change and unpredictability in their personal life.

So you pay your money and make your choice.

Anger as magic II

We can observe anger and rage in infants. It is an expression of frustration, frustration that the world is not doing what we need. Infants rage when they are hungry, cold, wet, too hot. Their expression of their anger is communicative; its goal is to goad caretakers/authorities into taking action to make things right. The baby shouts at the world; the world recognizes the problem and does something to fix it.

We are angry for the same reasons that we expressed our anger as infants. We express anger or rage when the universe and/or other people don't do what they should do. Every expression of anger is aimed at causing the object of our anger to change. It is a primitive expression of demand. The other objects in our world should behave differently, and we will rage at them until they do. We get angry at everything that gets in our way, as if the universe were a sentient creature out to thwart us.

It is our primitive and barely conscious belief that anger is somehow effective in getting what we want from others and the universe out there that is incorrect. If I stub my toe on a rock, walking in the dark, I may curse the stone or the dark, or just "it". I rage at "it" just as if I expected it to attend to my needs like parents when I was an infant. On some level we (and I) have a belief that anger is magic, that it alone creates change in the world.

At the same time, rationality tells us that we are more likely to get cooperation from others when we are not angry. We observe that our anger is more than likely to engender defensiveness in others rather than rational thought. We can observe that attempting to solve our own problems reasonably is more effective than attempting to coerce others (or the universe) with our anger. We know the rock on which we stub our toe can't be forced to stay out of our way through raging at it, but we do it anyway.

Sometimes we prefer our anger to its opposite, fear. The same bodily reactions occur in fear and anger: the rapid breath and heartbeat, the adrenaline flow, muscle tension and the like. However, in fear the direction of our movement is away, to flee, while anger moves us toward forcing the other to change. The question is, however, do we have to be angry to confront something that we need to change? Can we get better results with or without the anger? What would our personal lives be like if we didn't get angry? Could we survive?

The function of religion

Quite apart from the issue of whether a (or any) religion is valid, i.e. describes some aspect of reality, it seems to serve several important functions. It provides a "pre-history" which describes the beginning of the world. In societies in which there is little control of conditions or where food is scarce or requires skill to obtain, religion offers magical and ritual methods of attempting to exert control. Whether through invocation of game animals or placating gods supposed to be in charge of a particular aspect of life, such as weather, war, and so on, this aspect of early religions offers members a way of feeling they have control over important parts of their life that are really chance.

When the rituals don't work and the god(s) don't perform up to specifications, we develop a system to account for the failures of the magic: we imagine trickster gods or bad gods who oppose good gods. If the good god magic doesn't work, there must be another god who sabotaged it. Every culture of which I am aware has developed in this direction.

Since life is so manifestly unfair and since we so badly want it to be fair, we incorporate in our religions conditions that reconcile the unfairness. The more unfair and out of control things become in our lives, the more we seek a religious justification and rationale. I wonder if, as things get more erratic and unjust in our "democracy", we might not expect to see a surge of interest in the more extreme aspects of religion? Clearly we need better and more powerful magic; clearly we need to make more fairness, no matter who we have to go to war with.

Anger as a mental illness

We don't hesitate to classify chronic sadness as an illness. Depression is a serious disorder, resulting in many deaths and what is almost as bad, lives with all the joy emptied out. Chronic anxiety is also an illness. Anxiety shortens lives and makes most events fear-producing (not that there are not genuine reasons for anxiety at times). Chronic anger, however, has never been classified as a "mental illness", though it probably costs more lives than the first two together. It has broken many marriages and families, stressed people to the maximum and ruined their health. Why don't we see this as an illness deserving serious study and treatment?

It occurs to me that we as a nation (USA) see anger generally as a "good thing". We live in denial as to its toxic qualities and life-damaging effects. We love movies in which the good guy, having been suitably mistreated in the early part of the film, rises in righteous indignation and smites the bad guys in bloody and exciting ways. Consider the "Die Hard" movies, the movies starring Charles Bronson or Arnold Schwarzenegger or... there are really too many to enumerate. I like them too. When Dirty Harry lets 'em have it, I feel the same rush of satisfaction that the rest of the audience does. Our TV shows are full of it (anger, I mean), and we all watch them.

It's a way of life for us. We seem to need the thrill of knowing we are absolutely RIGHT and justified in whatever we do to take vengeance on the wicked. I find the same reaction in myself much of the time. In real life (whatever that may be) I'm rarely certain that I'm right. I'm possessed by the nagging feeling that perhaps the other person(s) may be right, that maybe I've missed something or misunderstood something. So when the time comes that I KNOW they are wrong and I'm RIGHT, I love the rush of adrenaline that spikes my righteous wrath. There's a thrill to "letting it go", even though I know it's bad for me and bad for relationships.

Maybe I don't want to see chronic anger as an illness. Where would we be without it? Would we still belong to Great Britain? Would we be able to stand up for ourselves and fight back without it? We as a nation were founded on rebellion and righteous wrath. Many of us espouse Christianity or Buddhism, which certainly do not encourage revenge or anger, but that doesn't even slow us down; in some cases it may make us worse because it makes us RIGHTER.

So I'm wondering if the reason we don't recognize chronic anger as the sickness it is, is because we like it too much.

Thought Experiment II

Suppose we were able to design a computer that can pass the Turing test, and let us further suppose that it has awareness of self, although we really can't define it. At keast it reports that it has self-awareness, awareness of itself in time and space. Now let us suppose that at any given moment we can turn it off, "freezing" all the circuits as they are at that moment, and then at some later moment turn it back on.

When it is on again, it reports that there is no lapse of awareness, just a lapse in time. In other words, it experienced restarting as a simple continuation of its previous functioning. This experience and report is essentially identical to what we humans experience when we are anaesthetized. We "go to sleep", and when we recover consciousness, we don't experience a lapse of personal awareness, just a lapse in time. We become unconscious at 1 pm and recover our consciousness, little the worse for wear, at 5 pm. We are the same person we were when we became unconscious.

Now reconsider with me the previous "thought experiment". In it we considered the plight of a person who could (through some advanced technology) be completely deconstructed and destroyed, then rebuilt at another place and time exactly as it was when deconstructed. It was possible to conclude that there would be literally no way, even in theory, to reconstruct the experience of the person who was deconstructed. The replica or reconstruction would experience exactly what the person or computer in the first example might experience. It "went to sleep" and then "woke up" at a later time with no experience of lapse of selfhood. But the original, the one who was destroyed, might have experienced total and irrevocable death, and as a result there would be no way to recapture its experience of termination.

The problem seems to arise from the way in which we think of consciousness. We tend to think of it as a unique phenomenon, unique to each one of us, and not in itself replicable. However, we also know that every person (and probably some animals) experience their identical awareness as unique. So, is the reawakened or reconstituted computer or person experiencing the "same" or a "different" consciousness? When we think of the computer, replaced atom for atom, reporting in its reconstructed state that it is "the same" as it was before destruction, does that mean that somehow identity has been passed along with the sense of consciousness?

I think it begins to seem that we make a mistake when we equate consciousness with self-awareness. We think of self-awareness as unique to each of us, but consciousness is simply a kind of functioning that animals and people can have without requiring that self-awareness be part of that consciousness. In the original thought experiment, it was posited that the process of destruction of the original could fail, and as a result both the original and the reconstructed person/computer would be identical and in effect be the same person. This now appears to me to be a difficult concept only because we equate self-awareness with consciousness. Both the original and the replication would be conscious. Both would have whatever self-awareness that accompanies consciousness on that level. To consider which is the original person now becomes meaningless. They are both the original. They both are conscious. They both have self-awareness. Each awareness is immediately different from the other because each now has different input, so off goes their consciousness marching to a different tune.

I'm still thinking about it.