How Christmas creates unhappiness

My strong opposition to Christmas is totally unrelated to its religious meaning. Christmas as it is popularly celebrated has little to do with religion but everything to do with merchandising. From the standpoint of Buddhist philosophy it is the worst day of the year, not on "moral" but on practical grounds: owning things makes us unhappy.

Especially in the U.S., people have been lead to believe that happiness and a good family life are tied up with the purchase of all kinds of goods. Yet the reality is that after Christmas we have a sizable increase in depression and unhappiness, as the promise we believe in fails to come true. We are not happier after Christmas. In fact, the more we have, the less likely we are to be content and happy. This outcome is totally unrelated to over-spending and debt, which only adds to and perhaps conceals the real problem.

I'm not encouraging poverty and abstinence. I am discouraging the belief that owning things has anything to do with happiness. We already know that when we own things, they own us as well. Not only do we have to make payments initially or over time, we have to take care of the things, store the things, dispose of the things, and wait in vain for the happiness to start. We have to deal with the disappointment and disillusion that follow in greater or lesser degree.

But there's always next year, while we look for storage space for our happiness-makers.

Terrorism as a "Kick Me" Game

In Transactional Analysis we note a pattern of interpersonal behavior which is (unfortunately) quite common, called the "Kick Me" game. In TA a game is defined as a limited and predictable series of moves with a reaction and payoff. Without going into technical details and analysis, imagine the following sequence of events: Person A makes irritating comments, sarcastic remarks and mildly hurtful statements over a period of time to Person B. The goal of this irritation is to provoke a response from Person B that is "out of proportion" to the most recent irritation from A. When B reacts strongly, A is able to cast B in the role of villain. A has been "kicked". This is the goal of the game. A is now (comparatively) the good guy, and B is the bad. People do this all the time, in many circumstances, from playground to boardroom, in their attempts to get someone else "in trouble".

It's easy to see that terrorist attacks all over the world are operating by the rules of the "Kick Me" Game. They threaten, frighten, provoke, cause small-scale tragedies and deaths. They hope for a large, dramatic response from those they attack, thus enabling the terrorists to characterize those who respond as villains. These terrorists then become the Victims, through their own actions. As a tactic, when it works, it unifies both sides and simplifies the conflict. "Sides" are taken, people are polarized into opposing groups. Small splinter groups of terrorists benefit by such unification, validating their position and even raising funds for future attacks.

In reality, there is little the terrorist groups can do that is actively so harmful or dangerous that an entire nation is endangered. Their attacks are painful and people die, which is not a minor issue, but there is no chance that their attacks can cause the fall of a nation. By not responding, we minimize their effectiveness, even while mourning the dead. It has always been possible for people to hurt other people, and rarely is there any way of stopping it; war has not been particularly successful in reducing pain and conflict.

Taking Things Personally

Lately, in our therapy groups, Elaine (my wife and co-therapist, an LCSW) and I have been considering the cognitive structure of "taking things personally" or "getting one's feelings hurt". Much of the conflict in close relationships seems to start with this issue. Some time ago we realized that we had taken this expression at face value and focused our attention on the conflicts and difficulties that followed, rather than on the starting point.

Let me begin with an example. Maxine has had a difficult day, and comes through the front door with a slam and a muttered curse, having just realized that she left some important papers at her office. Her husband, George, looks up and sees her angry face as she looks at him. Immediately he says "What's the matter? Have I done something wrong?"

Maxine, whose mind was on the missing papers, replies with considerable irritation, "No!". She goes into the bedroom to change clothes and prepare to drive back to the office. George, following her into the bedroom, feels defensive and on guard. "Are you sure?" he asks uncertainly. Now she is becoming irritated with George. "Didn't you hear me say so? Just leave me be!"

George is now sure she is angry at him, and he is not sure what he has done wrong, but he has been looking forward to her return and is now frustrated as well. "I'll leave you be, all right," he replies, and stamps out of the room. He retires to his favorite chair and sulks. Both George and Maxine are angry and primed for a fight.

It's interesting to consider in detail the thought processes involved in the initial stages of the interaction. Maxine is not even thinking about George as she enters the house. He sees her frustration and out of his anxiety constructs a worst-case scenario, i.e. that her anger is about him and some failure on his part. He adds a further extension to this catastrophe with his fear that their relationship is in trouble and that somehow it is his fault. His only plan is to ask Maxine to explain. At this point he becomes another frustration for Maxine, and her anger turns to include him. Her tone of voice confirms his fear, i.e. that she is angry at him about something. He responds with a veiled threat and retreats to sulk, since he has no idea what the "fight" is about. His "sulk" is intended to communicate to her that this is her problem and that he is ready to fight or to just withdraw.

Why does George assume that Maxine is angry at him? George is frequently anxious, which means that he is in the habit of "catastrophizing" every event, looking for the worst possible outcome so that he can prepare for it. For him, the worst case scenario he has constructed to account for Maxine's anger involves him. This particular scenario has at its core the fear that he is failing in some major way to be the partner Maxine needs and that the relationship will break or end. His readiness to believe this possibility is based on earlier failed relationships. He is ready to blame himself for any potential failure, and at the same time to defend himself against any such blame.

Nothing hurts us unless we are prepared to believe in its truth. No accusation or attack can wound us without our consent; we have to believe that there is at least some truth in the attack or we dismiss the attack as meaningless. Think, for instance, of the things that people could say that would hurt you, and you will note that they are all things that at some time have concerned you about yourself. Then think of some totally inappropriate and untrue accusation. In the first instance, the things that people could say that might hurt you are things you "worry" about, that you consider to be possibly true. In the second instance, you would experience the attack as basically futile, because you do not fear that it might be true. This kind of attack is equivalent to telling a Nobel Prize winner that s/he is stupid; the person would not be so much hurt as puzzled at the inappropriateness of the comment. But calling an overweight person “fatty” is guaranteed to result in unhappiness.

Our internal Parent/value structure is the gateway through which accusations have their power. For this reason, people who know us and our secret doubts and guilts can more easily damage us that strangers can. Attacks aimed at our known “triggers” are usually successful (in the sense that they result in our being hurt or angry). This is why battles between intimate partners are so likely to be taken personally. In a sense, we collude with the attacker in attacking ourselves, or we do not and thus take no harm. In the example above, George is ready to believe that he has done something wrong, and thus is vulnerable to the interpretation of her frustration as somehow his responsibility. She did not attack him, but in a sense, George attacked himself. Even in the instance in which the other person deliberately does in fact attack the other person in the relationship, the "consent" of the victim is required for damage to the ego to occur, and the damage, in a sense, is self-inflicted with the active encouragement of the other person.

It is instructive analyze an instance of taking things personally between you and a loved one. List all the actions, thoughts and behaviors that were elements in the conflict. Being careful to be as honest as possible, look for the moments of self-doubt and fear and the content of your thoughts.

“No-suicide decisions”

The problem with having an option to kill oneself is that it is effective in reducing anxiety without solving the basic problem. The suicide option is a plan of action, and like all action plans, functions to reduce the anxiety that arises from having a problem with no easy solution. A reduction in anxiety also reduces the motivation to find another and better solution. Making a “no-suicide decision” will sharply increase the anxiety-level. The increase in anxiety motivates us to find a new solution to life’s problems

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Recently a battered wife whose alcoholic husband regularly threatened her life told me she could stay in the marriage because “if it got too bad, I can always kill myself”. The thought of having a “way out” through suicide reduced her anxiety at the thought of being “trapped” and made it possible for her to continue living in that situation. The effect of making a no-suicide decision is fairly obvious: 1) her anxiety level is going to rise sharply since she no longer has “a way out”; 2) the rise in anxiety level should trigger other solutions that do not involve suicide.

Imagine yourself for a moment in her position. You can find the situation barely tolerable by reminding yourself that if the situation “gets too bad” that you can always kill yourself. Your counselor tells you that if you make the no-suicide decision, you may have another 30 years in that situation.

The counselor then asks “Can you imagine enduring your situation another thirty years or so?”

You reply “Absolutely not!”.

This vignette illustrates the power of the no-suicide decision to provoke a new decision to change things.

The no-suicide decision has been described in other articles by myself and others, and is quite simple to describe technically, if somewhat more difficult to put into practice. A person who indicates their willingness to make such a decision is asked simply to read the following words from a piece of paper or from a blackboard: “I may feel like killing myself AND I will not.” The person making the decision should be told not to change the wording. Note that the statement deliberately separates feelings from behaviors. It is important because patients frequently feel they are unable to control their emotions and thus would be making a “false promise”.

The therapist then points out that only the client can tell whether or not the statement is true. The client may be asked to read the statement without meaning it, in order to clarify the difference between commitment and insincerity. The person can be invited to “Say it again and mean it”, but more often the patient will spontaneously carry out this action. I always ask the patient if they felt “solid” with the decision or if they were not sure if they meant it. If they indicate uncertainty, I suggest they spend some time thinking about it and discuss it with family, and at a later time with me. It is not useful to bring pressure to bear on the patient, since inducing some kind of insincere compliance is counterproductive.

It is important to emphasize that this decision is NOT a contract of some kind. It is not an agreement between client and counselor. It is not a “promise”. Contracts and promises can be broken. The no-suicide decision is not between the client and anyone. It is not dependent upon anything. Sometime their heightened anxiety causes them to look for “loopholes”. I suggest they add the following: “If I find a loophole in my decision, I will not take it”.

I am intrigued by the fact that making such a decision is so difficult without the presence of another person. Why can’t I tell what I mean when I’m simply thinking to myself, or even talking aloud while driving alone? I do know that the moment such thoughts are expressed to another person actively listening whose opinion I respect, I can tell whether I am being truthful or just playing with thoughts.

Bear in mind that the no-suicide decision is not for the benefit or reassurance of the therapist. It is to allow the patient to force him/herself into a position in which s/he will be under pressure to make changes rather than continue temporizing. Patients sometimes want to engage in pseudo-philosophical discussions rather than actually make a commitment. These tend to be the same patients that talk and talk in therapy without actually doing anything. “Talking about” for them is instead of taking action, rather than preparatory for action. I have been known to suggest suspending therapy for a period of time to “give them time to think things over”.

I strongly believe that patients in therapy with open suicidal options will do very little except talk. If therapy is a place in which people wish to change, an open suicidal option precludes that possibility. In early stages of therapy clients are often involved in philosophical exploration, rumination, self-examination. They are not ready to change; they are in what Prochaska calls “pre-contemplation”. I want to be clear that no-suicide decisions are necessary only in the stage of therapy in which change is the goal.

A more serious technical difficulty is in the timing of suggesting a no-suicide decision. Very early in the therapy, when the relationship of therapist and client is still new and tenuous, it is easier for the client to terminate rather than face the anxiety and discomfort of change. By suggesting the no-suicide decision too soon, the therapist may be asking the patient to give up a tactic that for some time has provided the only “way out” of a difficult or impossible life. Why should the patient believe the therapist is competent and has something to offer that is better?

Clients would not come to therapy if they were simply and purely suicidal. They would be dead. They are in therapy because, whether or not they know it, they are significantly ambivalent. They want to have a life but fear it. They fear they won’t be competent to solve their important problems. They fear that a solution to their problems may require a radical rethinking of their values and beliefs. They may not be ready; they may not be able; they may lack the courage.

A caveat: Therapists who have open suicidal options themselves will be generally ineffective in getting no-suicide decisions from patients.

Suicidal Life Styles

Some suicides happen impulsively. Some suicides are deliberate and result from a rational decision to end physical suffering and pain. Many people have occasional suicidal impulses and do not act upon them, and some people endure physical pain and suffering for lengthy periods of time without seriously considering suicide. In this article I want to examine the frame of mind in those for whom suicide IS an option, whether or not such people actually kill themselves.

A surprisingly large number of people have an open “suicide option”. This option is a conscious willingness to consider death as a legitimate solution to a difficult problem. If you ask whether suicide is an option for such people, they can give you a direct answer, because it is always a conscious choice. They see suicide as a legitimate and reasonable solution to life’s problems, at least under certain circumstances. I have for a long time been interested in the developmental histories of people with suicidal options, and I have noted certain consistencies, both in their historical development and in their subsequent life styles.

To carry out a decision to kill oneself the suicide option has to be actually open. A close friend of mine, facing a certain and painful death from cancer, decided quite rationally to end his life. When the moment came, however, he discovered to his own surprise that he was quite unwilling to actually do it. Another psychologist friend (who had been in therapy for many years with little change) told me that “knowing I can always kill myself is the only thing that keeps me going.”

For a suicide to take place, there must be as a minimum an open suicidal option. Some people have this option, and others do not. Where does it come from? Many psychotherapists have asserted that the decision to die is made in childhood, when it is seen as a solution to an intolerable and inescapable situation (Haiberg, Sefness and Berne, 1963; Boyd, 1972; Drye, Goulding and Goulding, 1973). It is unfortunately not difficult to find instances of deliberate suicides carried out by children.

Children have a limited capacity to understand the real nature of death. They also have a very limited ability to deal with difficult or even unbearable situations, such as a brutal or sexually predatory parent or total abandonment. They have few choices in reality. They can’t move away or seek shelter from other sources; they are in fact helpless. Their resultant anxiety can be overwhelming when they see no way out of their suffering.

One way they may find of reducing anxiety is to make a plan that they can actually carry out. This decreases the feeling of helplessness that makes the pain so unbearable. When children discover that suicide is a choice they can make and actually carry out, their anxiety is relieved, though the subsequent depression and sadness is not. The price of that decision (which I will discuss later) is not obvious. It is important to note that the function of the suicidal decision/option is an immediate reduction in anxiety.

Holloway (1973) described the suicidal decision in children as an “escape hatch”. It takes the form “If things get bad enough, I can always kill myself”. People with this escape hatch frequently find this thought passing through their minds. It becomes something of a crutch, used consciously to decrease anxiety in a difficult situation. As such, it is reassuring and rewarding, a reaffirmation that the person is neither powerless or helpless.

It is necessary to understand how important the suicidal “crutch” is in decreasing anxiety. As an anxiety reducer, the suicidal decision is constantly reinforced, even in situations not in themselves critical. It is actively seen as a solution to many of life’s problems. There is a price, however. Keeping this option open requires that the person be able to see life as something that can always be left. To get too attached, to love too deeply, to become too successful, to be too happy, make leaving life more difficult.

Many times I see people (including clients) back away from positive experiences, avoid intimacy and love, sabotage success, but tolerate a mediocre and lackluster and “safe” existence. They do so to protect their “solution”, because reducing their anxiety is more important to them than chancing success and failure. They seem to live as if they cannot move too far away from the graveyard or the “safety” of the grave. To be ready to go on a trip, one must keep one’s bags packed. They seem to believe that real happiness would somehow leave them trapped, a thought they find unbearable. Death becomes a security blanket, a promise of escape. But it is also an escape from life, an avoidance of any passionate commitment to make things better.

Others allow themselves more happiness and success, but in their minds they attach a condition for continuing to live. They remind themselves that “if things go wrong”, meaning if they lose their money or their life-style or their loved partner, they can exercise their suicidal option. There is a tentative quality to their happiness and success; their willingness to continue in life is based on the chance that life will continue to meet their demands. No one with a suicidal option, placed in the situation of the Swiss Family Robinson, would have the endurance or will to create a good life from disaster. If life becomes overly painful, they neither make things better nor endure them with grace. People associated with them are frequently aware of the tenuousness of their commitment to life.

The result of this half-hearted life style is that the person with the suicidal “escape hatch” is very prone to depression. They are frequently aware that there is something missing, that somehow their happiness and love are incomplete and unsafe. Their marriages, their careers, their education, their therapy all have the mark of limited commitment. Because of this failure to commit, they have a sense of alienation from others, a distance from life that isolates them.

So we see four kinds of consequences for keeping the suicidal option open:

1) A general failure to commit wholly, to connect to others wholeheartedly;

2) A basic passivity toward the ills of life and an unwillingness to commit oneself to correct them;

3) An overall pessimism about life sufficiently intense to make the fantasy of death an effective reliever of anxiety;

4) A willingness to trade the anxiety over being helpless and abandoned for a general mild and predictable depression and alienation.

In the next part I plan to discuss how one gives up the suicidal option. The references cited in this note are available on request.

Values clarification as a psychotherapy

There are a wide variety of values in the Parent ego state, ranging from primitive to sophisticated. When the values in the Parent conflict with one another, there seems to be no built-in sense of discrepancy. Something has to bring the values together to be considered in the Adult. Events, conversations, information, education, experience... any of these things can cause the person to become aware suddenly that they have conflicting values, and therefore conflicting behaviors.

When the majority of the values present in the Parent support one of the conflicting values, it's fairly easy and quick for the person to make a choice and reinforce that value. The conflict may still exist, since there is no way to erase Parent beliefs and values. But the person will experience decreasing conflict as the person begins to act on their chosen value. However, when there is no clear weight of value and choice on the side of one of the conflicting values, the situation does not readily resolve, and the conflict in fact becomes more acute since it is now more conscious (i.e. within the purview of the Adult).

Moreover, when the person attempts to resolve their internal conflict, they are limited to the problem-solutions about which they already know. If their repertoire of problem-solutions is limited, their ability to change behaviors and resolve their internal values conflict in a new way is equally limited. This is why people with personality disorders are so rigid and inflexible in solving new problems.

The job of the growth therapist seems to be that of bringing the person's awareness to conflicting values, and to assist them to find new solutions to the conflict. This frequently is a very difficult and painful process, especially when the person has a great deal of emotional investment in the "wrong" value. It is not usually effective for the therapist to take sides, but sometimes it's the only way the patient can find a way to move on.

Another look at Growth Psychotherapy

As clients talk with me about their behaviors, and perhaps more importantly, their desired behaviors, they reinforce the value systems that support the desired behavior. When the desired behavior is not carried out, the discrepancy between the two value systems increases. This results in an increasing degree of conflict internally. As the clients become more uncomfortable, their motivation to resolve the conflict increases, and the likelihood of changing their current behaviors to conform with the desired value system increases.

However, when the client has a limited repertoire of tactics with which to solve problems, the attempts to change behavior patterns often fail. Even with a very limited set of tactics (e.g. a client with a "personality disorder") if the tactics available are adequate to deal with the problem, the client can succeed in resolving the conflict fairly readily. But when the tactics available are inadequate to solve the problem, the discomfort rapidly becomes more acute.

In this latter case, the therapist must find ways to demonstrate or teach the necessary tactical skills to solve the problem The therapist cannot solve the problem directly, of course. But successful therapists are able to teach the techniques for competent problem solving so that the client can ultimately deal with the conflict.

Therefore it appears that this form of therapy has at least two stages: one in which the client becomes more uncomfortable with the discrepancy between their actual behaviors and their desired behaviors, and a second stage in which the client may have to learn new techniques with which to change their behaviors and find new solutions.

This approach to therapy is not aimed at symptom reduction, as cognitive-behavioral therapy is, for instance. In fact, increasing discomfort may be a sign of the efficacy of the therapeutic approach. Sometimes we have to become unhappy with ourselves to develop the desire to change who we think we are.

Presidential un-choices

There needs to be a way in which US voters can express their dissatisfaction with the choices they have been offered. Rarely has there been a better instance of this need than in the upcoming presidential elections.

Of course we can simply not vote. This, however, plays into the hands of the political machine, giving them even more power. The political managers would probably welcome our abdication from the machinery.

I would like to propose that we develop a system whereby we can responsibly express our unwillingness to accept the situation they present. For instance, ballots could have "None Of The Above" as a choice. Or a constitutional amendment could require that a majority of registered voters vote in the election and the election be declared invalid if that majority is not present. There are a number of ways this can be accomplished that would insure that elected officials really are the result of a majority of the electorate.

On the positive side, the political machine would have to pay attention to the voters in a new way. They would not want an expensive election to result in a recall. A new slate of candidates would have to be proposed and more importantly, a LOT of new "deals" made with the people who provide the money. On the negative side, the amount of time and money that a brand-new election would cost creates a real management problem. There's no way to predict how long the replacement/revote process would take.

Personally, I want to take a positively negative action. It's not enough to simply not vote. I want my discontent with my choices to register directly. I want to vote against inadequate or incompetent potential managers. I don't want a choice between kinds of crap. I want to directly reject it and force political parties to recognize how badly they serve the American people, and even for them to pay for their mistakes.

In other posts I have suggested the presidential process is corrupt from the onset, in that no candidate can possibly raise the funds for a winning campaign without taking money from organizations that have an agenda not in the interests of the general public.

When do I get to vote against and express my extreme dissatisfaction with the current process?

Another Modest Proposal

People are living longer, and they have more medical bills. This is generally a good thing, especially for older people like me. However, the funds for the available medical help are limited, and there are many instances in which people are denied medical help that might save their lives because there are simply insufficient funds.

I object to using public funds to provide medical assistance to people who don't deserve it. It seems to me that when people engage in behavior which they know will cause illness or death, they should not be covered for medical expenses by Medicare. Examples are easy: Smokers should not be covered for illnesses that are the direct result of smoking, such as emphysema or lung cancer. Motorcyclists who ride without helmets should not be covered for head injuries sufferred in a motorcycle accident. Drug abusers should not receive coverage for drug-related illnesses. And so on.

I don't object to people being irresponsible. I object to being required to subsidize the medical problems caused by their irresponsibility. I object to responsible people being denied medical services because the money that those services would cost have been spent on people who voluntarily undertook the risks of their behavior.

We are going to have to deny some medical services because of fund shortages anyway. I am only proposing that we handle this proactively and decide that we can't afford to subsidize self-destructive habits and hobbies.

The fallacy of romantic love

We had several marriages in the family in the last year or so. Grown children, grandchildren, all in love, all getting married. It's charming and even touching to watch. They promise to love and honor one another. They clearly feel passionately about one another. They announce that they will love each other forever.

From that last sentence, you might easily think that love has something do with getting married and with staying married. We're in an age of romance. We like the idea of passionate feelings sweeping inhibitions away. We like the fantasy that such feelings can endure "forever". People "fall in love" and get married on the basis of such passion and frequently expect to stay married on that basis. The success rate for that belief system is not very high. We have begun to recognize that romantic love is not a good basis or predictor for a lasting marriage. In fact, we might find ourselves singing "What's love got to do with it?"

Part of our difficulty, as usual, lies in the multiple meanings of the word "love". Romantic love is a feeling, and like all feelings, waxes and wanes with time. Usually it includes a fantasy of a perfect union, a closeness unmatched since before our birth. It thrives on mutual admiration and on the capacity to ignore or discount flaws in the other person. Being thought lovable, even being thought perfect and wonderful, was (and is) a pretty intoxicating experience. In particular, when the participants had previously fairly low self-esteem, being in a "romantic" relationship in which they were seen as flawless and perfect had a disproportionately huge effect on their ego. That kind of love, romantic love, can be addictive in the extreme. When romantic love is combined with sexual passion it is one of the most exciting and gratifying experiences one can have.

However, romantic love is not only a feeling that passes and changes as feelings always do, it is based on a fantasy of perfection and mutual adoration that can't be sustained in the real world. It doesn't take long until the image of perfection begins to show signs of damage. When marriages are based on total mutual admiration, they eventually (and usually sooner rather than later) fail. Small wonder that when reality re-enters the picture and the illusion of personal perfection is lost, the person may find him/herself looking for a fix elsewhere. The result is frequently infidelity or perhaps divorce and serial monogamy. The search for the fantasied ideal romantic partner can go on episodically forever.

People in a romantically loving relationship don't necessarily really love each other as individuals, flawed and human. They love the admiration they receive, and they are passionately grateful to the other person for loving them and for the huge ego-boost that such admiration causes. When one or the other person begins to focus on the flaws in their partner, the fantasy of being perfect in their eyes is destroyed, and the disappointment and accompanying anger is sometimes surprising and sudden. All relationships based solely on romantic love are doomed to failure. There is nothing wrong with romantic love. It is simply a terrible basis for an enduring, long-term relationship.

There are other kinds of love than "romantic". It's a shame we use the same word for both unhealthy ("romantic") relationships and the most positive and healthy relationship two people can have. The confusion causes many wrecked lives and much misery. Healthy forms of love have been described many times and in a variety of ways, which I won't bother repeating here. It suffices to say that when we use the word "love" in a healthy relationship, it includes the willingness and even desire to put the other person's welfare in a place of equal importance to one's own. Healthy loving relationships are intimate, trusting and affectionate. Healthy love involves a commitment, not a temporary feeling, and because commitments can be permanent, can remain constant. Loving feelings come, go and return in a healthy relationship but the committed relationship remains constant.

In our romantic age, "falling in love" seems to be a prerequisite for marriage. However, it wasn't that long ago (in my grandparents' youth) when couples married first and developed a lasting relationship later. Many or most of those marriages lasted the lifetime of the partners. "Arranged marriages" didn't require romantic love. They were working partnerships in a difficult world that helped both partners survive on a higher level than they could have achieved alone. The workload was divided between them. In many cases the partners developed a strong, respectful and genuinely loving relationship over time. In other cases, the partners sought the romantic love to which they felt entitled in other relationships outside the marriage.

Among other things, successful marriages are business partnerships. As in all partnerships, workloads must be balanced and rebalanced. Mutual trust and respect is required and have to be earned as well as given. Happily married partners have open-eyed, realistic love AND like for each other, and such liking is harder to find than romantic love by a long shot. Liking one's partner, as I am considering it here, is something that necessarily develops over time. When couples have a romantic love to start their relationship, perhaps the fantasy can buy them the time it takes to fall in "like" with their partner, and then the relationship has a chance at enduring. However, romantic love is a weak reed to lean on; it has an expiration date somewhere in the near future.

The Buck Stops Where?

I remember when the then President of the United States had a sign on his desk that read "The Buck Stops Here". Harry Truman recognized that no matter who gave him information or how he obtained it, the final responsibility for acting on that information was his, and his alone. He did not rely on the doctrine of "plausible denial". The buck simply stopped there.

Now we have a President who acted on flawed and erroneous information. It seems likely that he knew the information was unreliable at best, but for whatever reasons, he used the WMD idea to defend the aggression against Iraq. Now his support staff are acknowledging that their information was wrong, wrong to the point of raising issues of criminal culpability. Why does the buck not stop with Bush?

Having made a major error that cost many lives, he can, of course, dump the blame on his staff, his support staff, CIA and the like. He undoubtedly will, having neither the integrity nor honor of Harry Truman. But. HE acted on that information. It seems clear that a more honorable course of action would be for him to resign. I would prefer to see him impeached with the potential of criminal charges being placed against him. A resignation, however, would restore at least a trace of honor and the remnants of dignity to an increasingly tarnished and tattered office.

Perhaps it is time to begin thinking of reorganizing the election process. The Electoral College system is certainly inequitable and no longer an appropriate means. A four-year term of office allows a President whose reputation and effectiveness are damaged beyond repair to stay in office, like a corpse in a wheelchair, for far too long. Perhaps we could have a system, like the English (in some ways) that would allow for a popular vote of no-confidence, that would require the current government to step down and new elections to be held. If we had such a procedure in place, how long do you think Bush would have been able to remain in office?

Time and past time to resign, Mr. Bush. The best thing you can do for the country, your party and yourself, is to leave office now.

Death rates in Iraq vs. US

Suppose the following imaginary study: A cohort of American men and women living in the US are chosen to match the characteristics of the equivalent group of soldiers in Iraq/Afghanistan. Over a one-year period the death rates of the two groups are compared, and it is hypothetically found that the death rates of the US-bound cohort are actually higher than that of the group in Iraq. The US cohort had a higher death rate due to drugs, car accidents, shootings, and the other usual issues that abound among the young everywhere.

So it might turn out that there are FEWER deaths in the military overseas than in the equivalent group in the US, meaning that military service might prove to be safer than young people left on their own here. If that were the case, would your (or my) position regarding the "war" in Iraq change? In other words, would your position regarding the appropriateness of the Iraq war change if it developed that young people were actually safer there than here? Why would it? Or why wouldn't it?

Religion and Magic

It seems pretty obvious that people who profess to be religious fall into several categories. For some, the way of life prescribed by their religion is important in its own right. Their religious beliefs are also an ethical and personal stance. The supernatural part of their belief system is not central to them; they rarely spend much time or energy attempting to make sense out of a supernatural world-view which exists independently of the physical laws of time and space.

For others, religion is simply a socially-acceptable way of believing in magic and the supernatural. This group of people believes that they are individually or as a group "special" and have some kind of entitlement to transcend the laws of reality. They believe they get "special dispensation" and that they can work magic on the universe, causing it to behave as they want it to. No matter how rarely that works, it works by sheer chance often enough that their belief is reinforced. When their prayers or magical chants are not answered as they want, they believe that they have done something wrong or that God (or whoever they believe is "in charge") is refusing their request.

In any case, the magical believers have a special relationship to the universe. They pray for rain, for health, for blessings, for success, for their personal (and frequently petty) little wants and desires. They pray that they will get a job, that someone will get fired, that they will win the lottery, that they won't get caught at whatever they're doing. It's magic, just simply magic. It has NOTHING to do with religious belief. They don't understand that prayer is not about changing the universe to fit their personal needs, that instead prayer is a behavior intended to put them in a proper frame of mind to deal with what comes next in their lives.

It seems to me that the vast majority of people professing religious belief belong to the latter group. They are essentially still primitive in their moral and ethical beliefs, still naive about how the laws of nature work, feeling special and "entitled". Most of them don't even pretend to live according to the rules of their religion, because for them religion is about getting what they want, not about living "right." They are the same people who buy lottery tickets, who gamble at Las Vegas, who believe in their hearts that since they are "special" they will get a better deal than the rest of us. It's amazing that in spite of all the evidence they never seem to get discouraged.

Placebos

The last post, regarding experimental design and placebo effects, got me thinking about all the "cures" that have been superseded throughout medical and psychiatric history with newer and presumably "better" cures. I recall reading of instances in which schizophrenia was "cured" through psychotherapy or re-parenting or...

Of course, schizophrenia results from a genetic predisposition. It is a physical condition, not a psychological illness. Still, there are reports of people recovering from schizophrenia. One of the few longitudinal studies that spanned over 50 years (my recollection is not perfect here) showed that almost 30% of accurately-diagnosed schizophrenics were eventually no longer schizophrenic. The concordance rate of schizophrenia between identical twins is around 90%, and that's with identical genes. So there is (or are) additional factors that enable the gene to express or to stop expressing, and, of course, we don't know what they are.

Setting aside, for the moment, the issue of how genes get activated or inactivated, people throughout the centuries have reported themselves (or been reported by others) as "cured" of a variety of illnesses and disorders that we KNOW were not treated effectively. "Bleeding" people as a medical technique had many adherents for centuries, and there were many people who believed they had been successfully treated in this manner.

The fact is that we do not know, even remotely, how the body cures itself from otherwise major or deadly diseases. We read about someone recovering from a 100% fatal cancer and living for many years, but we have no idea what the mechanism for this might be. The human body has mechanisms and modes of operation we can't consciously call upon. "Hysterical strength", in which someone under the right kind of circumstances can exert forces normally totally out of our range of function, has been known for a long time.

The "placebo effect" includes our ability to function in these extraordinary ways, and it is apparently fueled by belief or conviction, even mistaken beliefs and erroneous convictions.

A friend of mine sent the following:
Harry, I'd be interested in a skeptical take on the following: I stand face toface with someone, an arm's length apart. He puts his arm straight out from the shoulder, palm up, resting his wrist on my shoulder (his right wrist on my left shoulder). I tell him I am going to try to bend his straightened arm, and he is to resist as much as he can. I cup my hands from both sides of his arm over the inside of his elbow and pull down hard, trying to get his elbow to bend downward. Depending on the person's size and strength, I have to use more or less force, but I can always get the elbow bent at least 60 degrees, usually more.

We then reset in exactly the same position with the same task as before. This time, however, he is instructed to visualize 'energy' flowing up from the earth, through the soles of his feet, up his trunk, into his arm and out through his fingertips and beyond, like a five-nozzled fire hose shooting out water under high pressure. He is told not to focus on resisting, but simply on maintaining the visualization. Once he indicates he is ready, I try again to bend his elbow, and I can't, no matter how much pressure I put on it.

I have done this dozens of times, with all kinds of people, with myself and/or others as subjects. Aside from whatever psychobabble and metaphors are used to describe what happens, the result is the same every time.The only "objective" difference is that the person is apparently thinking differently from one trial to the next; how does that make them (apparently) stronger?

This is a great example of the kind of incomplete thinking for which scientfic rigor was invented. Imagine that you wanted to test the hypothesis that some kind of "energy" could be used by some sort of"mental control" as described above. The null hypothesis is that there is no such effect apart from that produced bythe belief itself. To test this and eliminate experimenter and subject bias, you would want to have a double blind experiment. This would be one in which neither the subject nor the "tester" would know what exactly was happening.

If the effect was only produced when both parties to the experiment knew which experimental condition was in place, you would know that the effect was the result, not of the experimental condition, but of the belief/credulity of the parties in the experiment. That is, of course, exactly how the experiment described by my friend works. What you observe,therefore, is NOT some mystical and unexplained force occurring through some sort of equally ill-described mental energy, but the "placebo" effect itself. The amount ofenergy difference in the two conditions described is exactly the definition of the amount of energy produced by a belief system itself.

My friend has come upon a perfect demonstration of the placebo effect. What you believemakes a difference, not in the way the universe operates, but in how you operate. Occam's Razor states that when there are two hypotheses that explain the same data, you should be biased in favor of the simplest. It is usually stated in the form "Do not multiply complexities". In practice I think this means that a higher standard of experimental proof is required for an hypothesis that requires a radical change in the way the world is viewed. Sometimes that needs to happen, and our world-view is wrong and needs to change. But the level of proof needed is still a high level of proof. In the example given by my friend, the standard of proof that is offered is just the willingness of the participants to believe that "something" is happening. That standard of proof gets us belief in the supernatural, the phlogiston theory, humours, astrology, and the endless pantheon of silly and ill-informed beliefs that seem to constitute proof for much of the world.

Rationality may not seem to be enough, but it's way ahead of whatever is in second place. Just because a ready explanation isn't available doesn't mean we should leap to an irrational one.

Election frustration

We all know that we are not told enough valid information for us as individuals to have an opinion on political matters. Bush told us that war in Iraq was necessary because"they" had "weapons of mass destruction". What other information did we have?

Do we think we have more information about the war in Afghanistan? Do we think that opium/heroin has anything to do with it? and if so, what? How are we supposed to have a valid opinion when we are not given information that is worth a fart in a windstorm?

That's why we have a representative government, rather than a true democracy. We vote for people that we have to trust to get all the information, even the information that is not available to us, so that they can vote as they think we would want them to. That's the theory. What's the checks-and-balances on this system? We have no way of knowing whether they voted in a way that represented their constituency. Essentially we have to trust them, trust the integrity, honor and sense of duty of our elected representatives.

Do other people have the same failure of trust that I do? If so, the problem is not a simple one, one in which electing different people will solve it. The problem is that there is no way to know whether a politician is voting as he believes we would vote if we had all the facts. We have to guess from outcomes and newspaper/tv articles.

So, what have we accomplished in Iran? Do we honestly believe that we can impose a representative and democratic government on people who want to follow religious leaders blindly? In the last 2000 or 3000 years, how many democratic governments have there been?
Particularly in the middle East, which in most relevant ways is still peopled by tribes battling for territory and water rights, where national boundaries are relatively recent and still relatively unimportant, where a winning tribe celebrates by killing as many as possible of the losing tribe, where there are no rights for those not members of your group, it is impossible to see how representative government would work. It doesn't even work that well here. And what gives us the right to try to impose our form of government on people who are not interested in democracy? What do we care what form of government they have?

The answer has to be that fighting for "democratic governments" in the middle East is the same as fighting against "weapons of mass destruction" in the Middle East. That's not why we're there, it's just why we're TOLD we're there. How much faith do we have that the secret reasons we are in the middle east and Afghanistan are good and valid? It's not so much that our leaders lie to us. There are probably good tactical and strategic reasons for doing that. It's that without ever, even eventually, knowing the REAL reasons, we can't decide whether our elected leaders are doing right or not.

I no longer believe that national elections serve a useful purpose. Changing from one set of dishonest and corrupt politicians to another is only marginally better than keeping the original group. Representative government is purely and simply an act of faith, and I seem to be in increasingly short supply of that item.

Accumulating feelings as evidence

It's not good for us to "save up" bad feelings in order to justify an eventual explosion. When we do that, we accomplish nothing except to vent. The person we "explode" at simply sees us as being "emotional" and easily becomes defensive. No problem was ever solved while people were attacking and defending emotionally. Problems only get solved by thought, not by explosion, as far as I know.

But we notice when someone persistently and consistently criticizes us. When the issue remains the same over weeks or months, it is a specific single issue which is important and must be dealt with. On the other hand, when the criticism is constant but its content varies, the issue is not about a particular issue but is about us personally. In Transactional Analysis language, we begin to experience the criticisms not as "doing strokes", that is, negative strokes for specific behaviors, but as "being strokes", or criticisms of the whole person. There is a critical difference between the two kinds of strokes: "doing" strokes are limited to the behavior and gradually dissipate over time; "being" strokes are relatively permanent.

So when we begin to infer or guess that the negative comments made by the other person are about how we are as people, they become much more damaging to the relationship between us. It's one thing to gripe at someone because they forgot to get something at the grocery store; it's quite another to accuse them of being "thoughtless and inconsiderate". The former, a negative "doing" stroke, is fixed when we go back to the store, or is forgotten over a period of time. The criticism is not a personal one, and is really simply a request for a change in behavior. The latter stroke, that of being "thoughtless and inconsiderate", is a relatively permanent and attributive critism of the person to whom the comment is made. It has a permanent impact on the relationship and on one's expectations for future strokes.

As a result, in any important relationship, we are more attentive to "being" strokes than to "doing" strokes. When the negative comments and criticisms are for a variety of different behaviors, we begin to sense a deterioration in the relationship and a more and more toxic quality to the comments. When we "blow up", we are beginning to acknowledge that our relationship has become more toxic. We hope that this is not true and that "things can be fixed", but we are beginning to experience negative "being" strokes which in the long run are fatal to intimacy.

Relationships in which we are not liked are toxic. No one can live in an atmosphere of perpetual disapproval without emotionally withdrawing. Intimacy is not possible in such a relationship. It's important that we be careful with what we say to each other. We can and should listen to and sometimes give negative criticisms of behavior, but we should be careful in the extreme not to give negative "being" strokes, which leave permanent marks on the relationship and the person to whom they are given. And when we consistently criticize the other person for a variety of things, they begin to experience negative "being" strokes.

Sticks and stones may break our bones, but they will heal. Words can cut us deeply and can leave marks that simply never go away.

Stages of development

Human growth seems to be describable in a number of ways. I'm particularly interested in that pattern that describes the relative dominance of each of two functional parts of the brain: the emotional self and the intellectual one. I'm sure that each is intuitively obvious. They do not develop in step with each other, however. This is largely due to the fact that the actual physical development of the brain, especially the myelination of the connecting neurons, doesn't get completed until the early 20s, although the emotional capacity of the brain is largely complete at birth.

Small children, up to the age of 4 or 5 (and ages are very generally given) have little capacity to subordinate their feelings to their intellect. They may even be able to understand in a particular instance why they should do so. But if their feelings are even a little stronger, they dominate the child's behavior easily. In the second stage, from about 5 or 6 until puberty, they are more easily able to control their emotions with their intellect. During this (very pleasant!) age, you readily get a look at the person they will become as an adult.

When puberty strikes, the emotions greatly increase in intensity fairly quickly, but the brain continues its slow and steady development. As a result, the emotional self easily dominates the behavior and choices of the person, even though (at least at times) they are able to recognize how irrational and inappropriate their own behavior is. They are simply unable to muster the power to override their impulses. The teenager feels greatly conflicted by his/her own inability to make their behavior match their newly chosen values and beliefs. They are difficult to tolerate, even to each other.

When the person reaches the early twenties, assuming they haven't been done in by a parent, their growing intellectual power to suppress or inhibit emotionally-dominated behavior makes them more consistent and reasonable. The balance between emotional self and intellectual self remains precariously stable for many years, becoming more and more dominated by inhibitory power and intellect as the emotions (especially sexual) become weaker with age.

Since our emotional drives tend to diminish as we get older, we are more and more able to make our behavior fit our values consistently, and so our values become stronger and more reinforced by our actual choices. There is no age at which the emotions are totally dominated by intellect, of course, otherwise even us old people couldn't make impulsive and irrational choices. Such choices are clearly less frequent, however. At least I hope so.

Voting "against"

I have been voting in Presidential elections for a great many years. Sometimes I have been enthusiastic about a candidate, sometimes not. In recent years two things seem to have happened that have changed my attitude.

In the first place, it's become more and more clear that regardless of who is elected President, there is little they can do without a majority in Congress. The President seems largely a figurehead and to serve as a marker in meetings. (The current President functions mostly as a doorstop, as far as I can tell.) Not only does it not seem to matter who is elected, it seems increasingly clear that both candidates are almost equally inept, and fortunately, because of their lack of genuine power, that doesn't seem to matter either.

Secondly, and this may conflict with the paragraph above, nobody can be elected in a national election without selling some part of his or her soul to the large, moneyed corporations, assuming the candidates have a soul to sell. When a candidate takes a large sum of money, regardless of what he or she promises, they at least owe the money-provider more favorable attention than all of us who did not provide the money. The determinants of choice are not the issues which are most relevant to the welfare and even survival of our country. Instead the politicians are openly willing to be biased by special interest groups, without even the flimsiest pretense at fairness or the welfare of the country as a whole. Can anyone imagine what John Adams or Tom Jefferson would have thought? The system is corrupt from the beginning, and we all know it, and we don't seem to be willing to do anything about it. I would be more apathetic, but it's too much trouble.

We could finance all national elections through a tiny national sales tax on non-essential items. However, if candidates have to make a choice between unlimited funds from corporations and wealthy individuals OR a limited amount under government supervision and scrutiny, why would they even hesitate to choose the former?

Something is also wrong about how candidates are presented to us through the media. For example, I was totally unimpressed by Al Gore during the debates on television. He seemed wooden, unresponsive, cool and vague. His opponent, now the President, He Who Must Not Be Named, looked (God help us) "better". HOW DID THAT HAPPEN? Watching Gore on talk shows or presenting his material on global warning showed me a totally different Al Gore, one who would easily have gotten my enthusiastic vote in that election. How can we vote meaningfully when the information we are given is so inaccurate and inadequate?

I have no intention of voting for President again under the current conditions. The choice between TweedleDumb and TweedleDumber is not palatable. I wish there were a space on the ballot for "None Of The Above". Absent that, perhaps we could all just stop voting until the broken system is fixed....

"Religious freedom" is an oxymoron

In every conflict, as emotions get involved, the participants tend to descend to the lowest common denominator. Conflicts may begin about issues, but the rise of emotions triggers a descent into personal attack and mean-spiritedness. As a result, all participants fight on the level of the lowest attack. The values about which we fought are set aside for the sake of "winning" the battle. As we behave so do our values change to match our behavior. We become that which we hate.

When we go to war with religious bigots, the worst danger is that we become like those we fight. Their worst brings out our worst; their intolerance for us becomes matched by our intolerance for them. In the end, we fight them on the lowest common denominator, which is their emotionally-based intolerance for us and for freedom.

Mark Twain (I think) said something like "My right to swing my fist stops at your nose." He points out succinctly and validly that all freedom we grant one another is limited. It is limited by the need to avoid impinging on the liberty of others. In other words, our freedom is constrained by rules which maximize the total amount of liberty and freedom for our group. These rules are difficult to balance, and the balance we wish to attain changes from time to time. It is only in America, however, that we have placed the maximal balance of personal freedom with group rights at the very top of our list, our highest value. Whatever else we believe, we are a free people and we believe that freedom for everyone is the highest personal value. We have a right to be proud of that.

When we have found that we were not acting in accordance with the highest principles of freedom, we have changed our behaviors and our laws to bring us back into balance. No other country has done what we have done. We have even extended our values to provide that balance of freedom to defeated enemies. We have had failures, but we have righted many of them and are righting more. We move in the direction of increasing maximal personal freedom for everyone within our range of influence.

Freedom is a higher value than religion, in that freedom includes the right to disagree with religious beliefs of any kind. When any religion asserts that its beliefs have a higher priority than our freedom, we have a problem. Can we allow any religion to assert its right to limit the freedom of non-members? When a religion is allowed to limit my freedom, its fist no longer stops at my nose, and our freedom has diminished.

What is now happening in our own military in Iraq is concerning for a number of reasons. I refer, of course, to the demonstrations of intolerance by Christians for non-Christians within the military, including persecution, harassment and bullying. The temptation to descend to the lowest common denominator is increasing. In fighting religious fanatics, there is the urge to descend to that level, matching their intolerance with our own. As a result, we are no longer entirely fighting for freedom, for the assertion of the importance of individual rights, but for whether our form of intolerance is better than their form of intolerance.

As Pogo once said, "We have met the enemy, and he is us."

Withholding cooperation from children

Children don't realize and parents forget how dependent children are. Even 15-year-olds need to be fed and have their clothes washed and a ride to the mall. They tend to take these things as givens, that they are entitled to all kinds of benefits from us. "I didn't ask to be born", an adolescent might say, as if that proved some kind of parental obligation. Neither did we ask to be born, either, and since nobody in the history of the world did, this argument is not particularly compelling.

Most parents operate on a "punishment" basis, by which I mean they assume that their children are entitled to all the privileges they can legally manage, and that when a child misbehaves one or more of those privileges should be removed. When we punish by removing a privilege, there is rarely much connection between the misbehavior being punished and the removal of the privilege. To the child, they are simply being punished.

An alternative method is the "reward" method. In this approach, a child has no privileges other than basic ones, food, clothing, medical help and shelter. Every additional privilege has to be earned, and the privilege earned is always related to a specific behavior. An adolescent might earn late-night privileges on the weekend by demonstrating specific kinds of reliability during the week, such as being on time with chores. A child might earn time on video games by getting homework in on time on a daily or weekly basis, or might earn extra privileges for showing respectful behavior to the parents.

There are many advantages to the second approach, but one of the disadvantages is that the parents have to spend considerable time thinking about what they want to teach and how they want to relate privileges to specific behaviors. It takes time to figure out what a basic level of privilege they want their children to have, and to change that appropriately as the children age. In addition, they have to keep track of what's going on, and that takes more time and attention. Punishment, on the other hand, is quickly dealt out and quickly over, and rarely teaches much of anything useful other than to keep one's head down. Most children prefer punishment regimes, since the punishment is over quickly and the child can get back to doing whatever they want.

I suspect many parents have trouble just saying "no" to a child, especially when the request is a reasonable one. We all want our children to like us. We want them to be friendly, to not make waves, to allow our complicated lives to be easier. Why be a "tough" parent when it's so easy to "give in"? Parents who "give in" have over-privileged, over-indulged and overly entitled children, and that's bad enough when they are still children, but it's really awful when they're 17. They have sold out, given up on demanding respect in order to get accommodation and liking. They end with neither being liked nor being respected.

Changing values in relationships

Changing our behaviors changes our values and our feelings. It doesn't matter, comparatively, what we think consciously when we actually make different or new behavioral choices. The change in behaviors powerfully shifts our values, and with them our feelings.

Couples make many compromises in their preferences in order to "fit" better together. Each compromise shifts the person's internal value set, even when the change is clearly not for the better. One member of a partnership may be abusive; to the extent that the other partner changes their own behavior to be more compliant with the abuser, the compliant partner's values and emotions change in the direction of Victimhood. They find their own submissive behavior less and less ego-dystonic. If enough time passes, the Victim may hardly remember being assertive or self-protective.

Couples then begin to resemble each other to the extent that they have compromised and adjusted to the preferences and values of the other. In clinical psychology we recognize a mental disorder (folie a deux) in which a healthy partner married to a person with a paranoid disorder becomes more and more paranoid themselves, even to the point of delusional beliefs.

Older couples become more similar over time, for better or for worse. It's important to remember that our compromises, even healthy and adaptive compromises, change us in the direction of our new choices. "Temporary" changes become permanent. We can't change our behavior without our values and ideology changing with them. So people that enter a dysfunctional relationship, hoping to "change" it, will certainly find themselves changing as well, in the direction of the dysfunction.

Disciplining Children

We all seem to get caught up at times in confrontations with our children, especially teen-agers. They do something we don't like, and when we try to deal with it we often find ourselves locked in a power-struggle. The battle becomes about who is in charge and must be obeyed, like a pair of 8-year-olds in a fight. As the older and the parent, we believe we can enforce our will, like that of the neighborhood bully.

As a result, the fight becomes about the power issue, not about whatever was done wrongly by the child. Lines are drawn; the chip is on our shoulders and we dare one another to knock it off. Meanwhile, the real issue, whatever it was, has been lost in the smoke and turmoil of battle. Win or lose, we end up being defined by our children as the "bad guys", the evil bullying villains who want to deprive them of their liberty. This is always the problem with “punishment” as a problem solution; it creates many more problems than it solves, especially with people older than 6.

I want to propose an alternative way of looking at this kind of conflict, and to do so I want to back up a little and ask us to rethink what it is we are trying to accomplish. Are we using this issue to establish (again and temporarily) our absolute authority? Are we trying to enforce limits that the child does not accept as valid? Consider as an alternative that we should be trying to teach the child to think clearly for himself, to teach good problem-solving techniques and that to solve a problem cooperation may be required between us and the child rather than a solitary exercise of power..

Suppose, for instance, we have a teenager without a driver's license, who, during the night, took the car keys and went for a "joy ride" in our car. The teenager is not covered by our accident insurance since he isn't licensed. When we are ready to deal with the problem, what can we expect?

Firstly, the teenager will attempt to defend and justify himself, perhaps even counter-attacking, since he may choose to see our confrontation as an attack on his independence, competence and self-hood. Much of the time, I regret to say, when I had to deal with these issues with my own (now grown) children, I handled it poorly, which is to say, with the usual head-on battle for power. The usual shouting and threats were as useful as they always are, that is, not at all. We all know that punishment simply increases fear and anger on both sides, and while such battles can be exciting they are absolutely ineffective at resolving issues. Punishment simply avoids dealing with the problem because it is easier to punish and be punished than to think, and it's also more gratifying in an unhealthy way. Many children (of all ages) prefer to provoke an “authority” into anger and/or punishment, not only because it defines the parent as the villain in the fight, but because the parent very often feels guilty when they over-react, and then are much easier to manipulate.

Later in my life, raising children for the second time, I began to rethink this entire issue, and have begun developing some alternative ways of dealing with conflicts with children. Now, as a great-grandfather, I have continued to observe and refine my thoughts, which I hope you may find useful in avoiding the ineffectiveness and frustration which we so often find in dealing with children.

In my hypothetical example, suppose that instead of confrontation, I had done something like this: I tell him to sit down with me quietly. I say something like "We have a problem. Your taking the car without permission creates several problems for me, and I want you to help me solve them."

"Yeah?" he says doubtfully.

I get out a piece of paper and a pencil. "Tell me what you think the problems are." I prepare to write things down.

"I don't know", he says, sullenly.

"I think it might be easier for you to think this through if you didn't have to do it face to face with me. I know you expect me to get mad and let you have it, or find something wrong with everything you say. How about you sit down somewhere and write down your thoughts about this problem, from your point of view as well as mine. My intent is to work something out with you that we can both live with, and it's going to take some thinking. Just let me know when you're ready for us to discuss this or if you need any information from me."

And then I leave the room (with the keys, of course). The first issue to be dealt with is the definition of the problem or problems. From my standpoint, I need to know where my car is, and I need to know that we are covered by insurance. I further need some assurance that the car will be available and undamaged when I need it. Finally, I need to know that my property rights will be respected.

From his standpoint, he needs to have some freedom to go places, see people, feel like an empowered adult, all of which I want him to have as well. He didn't ask to use the car, not because he is a "thief", but because he didn't think I would give him permission to use it. He probably has a pretty good idea why I wouldn't give permission to use it, even though he doesn't want to admit that.

The second issue(s) to be dealt with are the solutions to the above problems, solutions for both his AND my problems, and moreover solutions that represent fair compromises that deal with the reality issues without getting into punishment. First the problems have to be defined. His problems as well as mine have to be examined and treated with respect. Until he is willing to be clear with me, we can't go forward.

How would I enforce my demand, if he is not cooperative? I have lots of options, since I don't require that he like me every minute. I can refuse cooperation with him, refuse to drive him places, refuse to provide other privileges until he is willing to talk with me. I'm in no hurry, and refusing to provide him with privileges is not so much a punishment as it is that I'm responding to a relationship he is defining as uncooperative. If he comes up with a realistic appraisal of the problems in 5 minutes, that's fine with me. If it takes two months, that's OK too, since it's up to him, not to me.

I found that putting this idea into practice involved some additional issues. For instance, in the example, the young man might offer to solve the problem by “giving his word” that he won’t take my car again. I would respond to this (and other equivalent “quickie” solutions) by saying that I would be willing to accept his solution. I would then point out that if he didn’t keep his word, I would not accept that solution again, for that problem or any other. I would use the occasion to emphasize how an overly general “solution” can become useless if not honored.

The point is that I take the problem seriously enough to recognize that I can't solve it alone, and that I need to develop an approach which recognizes his needs as well as mine. I'm sure he would prefer to have me get angry and punish him. That way he can comfortably see me as the bad guy and ignore his disregard for my problems and needs, or the problem he has caused me. It would all be over with, he thinks, and his life will return to normal, and in addition I'll probably feel guilty for the punishment and overdo the forgiveness.

But actually thinking and solving problems is hard work, and I need to teach him all I can about solving problems through thinking instead of feeling. I can teach him control and respect by showing control and respect. I can teach him about boundaries by respecting his and my own.

Who speaks for Job's dead wives?

I listened to a minister of a major church yesterday talking about a story from the Old Testament, the story of Ruth. In the story the Israelites had had a number of years of poor crops and bad harvests. But they had prayed to God, who had "heard their prayers" and granted them a good harvest, for which they were ever so thankful.

I wonder, does anyone hear how absolutely bizarre this sounds? If all you want to hear is about the "goodness" of God, and how he responds to prayers, then you probably wouldn't see the huge contradictions built in to the story. Who gave the Israelites all the years of bad harvests in the first place? Why did He wait for years to give them a good harvest? Are we expected to believe that something was special in their prayers in the seventh (or whatever) year? Were they not humble enough before?

This story is like hearing about a bully who has for seven (or however many) years been mistreating and beating people up, but after a number of years the people he has been beating up beg him in a heartfelt way to stop, and he stops beating them up. Then the people are grateful and worship the bully.

Unless you believe that God was not in charge of the bad years. Then we have a different set of questions. Who was in charge of the bad years? Did God let that person be in charge or was God off having lunch with friends? Why did God let someone else manage the store? Why would he let the Israelites, his "chosen people", be managed by an incompetent or evil manager? And why would he wait for humility and prayers to resume his post?

Another example comes to mind. You will probably recall the story of Job. Job was a God-fearing man with a good farm, many wives and healthy children. He was doing just fine. However, God and Satan are chatting over a pint and a bet is made. The bet, by Satan, is that anyone could worship a God who does good stuff, but what happens when the going gets tougher? So God gives Satan freedom to do whatever he wants to poor Job, who is taking care of business and minding his farm and who doesn't see any of this coming. Satan destroys everything, killing everyone and everything in sight, and poor Job is next seen sitting in the ruins of his house with absolutely nothing, just sitting there scraping at his boils with a fragment of broken pottery. Long story short, Satan tries to get Job to renounce God, but Job refuses to do so, so Satan loses the bet and has to buy the next round. As a reward for his fidelity, God restores Job's farm, gives him new stock, wives and children to replace the dead ones.

What is usually overlooked here is how this story would play out if it were being told by the dead wives or the dead children. What kind of a deal is that for them? They get killed and replaced like poker chips in a GAME by God and Satan. I see a certain inequity in God's handling of his faithful, since one clearly has to assume that the dead wives and children were Israelites and believers.

My point is that few of the Bible stories make any sort of rational sense. People taking them as literally true are left with an arbitrary Universe in which neither faith nor fidelity make any sense or any difference. Is some modern Bible-story writer going to tell a story of how the Israelites in Nazi Germany were punished by God for something or another? Is it going to be their fault, and the survivors supposed to be grateful for being saved?

Who will speak for Job's dead wives and children?

Are good and bad quantifiable or absolute?

In Fowles book The Magus, Conchis tells a purportedly true story about an event in a Greek village during the Nazi occupation. Partisans from the region and from the village itself had been carrying out guerrilla activities against the Nazis. Nazi troops had then occupied the village, rounded up all the residents and the Mayor, and presented the Mayor with a choice of himself executing ten villagers, all of whom he knew, or if he refused to do so, the Nazis would execute everyone there.

The Nazi officer gave the Mayor a rifle with which to execute his choices of villagers. Of course, the Mayor immediately turned the gun on the Nazi officer and pulled the trigger. The gun was, of course, unloaded, the officer said. You must carry out the executions with the butt of the rifle, he added.

The latter detail doesn't change the ethical shape of the dilemma, of course. It only makes the choice more dramatically unpleasant. It's the choice itself that is of interest. Is it ever morally acceptable to carry out an evil act in order to prevent a greater evil? The dilemma can be rephrased: Are ethics absolute, or are they relative and quantifiable?

The United States has taken both sides of this question, sometimes simultaneously. For instance, we held "war crimes trials" after the second World War. Shortly before this event (or events) we had dropped atomic weapons on Nagasaki and Hiroshima, on the grounds that the horrific deaths of the civilian population could be justified if they caused the Japanese to surrender and thus avoid many more deaths. We firebombed Dresden using the same logic. We excoriated the Germans for bombing London, but used their own tactics against them.

I'm not taking a side here. If I had to, I would probably take an absolutist side. The question is a legitimate one, though. Is it better to kill a few in order to avoid the deaths of many more? Is it acceptable to kill mice in order to save people? Is it morally correct to send men to death in battle in order to protect the majority population? I think it's amazing that when we advocate most loudly for a relativist moral position we are generally among the population that is most benefited by it.

In the choice offered in the story in The Magus, a linguistic trick is played on the reader to make it seem that the Mayor has a terrible choice. The Mayor is told, in effect, that he will be responsible for the deaths that result if he chooses not to take part in the executions. This is not true, of course. The soldiers who follow their orders will be responsible for the outcomes of their action, not the Mayor. If he chooses to try to spare the majority of the villagers by himself killing ten, he is clearly carrying out an unethical (or at least immoral) act. If he doesn't do that, he is not responsible for what the soldiers might or might not do. He will have no way of knowing that the Nazi officer will carry out his part of the "agreement"; he could kill the ten and then the Nazis would do whatever they chose to do.

It seems to me that no matter what conditions are assigned to a choice, the individual who makes the choice carries the responsibility for his own actions, as do those of the others (if any) involved. Such a position of absolute morality doesn't fit well with our more modern and politically astute positions of moral relativity. Something is acceptable if it isn't as bad as the alternative. Really? And are we sure that the alternative is our responsibility too?