When I wrote for Yahoo Health, I often pitched articles such as the following:

- Sandusky: The Psychology of Pedophilia
- Pornography: Relationship Enhancer or Detractor?
- Penn State and Denial: Why Winning will Always Trump Morals

These were denied due to a conflict with the philosophy of the site. Yahoo Health is a conservative, family-oriented site that prefers to give practical, “take away” information. That in and of itself isn’t a problem, it just meant that the truly fascinating aspects of psychology often got bounced in favor of more self-help oriented pieces. It also meant cranky emails from readers of ShrinkTalk asking, “What the fuck is wrong with you? You’re like Ned Flanders now!”

One racier piece, however, was accepted, and although it’s not necessarily the most relevant topic for everyone, it had the word “affair” in it (translation: lots of people read it). So I decided to post it here as well, just in case you’re in the unfortunate position named in the title. Enjoy…

When you’re a practicing therapist, you often have clients who grapple with infidelity in their relationships. If the client is the person who cheated, your job is to help him/her to understand the reasons behind the transgression and, if appropriate, how not to go down that road again. If the client is the one who has been cheated on, the work is generally about deciding whether to stay in the relationship and, if so, how to move past the affair and make the partnership work.

However, what if the person who has uncovered the affair is neither person? Recently a client of mine posed this question:

I am a very good friend with a couple, each of whom I love dearly. One friend confided in me that she is cheating on her partner with another man. She says she feels terrible about it but does not want to stop the affair, that it brings her too much pleasure. She told me that she confided in me because of her guilt and ‘needed someone to talk to,’ but begged me not to tell her partner who is also my friend. I feel trapped. I don’t want to betray my friend’s trust but, at the same time, I do not want to see my friend played for a fool. He’d be furious if he somehow found out I knew and didn’t tell him. What do I do?

Let’s go through the two most obvious options, then I’ll present a third, perhaps more subtle choice for consideration.

Tell the Partner

Pros: You are no longer hiding a secret and your male friend has full disclosure so that he may decide if/how the relationship should continue.

Cons: Your female friend is angry with you for having betrayed her trust, and it could be argued that your disclosure was the end of their relationship (i.e., if you just kept your mouth shut, no one would have gotten hurt, at least right away).

Do Not Tell the Partner

Pros: You keep your female friend’s trust and you spare your male friend the potential agony of finding out about the affair (at least for now).

Cons: You are tacitly lying to your male friend. He may ultimately be angry at you for letting him continue in a relationship that he believed was monogamous. You are also enabling your female friend to cheat and are now holding an important, perhaps life altering, secret.

Neither of those sound particularly appealing. This is, in many ways, a no-win situation. However, all is not lost. My client has been subtly manipulated into becoming a helpless third party in the relationship. Above all else, she needs to remove herself from that position and regain control if she wishes to remain friends with that couple. This is one way to achieve that:

Give Your Friend a Time Frame

Tell your friend that she either needs to end the affair or confess to her partner – within a time frame that you establish. Tell her that if she fails to comply with this, you will tell him yourself. If she follows through, do nothing and allow the relationship to either progress or end based on her behavior. If she does not, tell the male partner along with full disclosure that you attempted to protect both of them as equally as possible.

Pros: You regain control of your personal situation, allowing your female partner to potentially save face while still holding her accountable for her actions. You also convey the message that you are not looking to simply snitch on her, but that you have a responsibility to your male friend. You demonstrate respect to her by allowing her to walk away from the affair (if she so chooses) and at least attempt to make her current relationship work. Finally, you free your male friend from a false belief about his relationship while not pushing your personal stance onto your female friend. It is now her choice.

Cons: Either or both parties could be angry at you. However, even if this does occur, you didn’t force your moral compass onto either party without a viable alternative. Given the circumstances, you respected each friend’s need to be protected but recognized that actions have consequences (including confiding in a friend who has more than one person’s interests at heart).

Every situation has its own nuances and therefore this advice may not fit every relationship, but far too many of us restrict ourselves to the obvious choices when presented with ethical dilemmas. Not all problems have perfect solutions, especially when it comes to infidelity, but the first two options don’t allow anyone to move forward in a psychologically healthy way. Furthermore, those choices will ultimately leave my client feeling resentful, guilty and/or helpless. This last option gives her control and, ideally, the respect of both parties for attempting to balance their needs accordingly.

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When I watch/read about the carnival of idiocy that is the Republican candidates for the Presidency, it usually begins with laughter and ends in a fit of rage that can only be tamed by a strong scotch. I disagree with virtually everything they stand for and can only giggle at their lunacy for a short while before I realize that their conservative viewpoints could realistically become reality.

When truly pushes me over the edge, however, is the notion that everyone can achieve their dreams if they put their mind to it. The belief that Americans are special people, that arrogant take that we alone can overcome any adversity, independent of intellectual/psychological/environmental make-up, is simply deplorable to me. This myopic patriotism is a hallmark disguise of politicians who seek office. They want you to believe that American isn’t truly broken, that a “return to traditional American values,” following the Bible and adhering to even the most outdated parts of the Constitution will allow all to have a chicken in every pot and two cars in every garage.

Given such hatred on my end, I jumped at the chance to partake in a roundtable discussion about the American Dream; specifically, is this a dead concept? Take a look at my diatribe (hint: yes, it’s dead, if it ever existed at all).

All you have to do is open a newspaper or click on CNN.com to see a colossal amount of misery in both this country and the world. So you either put down the paper, or say “thank God that’s not me,” or even feel empathy for a few moments for the suffering of others. But then you move on. You could think about your impending death all day long, but that wouldn’t necessarily serve you well. So you drop it and go about your day. You almost have to think of Manifest Destiny as a realized dream, lest you feel shame at being an American.

You can claim that this kid is an outlier, that America isn’t really like that, but you’d be either wrong or lying. That shit is everywhere and these people have almost no chance. Virtually none. The ones who escape that life generally have a phenomenal amount of luck, incredibly high God-given intelligence, or both. They are not the norm. So you can’t ever say to these kids coming out of the womb, with every possible negative box checked, “break out your Constitution, son! This is the land of opportunity.”

You can read the rest here.

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When I was an intern I worked in a community mental health center that treated primarily women with Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD). As many of you know, this can be a very difficult population with which to work, given the disorder’s remarkable ability to lash out in anger and fear with very little catalyst. And, given that approximately 75% of women with this condition have also been the victim of sexual abuse, male therapists can often bear the brunt of a client’s fury as she attempts to make sense of what has happened to her.

The treatment of choice for BPD involves both individual and group work. In the group treatment, skills are taught to help clients regulate their emotions and successfully navigate through the interpersonal chaos that dominates their lives. In essence, the group work is really more of a class than a therapy, designed to give the clients a psychological toolbox with which to deal with the world.

As co-leader of the group – you may remember in ‘Crazy’ that some groups use two facilitators – I began a discussion about interpersonal effectiveness. In a group with about 10 participants, there are often one or two who are extremely vocal and actively involved, another few who remain completely silent while the remainder vacillate between both ends of the spectrum. So when the topic of dealing with difficult people arose, one person had very strong opinions.

“These types of people, the ones in stores who give you a hard time at the register, remind me of my dad: uninvolved, disconnected. They don’t listen! They don’t want to help!”

Others nodded in agreement. This is usually reinforcing, so she continued.

“People need to be held accountable for their actions. They are supposed to be at your service when you’re there!”

Group work of this sort is rarely helpful when it becomes a forum for airing grievances, but at that of my training I wasn’t skilled enough at the art of subtly shutting down diatribes.

At that point other women began to chime in, drawing parallels between their current lives and the situations that lead up to them. This often produced intense anger toward the abusers in the women’s lives. However, this type of dialogue was discouraged in group; rather, it was meant to be saved for individual sessions, if for no other reason that it could trigger negative emotional reactions in other group members with no viable outlet to process the experience.

However, at that point my co-therapist and fellow intern spoke up, albeit with the same lack of wisdom and clinical skill I possessed at that time.

“Ladies, it’s important for us not to play the Blame Game here,” he said. “Not toward the cashier or toward your abuser. Mental health is about understanding, not blaming.”

At that point one of the women moved into the conversation in with an interesting point. “No. No matter what reasons my stepfather had for abusing me, or whatever bullshit excuse a store worker has for not helping me out, it’s not my job to accept it. They are both scumbags. I don’t have to forgive, and don’t think you can make me!”

Notwithstanding my colleague’s misguided attempt at restoring order in the group by opening up a new can of worms, what are the flaws in the woman’s position? She’s not wrong about forgiveness. Why should anyone be required to forgive such a heinous act like sex abuse? That’s not the issue. Her problem is that she is equating understanding with forgiveness. My colleague was right: mental health is, in fact, about understanding, both yourself and others. Without understanding, there is merely finger pointing and an endless parade of victimization. But that does not translate to accepting what others have done or not holding them accountable. The healthiest people around you are the ones who can say, “I get why he did such and such. He was a drunk, or depressed, or was abused himself as a kid, or even just fucking crazy. But that doesn’t excuse it, it doesn’t make it okay. I understand it and hate it, but that is how it was and how it will be. I now choose whether or not I want to forgive him.”

Far too many of us make an important cognitive error: we believe we are assigning a free pass for people who have wronged us if we take the time to understand the psychological underpinnings of their actions. It’s almost as if that person defeats us in some way by attempting to comprehend their behavior (“if I accept what he’s done, then he wins”). It’s actually the opposite: by psychologically turning away and simply labeling them as wicked, we are the ones who suffer more. The anger, anxiety and depression remain as strong as ever, and we often carry it over to other relationships. That’s never good.

It’s psychologically mandatory that we hold people accountable for what they do, lest we blame ourselves for every possible thing that goes wrong in our lives. But without that understanding, that ability to try to peek into the head of the other and say “why?,” you don’t grow. And when you can understand another person while still recognizing that accountability is present and forgiveness is not required, your mental health improves.

Tip of the day: don’t be that woman in the group. She never did understand what I’ve just described to you, and I can virtually guarantee that, unless something drastically changed, she is just as miserable now as she was almost 15 years ago.

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