The Road Less Traveled - SECTION I - Episodes 9 - 12

 

Episode 9:   Transference: The Outdated Map

This process of active clinging to an outmoded view of reality is the basis for much mental illness.

Psychiatrists refer to it as transference.

There are probably as many subtle variations of the definition of transference as there are psychiatrists.

My own definition is:  that which is usually acquired in the childhood environment but which is inappropriately transferred into the adult environment.

The ways in which transference manifests itself, while always pervasive and destructive, are often subtle.

Yet the clearest examples must be subtle.

One such example was a patient whose treatment failed by virtue of his transference.

He was a brilliant but unsuccessful computer technician in his early thirties, who came to see me because his wife had left him, taking their two children.

He was not particularly unhappy to lose her, but he was devastated by the loss of his children, to whom he was deeply attached.

It was in the hope of regaining them that he initiated psychotherapy, since his wife firmly stated she would never return to him unless he had psychiatric treatment.

Her principal complaints about him were that he was continually and irrationally jealous of her, and yet at the same time aloof from her, cold, distant, uncommunicative and unaffectionate.

She also complained of his frequent changes of employment.

His life since adolescence had been markedly unstable.

During adolescence he was involved in frequent minor altercations with the police, and had been jailed three times for intoxication, belligerence, "loitering," and "interfering with the duties of an officer."

He dropped out of college, where he was studying electrical engineering, because, as he said, "My teachers were a bunch of hypocrites, hardly different from the police."

Because of his brilliance and creativeness in the field of computer technology, his services were in high demand by industry. But he had never been able to advance or keep a job for more than a year and a half, occasionally being fired, more often quitting after disputes with his supervisors, whom he described as "liars and cheats, interested only in protecting their own ass. "

His most frequent expression was "You can't trust a goddamn soul. " 

He described his childhood as "normal" and his parents as "average." In the brief period of time he spent with me, however, he casually and unemotionally recounted numerous instances during childhood in which his parents had let him down. They promised him a bike for his birthday, but they forgot about it and gave him something else. Once they forgot his birthday entirely, but he saw nothing drastically wrong with this since "they were very busy." They would promise to do things with him on weekends, but then were usually "too busy." Numerous times they forgot to pick him up from meetings or parties because "they had a lot on their minds."

What happened to this man was that when he was a young child he suffered painful disappointment after painful disappointment through his parents' lack of caring.

Gradually or suddenly-I don't know which-he came to the agonizing realization in mid-childhood that he could not trust his parents.

Once he realized this, however, he began to feel better, and his life became more comfortable.

He no longer expected things from his parents or got his hopes up when they made promises.

When he stopped trusting his parents the frequency and severity of his disappointments diminished dramatically.

Such an adjustment, however, is the basis for future problems.

To a child his or her parents are everything; they represent the world.

The child does not have the perspective to see that other parents are different and frequently better. He assumes that the way his parents do things is the way that things are done.

Consequently the realization-the "reality" -that this child came to was not "I can't trust my parents" but "I can't trust people." Not trusting people, therefore, became the map with which he entered adolescence and adulthood.

With this map and with an abundant store of resentment resulting from his many disappointments, it was inevitable that he came into conflict after conflict with authority figures- Police, Teacher, Employers. And these conflicts only served to reinforce his feeling that people who had anything to give him in the world couldn't be trusted.

He had many opportunities to revise his map, but they were all passed up.

For one thing, the only way he could learn that there were some people in the adult world he could trust would be to risk trusting them, and that would require a deviation from his map to begin with.

For another, such relearning would require him to revise his view of his parents-to realize that they did not love him, that he did not have a normal childhood and that his parents were not average in their callousness to his needs. Such a realization would have been extremely painful.

Finally, because his distrust of people was a realistic adjustment to the reality of his childhood, it was an adjustment that worked in terms of diminishing his pain and suffering.

Since it is extremely difficult to give up an adjustment that once worked so well, he continued his course of distrust, unconsciously creating situations that served to reinforce it, alienating himself from everyone, making it impossible for himself to enjoy love, warmth, intimacy and affection. He could not even allow himself closeness with his wife; she, too, could not be trusted.

The only people he could relate with intimately were his two children.

They were the only ones over whom he had control, the only ones who had no authority over him, the only ones he could trust in the whole world.

When problems of transference are involved, as they usually are,  a turn- around is, among other things, a process of map-revising.

Patients come to therapy because their maps are clearly not working. 'But however they may cling to them and fight the process every step of the way!

Frequently, the urge to cling to their maps and fight against losing them is so great that therapy becomes impossible, as it did in the case of the computer 'technician.

Initially he requested a Saturday appointment.

After three sessions he stopped coming because he took a job doing lawn-maintenance work on Saturdays and Sundays.

I offered him a Thursday-evening appointment. He came for two sessions and then stopped because he was doing overtime work at the plant.

I then rearranged my schedule so I could see him on Monday evenings, when, he had said, overtime work was unlikely.

After two more sessions, however, he stopped coming because Monday-night overtime work seemed to have picked up.

I confronted him with the impossibility of doing therapy under these circumstances.

He admitted that he was not required to accept overtime work.

He stated, however, that he needed the money and that the work was more important to him than therapy.

He stipulated that he could see me only on those Monday evenings when there was no overtime work to be done and that he would call me at four o'clock every Monday afternoon to tell me if he could keep his appointment that evening.

I told him that these conditions were not acceptable to me, that I was unwilling to set aside my plans every Monday evening on the chance that he might be able to come to his sessions.

He felt that I was being unreasonably rigid, that I had no concern for his needs, that I was interested only in my own time and clearly cared nothing for him, and that therefore I could not be trusted.

It was on this basis that our attempt to work together was terminated, with me as another landmark on his old map.

The problem of transference is not simply a problem between psychotherapists and their patients, it is also a problem between parents and their children, husbands and their wives, employers and their employees and even between friends and between Nations.

It is interesting to speculate, for instance, on the role that transference issues play in international affairs.

Our national leaders are human beings who all had childhoods and childhood experiences that shaped them.

What map was Hitler following, and where did it come from?

What map were American leaders following in initiating, executing and maintaining the war in Vietnam? Clearly it was a map very different from that of the generation that succeeded theirs.

In what ways did the national experience of the Depression years contribute to their map, and the experience of the fifties and sixties contribute to the map of the younger generation?

If the national experience of the thirties and forties contributed to the behavior of American leaders in waging war in Vietnam, how appropriate was that experience to the realities of the sixties and seventies?

How can we revise our maps more rapidly?

Truth or reality is avoided when it is painful. We can revise our maps only when we have the discipline to overcome that pain.

To have such discipline, we must be totally dedicated to truth.

That is to say that we must always hold truth, as best we can determine it, to be more important, more vital to our self-interest, than our comfort.

Conversely, we must always consider our personal discomfort relatively unimportant and, indeed, even welcome it in the service of the search for truth.

Mental health is an ongoing process of dedication to reality at all costs.

 

Episode 10: Openness to Challenge

What does a life of total dedication to the truth mean?

It means, first of all, a life of continuous and never-ending stringent self-examination.

We know the world only through our relationship to it.

Therefore, to know the world, we must not only examine it but we must simultaneously examine the examiner.

Psychiatrists are taught this in their training and know that it is impossible to realistically understand the conflicts and transferences of their patients without understanding their own transferences and conflicts.

For this reason Psychiatrists are encouraged to receive their own psychotherapy or psychoanalysis as part of their training and development.

Unfortunately, not all psychiatrists respond to this encouragement.

There are many, Psychiatrists among them, who stringently examine the world but not so stringently examine themselves.

They may be competent individuals as the world judges competence, but they are never wise.

The life of wisdom must be a life of contemplation combined with action. 

In the past in American culture, contemplation has not been held in high regard.

In the 1950s people labeled Adlai Stevenson an "egghead" and believed he would not make a good President precisely because he was a contemplative man, given to deep thinking and self-doubts.

I have heard parents tell their adolescent children in all seriousness, "You think too much." What an absurdity this is, given the fact that it is our frontal lobes, our capacity to think and to examine ourselves that most makes us human.

Fortunately, such attitudes seem to be changing, and we are beginning to realize that the sources of danger to the world lie more within us than outside, and that the process of constant self-examination and contemplation is essential for ultimate survival. Still, 1 am talking of relatively small numbers of people who are changing their attitudes.

Examination of the world without is never as personally painful as examination of the world within, and it is certainly because of the pain involved in a life of genuine self-examination that the majority steer away from it.

Yet when one is dedicated to the truth this pain seems relatively unimportant-and less and less important (and therefore less and less painful) the farther one proceeds on the path of self-examination.

A life of total dedication to the truth also means a life of willingness to be personally challenged.

The only way that we can be certain that our map of reality is valid is to expose it to the criticism and challenge of other map-makers.

Otherwise we live in a closed system-within a bell jar, to use Sylvia Plath's analogy, re-breathing only our own fetid air, more and more subject to delusion.

Yet, because of the pain inherent in the process of revising our map of reality, we mostly seek to avoid or ward off any challenges to its validity.

To our children we say, "Don't talk back to me, I'm your parent."

To our spouse we give the message, "Let's live and let live. If you criticize me, I'll be a bitch to live with, and you'll regret it."

To their families and the world the elderly give the message, "I am old and fragile. If you challenge me 1 may die or at least you will bear upon your head the responsibility for making my last days on earth miserable."

To our employees we communicate, "If you are bold enough to challenge me at all, you had best do so very circumspectly indeed or else you'll find yourself looking for another job."

Not only individuals but also organizations are notorious for protecting themselves against challenge.

I was once directed by the Chief of Staff of the Army to prepare an analysis of the psychological causes of the My Lai atrocities and their subsequent cover-up, with recommendations for research that might prevent such behavior in the future.

The recommendations were disapproved by the Army general staff on the basis that the research recommended could not be kept secret.

Existence of such research might open us up to further challenge.

The President and the Army don't need more challenges at this time," I was told. Thus an analysis of the reasons for an incident that was covered up was itself covered up.

Such behavior is not limited to the military or the White House; to the contrary, it is common to Congress, other federal agencies, corporations, even universities and charitable organizations-

in short, all human organizations. Just as it is necessary for individuals to accept and even welcome challenges to their maps of reality and modi operandi if they are to grow in wisdom and effectiveness, so it is also necessary for organizations to accept and welcome challenges if they are to be viable and progressive institutions.

This fact is being increasingly recognized by such individuals as John Gardner of Common Cause, to whom it is clear that one of the most exciting and essential tasks facing our society in the next few decades is to build into the bureaucratic structure of our organizations an institutionalized openness and responsiveness to challenge which will replace the institutionalized resistance currently typical.

"The tendency to avoid challenge is so omnipresent in human beings that it can properly be considered a characteristic of human nature. But calling it natural does not mean it is essential or beneficial or unchangeable behavior. It is also natural to defecate in our pants and never brush our teeth.

Yet we teach ourselves to do the unnatural until the unnatural becomes itself second nature.

Indeed, all self-discipline might be defined as teaching ourselves to do the unnatural. Another characteristic of human nature-perhaps, the one that makes us most human-is our capacity to do the unnatural, to transcend and hence transform our own nature.

No act is more unnatural, and hence more human, than the act of entering psychotherapy.

For by this act we deliberately lay ourselves open to the deepest challenge from another human being, and even pay the other for the service of scrutiny and discernment.

This laying open to challenge is one of the things that lying on the couch in the psychoanalyst's office may symbolize.

Entering psychotherapy is an act of the greatest courage.

The primary reason people do not undergo psychotherapy is not that they lack the money but that they lack the courage.

It is because they possess this courage, on the other hand, that many psychoanalytic patients, even at the outset of therapy and contrary to their stereotypical image, are people who are basically much stronger and healthier than average.

While undergoing psychotherapy is an ultimate form of being open to challenge, our more ordinary interactions daily offer us similar opportunities to risk openness: at the water cooler, in conference, on the golf course, at the dinner table, in bed when the lights are out; with our colleagues, our supervisors and employees, with our mates, our friends, our lovers, with our parents and our children.

This even includes many psychiatrists themselves, who somehow never quite seem to find it convenient to enter their own therapy despite the fact that they have even more reason than others to submit themselves to the discipline involved.  

A neatly coiffured woman who had been seeing me for some time began to comb her hair each time she got up from the couch at the end of a session. I commented on this new pattern to her behavior.

"Several weeks ago my husband noticed that my hairdo was flattened in the back after I returned from a session," she  explained, blushing. "I didn't tell him why. I'm afraid he might tease me if he knows I lie on the couch in here."

So we had another issue to work on.

The greatest value of psychotherapy derives from the extension of the discipline involved during the "fifty-minute hour" into the patient's daily affairs and relationships.

The healing of the spirit has not been completed until openness to challenge becomes a way of life. This woman would not be wholly well until she could be as forthright with her husband as she was with me.

Of all those who come to a psychiatrist or psychotherapist very few are initially looking on a conscious level for challenge or an education in discipline. Most are simply seeking "relief. "

When they realize they are going to be challenged as well as supported, many flee and others are tempted to flee. Teaching them that the only real relief will come through challenge and discipline is a delicate, often lengthy and frequently unsuccessful task. We speak, therefore, of "seducing" patients into psychotherapy. And we may say of some patients whom we have been seeing for a year or more, "They have not really entered therapy yet."

Openness in psychotherapy is particularly encouraged (or demanded, depending upon your point of view) by the technique of "free association." When this technique is used the patient is told: "Put into words whatever comes into your mind, no matter how seemingly insignificant or embarrassing or painful or meaningless. If there is more than one thing in your mind at the same time, then you are to choose to speak that thing about which you are most reluctant to speak." It's easier said than done. Nonetheless, those who work at it conscientiously usually make swift progress. But some are so resistant to challenge that they simply pretend to free-associate.

They talk volubly enough about this or that, but they leave out the crucial details. A woman may speak for an hour about unpleasant childhood experiences but neglect to mention that her husband had confronted her in the morning with the fact that she had overdrawn their bank account by a thousand dollars. Such patients attempt to transform the psychotherapeutic hour into a kind of press conference. At best they are wasting time in their effort to avoid challenge, and usually they are indulging in a subtle form of lying.

For individuals and organizations to be open to challenge, it is necessary that their maps of reality be truly open for inspection by the public. More than press conferences are required.

The third thing that a life of total dedication to the truth means, therefore, is a life of total honesty. It means a continuous and never-ending process of self-monitoring to assure that our communications-not only the words that we say but also the way we say them-invariably reflect as accurately as humanly possible the truth or reality as we know it.

Such honesty does not come painlessly. 

The reason people lie is to avoid the pain of challenge and its consequences.

President Nixon's lying about Watergate was no more sophisticated or different in kind from that of a four-year-old who lies to his or her mother about how the lamp happened to fall off the table and get broken.

Insofar as the nature of the challenge is legitimate (and it usually is), lying is an attempt to circumvent legitimate suffering and hence is productive of mental illness.

The concept of circumvention raises the issue of "shortcutting."

Whenever we attempt to circumvent an obstacle, we are looking for a path to our goal which will be easier and therefore quicker: a shortcut.

Believing that the growth of the human spirit is the end of human existence, I am obviously dedicated to the notion of progress. It is right and proper that as human beings we should grow and progress as rapidly as possible. It is therefore right and proper that we should avail ourselves of any legitimate shortcut to personal growth. The key word, however, is "legitimate."

Human beings have almost as much of a tendency to ignore legitimate shortcuts as they do to search out illegitimate ones.

It is, for instance, a legitimate shortcut to study a synopsis of a book instead of reading the original book in its entirety in preparation for an examination for a degree.

If the synopsis is a good one, and the material is absorbed, the essential knowledge can be obtained in a manner that saves considerable time and effort.

Cheating, however, is not a legitimate shortcut. It may save even greater amounts of time and, if successfully executed, may gain the cheater a passing mark on the exam and the coveted degree. But the essential knowledge has not been obtained.

Therefore the degree is a lie, a misrepresentation. Insofar as the degree becomes a basis for life, the cheater's life becomes a lie and misrepresentation and is often devoted to protecting and preserving the lie.

Genuine psychotherapy is a legitimate shortcut to personal growth which is often ignored.

One of the most frequent rationalizations for ignoring it is to question its legitimacy by saying, "I'm afraid that psychotherapy would get to be a crutch. I don't want to become dependent on a crutch." But this is usually a cover-up for more significant fears. The use of psychotherapy is no more a crutch than the use of hammer and nails to build a house. It is possible to build a house without hammer and nails, but the process is generally not efficient or desirable.

Few carpenters will despair of their dependency on hammer and nails.

Similarly, it is possible to achieve personal growth without employing psychotherapy, but often the task is unnecessarily tedious, lengthy and difficult.

It generally makes sense to utilize available tools as a shortcut.

On the other hand, psychotherapy may be sought as an illegitimate shortcut. This most commonly occurs in certain cases of parents seeking psychotherapy for their children.

They want their children to change in some way: stop using drugs, stop having temper tantrums, stop getting bad grades, and so on. Some parents have exhausted their own resourcefulness in trying to help their children and come to the psychotherapist with a genuine willingness to work on the problem.

Others as often as not come with the overt knowledge of the cause of their child's problem, hoping that the Psychiatrist will be able to do some magical something to change the child without having to change the basic cause of the problem.

For instance, some parents will openly say, "We know that we have a problem in our marriage, and that this likely has something to do with our son's problem. Nonetheless, we do not want our marriage tampered with; we do not want you to do therapy with us; we want you just to work with our son, if possible, to help him be happier." Others are less open. They will come professing a willingness to do anything that's necessary, but when it is explained to them that their child's symptoms are an expression of his resentment toward their whole life style, which leaves no real room for his nurture, they will say, "It is ridiculous to think that we should turn ourselves inside out for him," and they will depart to look for another Psychiatrist, one who might offer them a painless shortcut.

Farther down the pike they will likely tell their friends and themselves, "We have done everything possible for our boy; we have even gone to four separate Psychiatrists with him, but nothing has helped."

We lie, of course, not only to others but also to ourselves.

The challenges to our adjustment-our maps-from our own consciences and our own realistic perceptions may be every bit as legitimate and painful as any challenge from the public.

Of the myriad lies that people often tell themselves, two of the most common, potent and destructive are "We really love our children" and "Our parents really loved us." It may be that our parents did love us and we do love our children, but when it is not the case, people often go to extraordinary lengths to avoid the realization.

I frequently refer to psychotherapy as the "truth game" or the "honesty game" because its business is among other things to help patients confront such lies.

One of the roots of mental illness is invariably an interlocking system of lies we have been told and lies we have told ourselves.

These roots can be uncovered and excised only in an atmosphere of utter honesty . 

To create this atmosphere it is essential for therapists to bring to their relationships with patients a total capacity for openness and truthfulness.

How can a patient be expected to endure the pain of confronting reality unless we bear the same pain? We can lead only insofar as we go before.

 

 

Episode 11:       Withholding Truth

Lying can be divided into two types: white lies and black lies.

A black lie is a statement we make that we know is false.

A white lie is a statement we make that is not in itself false but that leaves out a significant part of the truth.

The fact that a lie is white does not in itself make it any less of a lie or any more excusable. White lies may be every bit as destructive as black ones.

A government that withholds essential information from its people by censorship is no more democratic than one that speaks falsely.

The patient who neglected to mention that she had overdrawn the family bank account was impeding her growth in therapy no less than if she had lied directly.

Indeed, because it may seem less reprehensible, the withholding of essential information is the most common form of lying, and because it may be the more difficult to detect and confront, it is often even more pernicious than black-lying.

White-lying is considered socially acceptable in many of our relationships because "we don't want to hurt peoples' feelings."

Yet we may bemoan the fact that our social relationships are generally superficial.

For parents to feed their children a pap of white lies is not only considered acceptable but is thought to be loving and beneficent.

Even husbands and wives who have been brave enough to be open with each other find it difficult often to be open with their children.

They do not tell their children that they smoke marijuana, or that they fought with each other the night before concerning their relationship, or that they resent the grandparents for their manipulativeness, or that the doctor has told one or both that they have psychosomatic disorders, or that they are making a risky financial investment or even how much money they have in the bank. Usually such withholding and lack of openness is rationalized on the basis of a loving desire to protect and shield their children from unnecessary worries.

Yet more often than not such "protection" is unsuccessful.

The children know anyway that Mommy and Daddy smoke pot, that they had a fight the night before, that the grandparents are resented, that Mommy is nervous and that Daddy is losing money. The result, then, is not protection but deprivation.

The children are deprived of the knowledge they might gain about money, illness, drugs, sex, marriage, their parents, their grandparents and people in general.

They are also deprived of the reassurance they might receive if these topics were discussed more openly.

Finally, they are deprived of role models of openness and honesty, and are provided instead with role models of partial honesty, incomplete openness and limited courage.

For some parents the desire to "protect" their children is motivated by genuine albeit misguided love. For others, however, the "loving" desire to protect their children serves more as a cover-up and rationalization of a desire to avoid being challenged by their children, and a desire to maintain their authority over them.

Such parents are saying in effect, "Look, kids, you go on being children with childish concerns and leave the adult concerns up to us. See us as strong and loving caretakers. Such an image is good for both of us, so don't challenge it. It allows us to feel strong and you to feel safe, and it will be easier for all of us if we don't look into these things too deeply."

Nonetheless, a real conflict may arise when the desire for total honesty is opposed by the needs of some people for certain kinds of protection. For instance, even parents with excellent marriages may occasionally consider divorce as one of their possible options, but to inform their children of this at a time when they are not at all likely to opt for divorce is to place an unnecessary burden upon the children.

The idea of divorce is extremely threatening to a child's sense of security -indeed, so threatening that children do not have the capacity to perceive it with much perspective.

They are seriously threatened by the possibility of divorce even when it is remote.

If their parents' marriage is definitely on the rocks, then children will be dealing with the threatening possibility of divorce whether or not their parents talk about it. But if the marriage is basically sound, parents would indeed be doing their children a disservice if they said with complete openness,

"Mommy and Daddy were talking last night about getting a divorce, but we're not at all serious about it at this time."

As another instance, it is frequently necessary for psychotherapists to withhold their own thoughts, opinions and insights from patients in the earlier stages of psychotherapy because the patients are not yet ready to receive or deal with them.

During my first year of psychiatric training a patient on his fourth visit to me recounted a dream that obviously expressed a concern with homosexuality. In my desire to appear to be a brilliant therapist and make rapid progress I told him, "Your dream indicates that you are concerned with worries that you might be homosexual." He grew visibly anxious, and he did not keep his next three appointments. Only with a good deal of work and an even greater amount of luck was I able to persuade him to return to therapy. We had another twenty sessions before he had to move from the area because of a business reassignment. These sessions were of considerable benefit to him despite the fact that we never again raised the issue of homosexuality. The fact that his unconscious was concerned with the issue did not mean that he was at all ready to deal with it on a conscious level, and by not withholding my insight from him I did him a grave disservice, almost losing him not only as my patient but as anyone's patient.

The selective withholding of one's opinions must also be practiced from time to time in the world of business or politics

if one is to be welcomed into the councils of power. If people were always to speak their minds on issues both great and small, they would be considered insubordinate by the average supervisor, and a threat to an organization by management.

They would gain reputations for abrasiveness and would be deemed too untrustworthy ever to be appointed as spokesmen for an organization. There is simply no way around the fact that if one is to be at all effective within an organization, he or she must partially become an "organization person," circumspect in the expression of individual opinions, merging at times personal identity with that of the organization. 

On the other hand, if one regards one's effectiveness in an organization as the only goal of organizational behavior, permitting only the expression of those opinions that would not make waves, then one has allowed the end to justify the means, and will have lost personal integrity and identity by becoming the total organization person.

The road that a great executive must travel between the preservation and the loss of his or her identity and integrity is extraordinarily narrow, and very, very few really make the trip successfully. It is an enormous challenge.

So the expression of opinions, feelings, ideas and even knowledge must be suppressed from time to time in these and many other circumstances in the course of human affairs.

What rules, then, can one follow if one is dedicated to the truth?

First, never speak falsehood.

Second, bear in mind that the act of withholding the truth is always potentially a lie, and that in each instance in which the truth is withheld a significant moral decision is required.

Third, the decision to withhold the truth should never be based on personal needs, such as a need for power, a need to be liked or a need to protect one's map from challenge.

Fourth, and conversely, the decision to withhold the truth must always be based entirely upon the needs of the person or people from whom the truth is being withheld.

Fifth, the assessment of another's needs is an act of responsibility which is so complex that it can only be executed wisely when one operates with genuine love for the other.

Sixth, the primary factor in the assessment of another's needs is the assessment of that person's capacity to utilize the truth for his or her own spiritual growth.

Finally, in assessing the capacity of another to utilize the truth for personal spiritual growth, it should be borne in mind that our tendency is generally to underestimate rather than overestimate this capacity.

All this might seem like an extraordinary task, impossible to ever perfectly complete, a chronic and never-ending burden, a real drag. And it is indeed a never-ending burden of self-discipline, which is why most people opt for a life of very limited honesty and openness and relative closedness, hiding themselves and their maps from the world. It is easier that way.

Yet the rewards of the difficult life of honesty and dedication to the truth are more than commensurate with the demands.

By virtue of the fact that their maps are continually being challenged, open people are continually growing people.

Through their openness they can establish and maintain intimate relationships far more effectively than more closed people.

Because they never speak falsely they can be secure and proud in the knowledge that they have done nothing to contribute to the confusion of the world, but have served as sources of illumination and clarification.

Finally, they are totally free to be.

They are not burdened by any need to hide.

They do not have to slink around in the shadows. They do not have to construct new lies to hide old ones.

They need waste no effort covering tracks or maintaining disguises.

And ultimately they find that the energy required for the self-discipline of honesty is far less than the energy required for secretiveness.

The more honest one is, the easier it is to continue being honest, just as the more lies one has told, the more necessary it is to lie again. 

By their openness, people dedicated to the truth live in the open, and through the exercise of their courage to live in the open, they become free from fear.

* The C. l. A., which has particular expertise in this area, naturally uses a more elaborate system of classification and will speak of white, gray and black propaganda, gray propaganda being a single black lie and black propaganda a black lie falsely attributed to another source.

Episode 12:       Balancing

By this time I hope it is becoming clear that the exercise of discipline is not only a demanding but also a complex task, requiring both flexibility and judgment.

Courageous people must continually push themselves to be completely honest, yet must also possess the capacity to withhold the whole truth when appropriate.

To be free people we must assume total responsibility for ourselves, but in doing so must possess the capacity to reject responsibility that is not truly ours.

To be organized and efficient, to live wisely, we must daily delay gratification and keep an eye on the future; yet to live joyously we must also possess the capacity, when it is not destructive, to live in the present and act spontaneously.

In other words, discipline itself must be disciplined.

The type of discipline required to discipline discipline is what I call balancing, and it is the fourth and final type that I would like to discuss here.

It is discipline that gives us the extraordinary flexibility required for successful living in all spheres of activity.

To use but one example, let us consider the matter of anger expression.

Anger is an emotion bequeathed to us (also into less evolved organisms) by countless generations of evolution in order that our survival may be encouraged.

We experience anger whenever we perceive another organism attempting to encroach upon our geographical or psychological territory or trying, one way or another, to put us down.

It leads us to fight back.

Without our anger we would indeed be continually stepped on, until we were totally squashed and exterminated.

Only with anger can we survive. Yet, more often than not, when we initially perceive others as attempting to encroach on us, we realize upon closer examination that that is not what they intend to do at all. Or even when we determine that people are truly intending to encroach on us,

we may realize that, for one reason or another, it is not in our best interests to respond to that imposition with anger.

Thus it is necessary that the higher centers of our brain (judgment) be able to regulate and modulate the lower centers (emotion).

To function successfully in our complex world it is necessary for us to possess the capacity not only to express our anger but also not to express it. 

Moreover, we must possess the capacity to express our anger in different ways.; At times, for instance, it is necessary to express it only after much deliberation and self-evaluation. 

At other times it is more to our benefit to express it immediately and spontaneously.

Sometimes it is best to express it coldly and calmly; at other times loudly and hotly.

We therefore not only need to know how to deal with our anger in different ways but also how most appropriately to match the right time with the right style of expression.

To handle our-anger with adequacy and competence', an elaborate, flexible response system is required. It is no wonder, then, that to learn to handle our anger is a complex task which usually cannot be completed before adulthood, or even mid-life, and which often is never completed.

To a greater or lesser degree, all people suffer from inadequacies of their flexible response systems. Much of the work of psychotherapy consists of attempting to help our patients allow or make their response systems become more flexible.

Generally, the more crippled by anxiety, guilt and insecurity our patients are, the more difficult and rudimentary this work is. For example, I worked with a brave thirty-two-year-old schizophrenic woman to whom it was a veritable revelation to learn that there are some men she should not let in her front door, some she should let into her living room but not her bedroom, and some she could let into her bedroom.

Previously she had operated with a response system by which she either had to let everyone into her bedroom or, when this response did not seem to be working, not let anyone in her front door. Thus she bounced between degrading promiscuity and arid isolation.

With the same woman it was necessary for us to spend several sessions focusing on the matter of thank-you notes. She felt compelled to send a lengthy, elaborate, hand-written, phrase- and word-perfect letter in response to each and every gift or invitation she received.

Inevitably she could not continually carry such a burden, with the result that she would either write no notes at all or would reject all gifts and invitations. Again, she was astounded to learn that there were some gifts that did not require thank-you notes and that when these were required, short notes sometimes sufficed.

Mature mental health demands, then, an extraordinary capacity to flexibly strike and continually re-strike a delicate balance between conflicting needs, goals, duties, responsibilities, directions, et cetera.

I remember first being taught this one summer morning in my ninth year.

I had recently learned to ride a bike and was joyously exploring the dimensions of my new skill.

About a mile from our house the road went down a steep hill and turned sharply at the bottom.

Coasting down the hill on my bike that morning I felt my gathering speed to be ecstatic.

To give up this ecstasy by the application of brakes seemed an absurd self-punishment. So I resolved to simultaneously retain my speed and negotiate the corner at the bottom.

My ecstasy ended seconds later when I was propelled a dozen feet off the road into the woods. I was badly scratched and bleeding and the front wheel of my new bike as twisted beyond use from its impact against a tree

I had lost my balance.

Balancing is a discipline precisely because the act of giving something up is painful.

In this instance I had been unwilling to suffer the pain of giving up my ecstatic speed in the interest of maintaining my balance around the corner. I learned, however that the love of balance is ultimately more painful than the giving up required

It is a lesson I have continually had to relearn throughout my life.

As must everyone, for as we negotiate the curves and corners of our lives, we must continually give up parts of ourselves. The only alternative to this giving up is not to travel at all on the journey of life.

It may seem strange, but most people choose this alternative and elect not to continue with their life journeys-to stop short by some distance in order to avoid the pain of giving up parts of themselves. 

If it does seem strange, it is because you do not understand the depth of the pain that may be involved. In its major forms, giving up is the most painful of human experiences. 

Thus far I have been talking about minor forms of giving up-giving up speed or the luxury of spontaneous anger or the safety of withheld anger or the neatness of a thank-you note. 

Let me turn now to the giving up of personality traits, well-established patterns of behavior, ideologies, and even whole lifestyles. These are major forms of giving up that are required if one is to travel very far on the journey of life.

One night recently I decided to spend some free time building a happier and closer relationship with my fourteen-year-old daughter.

For several weeks she had been urging me to play chess with her, so I suggested a game. She eagerly accepted and we settled down to a most even and challenging match. It was a school night, however, and at nine o'clock my daughter asked if I could hurry my moves because she needed to get to bed; she had to get up at six in the morning.

I knew her to be rigidly disciplined in her sleeping habits, and it seemed to me that she ought to be able to give up some of this rigidity. I told her, "Come on, you can go to bed a little later for once. You shouldn't start games that you can't finish.

We're having fun." We played on for another fifteen minutes, during which time she became visibly discomfited. Finally, she pleaded, "Please, Daddy, please hurry your moves." "No goddammit," I replied. "Chess is a serious game. If you're going to play it well, you're going to play it slowly. If you don't want to play it seriously, you might as well not play it at all." And so, with her feeling miserable, we continued for another ten minutes, until suddenly my daughter burst into tears, yelled that she conceded the stupid game, and ran weeping up the stairs.

Immediately I felt as if I were nine years old again, lying bleeding in the bushes by the side of the road, next to my bike. 

Clearly, I had made a mistake. 

Clearly I had failed to negotiate a turn in the road. I had started the evening wanting to have a happy time with my daughter. Ninety minutes later she was in tears and so angry at me she could hardly speak.

What had gone wrong? The answer was obvious. But I did not want to see the answer, so it took me two hours to wade through the pain of accepting the fact that I had botched the evening by allowing my desire to win a chess game become more important than my desire to build a relationship with my daughter. I was depressed in earnest then. How had I gotten so out of balance? Gradually it dawned on me that my desire to win was too great and that I needed to give up some

of this desire. Yet even this little giving up seemed impossible.

All my life my desire to win had served me in good stead, for I had won many things.

How was it possible to play chess without wanting to win? I had never been comfortable doing things unenthusiastically. How could I conceivably play chess enthusiastically but not seriously? 

Yet somehow I had to change, for I knew that my enthusiasm, my competitiveness and my seriousness were part of a behavior pattern that was working and would continue to work toward alienating my children from me, and that if I were not able to modify this pattern, there would be other times of unnecessary tears and bitterness. My depression continued

My depression is over now. I have given up part of my desire to win at games. That part of me is gone now. It died.

It had to die. I killed it. I killed it with my desire to win at parenting.

When I was a child my desire to win at games served me well.

As a parent, I recognized that it got in my way. So it had to go. The times have changed. To move with them I had to give it up. I do not miss it. I thought I would, but I don't.