In the following blogs there are numerous examples of clients in therapy struggling, coping and overcoming different mental health issues. I offer them to illustrate points, to add some interesting ideas, to make the whole enterprise of working in therapy become more real for you, the reader. None of the examples use the names of actual clients. So, if you think you see yourself (as a former or current client) or someone you might know (who is a former or current client), I am glad you can relate to the example, but be assured that I have added, removed, and modified some parts of actual client issues to make the situation different to some extent than it really was.

Also, My Book, Firewalking on Jupiter: A Therapist’s Guide to Fearless Self-discovery

If you have run out of things to read on my blog page, or just want to learn more about mental health and personal growth, I have many more ideas and writings available in my book.  In fact, many of the chapters in the book are modified versions of previous blog posts on this website. It is available here at Amazon.com. in both print and Kindle format. This announcement might seem like a shameless plug. I suppose in a way it is. I want people to buy the book because I really think it is pretty good at getting to some of the thorny issues that keep people stuck in difficult places in their lives. It brings most of my previous writings and some new material all together in a single place. It doesn’t need to be read as a “book” because each of the chapters deal with discrete issues like Anger, Depression, Anxiety, Relationship Conflict, Shame, Guilt, Forgiveness and letting go, that you might find value in reading as needed, when needed. I hope you will check it out.

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The Value of Self-Awareness (Bad Weather Podcast Interview with Michael Kinzer)

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Two things prompted this topic (and allowed me to give myself permission to put it to writing). Last night, my nephew noted that he has viewed my previous success as a therapy client (on and off for the past 30 years) as the result of a long-term willingness to be self-critical, to question my direction, and make significant changes when I thought I needed to do so–that I have made choices in my life based on sometimes very difficult questions directed right back at myself, sometimes with the help of others (including therapists). Then, this morning, not for the first time, I received a request from a potential new client who noted that their interest in reaching out to me is precisely because I am a therapist who used to be a lawyer (a fairly rare thing, I think). Although my nephew and I were not specifically talking about my decision to leave the practice of law and then become a therapist, it occurs to me now that this decision is a very clear reflection of my nephew’s point, which can be summed up this way: “living intentionally.”

Before telling the story about my switch from lawyer to therapist, let’s start with what “living intentionally” means (to me). When you do something with “intent,” you are doing it with purpose, you have a reason to do it. I want to add something to this though. I think when you do something intentionally, you know why you are doing it at the time or before you do it. You understand the motive behind it. You know what you hope to accomplish in doing it. You know how you feel about doing it. Take something simple. You go to the grocery store to pick up some eggs, bread, mushrooms and spinach to make breakfast tomorrow. While you are there, you also buy some chips and soda. A pretty common scenario. The eggs, bread and mushrooms were intentional. You went to the grocery store with the intention of buying them. The chips and soda were not intentional, they were an afterthought—you didn’t think about buying them until you were there, and probably didn’t give them much thought at all. Maybe you were just a little hungry when you arrived at the grocery store (which is why they place them near the cashier).

So, for this discussion, intentionality has two components. First, there is a purpose, a motivation, a reason you are doing it. Second, it is premeditated—you know why you are doing it before you do it. Now, add this definition of “intention” to “living intentionally” and you have something like this. To “live intentionally” is to make decisions about your life knowing in advance of making those decisions and acting upon them why you are making the decision and taking the action, what you hope to gain, what it means to you, what motivates you, why it is the “right decision” for you at that time. When you know these things in advance, and have given them thought and weighed the options, you are far less likely to be surprised, disappointed, or filled with regret after having made the decision and taking the action. And here’s the kicker, this is true even if the result isn’t what you expected. True story, pretty much every time. I have said elsewhere (I can’t remember where just now): with very few exceptions, if you do something with the “right intent,” if you do it for the right reasons (whatever that means for you), you cannot make a mistake. Again, this is true even when the outcome of your decision is different than what you intended.

Living intentionally has some difficulties. First, it requires that you have at least a basic and pretty comprehensive understanding of yourself. How can you understand why you want to do something if you don’t really understand who you are and what motivates you. For a detailed explanation and ideas related to all the ways you can get to know yourself better, see my series of 12 blog posts on Introspection. Second, it requires a fairly good grasp and comfort with ambivalence and ambiguity (feeling two or more different ways about the same thing). For more on the value of coping with this kind of uncertainty, see my blog post on ambivalence. Third, it requires paying attention to yourself, your life, and your motivations pretty much all the time, which can sometimes be frustrating and exhausting. 

I am here to tell you though, that it is worth the effort, especially given the alternative. What is the alternative? What does not living intentionally look like? More or less, it looks like making decisions on the fly, without really thinking about why you are doing them, shooting from the hip, living according to the path of least resistance. Coasting. When you are not living intentionally, especially after a long period of doing so, it’s like waking up in the morning, asking yourself, “how did I get here?” Where “here” might be, this job, this house, this city, this marriage, this life. The cumulative result of living intentionally, of making many different decisions knowing why you are making them in advance, over a longer period of time, is that there is a much, much greater chance that your life will look and feel much closer to what you hoped it would be and want it to be than if you don’t live intentionally. You are also much less likely to be surprised and disappointed, because you have thought about the kind of life you want, the kind of life that matches the person you are, your values and priorities. Finally, if you become accustomed to living intentionally and see the benefits, then when you find yourself in a pickle, a situation that does not suit you, you are much more likely to feel empowered to do something about it, to take action to change it, because you know you can–you’ve already done the same thing with good results many times before.

With all of that in mind, I think I am ready to use the story of my switch from lawyer to therapist as an example, but just one example among many in my life, of what it has meant (so far) for me to “live intentionally.”

In college, I studied philosophy. This was my love and interest. I loved the study of philosophy so much, I had planned to get a Ph.D. in Philosophy and later teach college courses in Philosophy somewhere. I had letters of reference already promised by a number of my professors who were very supportive and encouraging. Two things changed my mind. I had a run-in with a professor that was relatively trivial, but he didn’t see it that way and made it clear to me that he could cause me problems if I stayed in academia. I realized then how small the world of scholarly philosophy is, and how easy it can be to cross someone and have it stick with you. At the same time, I discovered I was going to be a father, so the fairly significant chances that I might end up with a Ph.D., but also $200,000 in student loans and no job, were not really fair to my little son. He needed a dad who could support him. Law school seemed like the next best thing to studying philosophy. I still think that choice made all kinds of sense for me at that time. I have no regrets about it.

When I was 37 years old, I was really coming into my own as an attorney. A firm I really liked working for, with partners who fully supported my leadership of the litigation department, gave me the opportunity to build something with a group of lawyers, paralegals, and secretaries working with me to provide top-notch legal services to our clients. My job title was “Chief Litigation Attorney.” It fit me. In this role, I’d been training newer attorneys how to best approach the practice of litigation, both inside and outside the courtroom. 

On one occasion, a younger associate attorney came to me with a well-drafted memorandum of law to be used with a court in an ongoing case. It described the law accurately and in detail, giving a fair shake to both sides for the judge to consider. There was only one problem, and it was a big one: it gave the Judge permission to go either way, to rule either in our favor or against us. The memorandum was more scholarly than strategic. If we filed this, we could easily end up losing. I called the associate in, praised him for his skilled research and writing, but also told him I couldn’t use his memorandum. He was disappointed and I think a little hurt. I said, “Our clients do not hire us because we know the law. They expect us to know the law. Our clients hire us to win. That’s all they care about. And this memorandum doesn’t guarantee we win. Everything you do, everything we do in this practice, has one and only one goal, to win. Losing is never an option. So go back and write something that will win, where winning is the only choice we are giving to the Judge.” Consider this: I meant every word of what I told him that day. As long I had a good faith basis for believing my client deserved to win, I put all my efforts into that goal and expected no less from anyone working with me.

Fast forward maybe a year, this same associate came into my office one morning and asked if we could talk in private. He told me he was planning to submit his resignation that day. I was quite surprised. He’d come to my litigation department after having worked in a transactional legal department where the head of that department had planned to let him go, so I’d offered him an opportunity to work in my department as an option for him to avoid being fired, which he enthusiastically agreed to do. I’d been training him as a trial lawyer ever since. He’d really come a long way. 

I asked him why he was quitting. Fortunately for me, and for the rest of my life, he took the time to explain (I am paraphrasing). He said, “before I came to this firm, I worked for 3-4 years as a judge’s clerk, where I sat in court day after day watching lawyers come and go. I always wondered, ‘why do some lawyers come into court and seem able to walk circles around the other lawyers? What does that take outside the courtroom? Why are some lawyers great and others not very good?’ And now I have the answer.” “Okay,” I said, “what’s the answer?” He said, “I have worked with you for more than a year, watched what you do inside and outside the courtroom, in depositions, in the office, in your daily practice to get your cases ready for court. You are a great lawyer. You come into court well-prepared, knowing what you want, and knowing how you are going to get it.” (He really did say this). “I realized, in order for me to a be a great lawyer some day, I am going to have be ‘like you’ and I don’t want to be ‘like you.’ So, I am not just quitting this job, I am quitting the practice of law before it’s too late.” 

His announcement was a disappointment.

HIs explanation hit me like a ton of bricks. 

Why did it hit me so hard? Because I knew exactly what he was talking about. I knew what I had become and I didn’t like it either.

I thanked him for his explanation, said I’d be happy to offer a reference if he needed one, wished him well, and asked him to close the door on the way out of my office. I laid my head on the desk and wept for maybe an hour. I called my secretary’s desk, told her I wasn’t feeling well and asked her to cancel the rest of my appointments that day. I went home and later that day, when my partner came home from work, not realizing there was any problem, I announced, “I do not want to practice law anymore.” And I meant it, right down into my bones. I never wavered in that decision.

So, why did the young associate’s explanation hit me so hard? What was he talking about? I should make clear from the start, I never did with him or at any other time in my legal career anything unethical or unprofessional. Within the bounds of professional practice, though, I was never hesitant to crush witnesses on the other side, destroy their credibility, even if that might also mean destroying their personal relationships, careers, reputations, finances, etc. 

I correctly believed that was my job. There’s a book that emphases this point about being a lawyer called, “Law v. Life,” written by an attorney whose job it was to prosecute lawyers for unethical practices. In that book, he says (paraphrasing): “the legal profession is the only profession in which you are ethically obligated to hurt other people.” He’s right. Litigation is designed as a “zero-sum game,” where the more the other side loses, the more my client wins. As an attorney, I have an ethical duty to “zealously advocate” the interests of my client. Take note: not just advocate, but “zealously” advocate their interests. I took this duty, this oath on behalf of my clients, very seriously, and still would today if I were practicing law. I am proud of this part of my practice history. Still, in the process of doing my job, and doing it well, I invariably had to hurt other people, and I had grown tired of it. I had also on many occasions realized I was being rewarded handsomely to emphasize parts of my personality I did not like—argumentative, confrontational, cold, hostile, defensive, crafty, strategic, manipulative (without deception), and hurtful. Being good meant being ruthless. I was ruthless. From a professional standpoint, I was proud of this. From a personal standpoint, I felt increasing levels of shame about it. 

I knew all of this for years, and it had increasingly bothered me, but I mostly ignored my misgivings, until this young, honest, earnest, good man put it right in front of me. Smack! No more avoidance or denial about what the practice of law was doing to me, and required from me. No more denial about the ways I was using my skills, personality, and character traits to hurt other people, even if it was not technically wrong to do so and had made me quite good at my job, which allowed me to be effective for my clients. It still felt wrong for me to be the one doing it, the hurting others for the benefit of my clients. That was enough. 

Don’t take this as a universal condemnation on the practice of law, though. I have great respect for good lawyers, including the lawyers at the firm I worked with when I decided to leave, who continue to do right now the very things that led me to leave the practice of law. We need lawyers who take their oath of advocacy seriously for their clients (within the bounds of ethics, honesty and good faith). That’s the only way our legal system can function. To do less is at best shoddy, lazy and maybe malpractice—doing anything less than zealous advocacy for their clients breaks the promise they made to their clients when they were hired. Like I said, though, after well over a decade, I’d grown tired of hurting other people, of my own ruthlessness for the sake of winning. 

Even though I’d decided right then I wanted to leave the practice of law, I didn’t just quit. I’d made promises to clients to carry their cases through to their conclusion, and intended to keep those promises. I had no idea at that time what I wanted to do next if I was not going to be a lawyer anymore. In other words, I didn’t leave the practice of law to be a therapist. I decided I no longer wanted to practice law, and then about a year later, decided I’d give therapy a try.

I spent the next year researching and planning what I might want to do next. This is also intentionality. Look before you leap. In that year, I considered three other paths. I considered being an electrician, but realized I’d be spending my day mostly alone, with wires. I am fascinated with signal flow, but I also need connections with people, so didn’t think this would be good for me, and might lead to dissatisfaction. I very nearly became a high school social studies (philosophy) teacher, having applied for an accelerated Master’s Degree program, which would have allowed me to use alternative education (law school in my case) and experience (practicing law) to circumvent a year of schooling. That plan was scuttled due to a clerical error when an administrative assistant mistakenly rejected my application, not realizing that my year of constitutional law history in law school actually did count for the study of US history, which was a requirement for the program. The director of the program was profuse in his apology for the mistake, but by the time they caught the error, the program was full for the year, and I wasn’t willing to put my life on hold for a year due to their mistake.

As we all now know, I ended up deciding to go back to school to get the necessary credentials to become a licensed therapist. I feel very fortunate for having chosen the program I chose (really great instructors and mentors), but not for the reason I chose it. There were other programs that may have had more academic credibility or rigor, but this was an accelerated program, meaning I could skip a year by doing my internship while also taking classes. Since I wasn’t entirely sure being a therapist suited me, I didn’t want to spend more time or money than necessary getting ready for it. As it turned out, it was a nearly perfect fit for me for what I would end up (very likely) doing for the rest of my work life.

In its simplest terms, the best way to describe why I left the practice of law is that it rewarded me for parts of myself I do not want to encourage, while being a therapist rewards me for the parts of myself that I do want to encourage. 

Being a lawyer, especially the kind of lawyer I was, tenacious litigation attorney, encouraged me to be aggressive, fearful, manipulative, to weigh things like disclosure based less on the whole truth and more on getting what my clients wanted. This never meant dishonesty, but often meant nondisclosure where disclosure wasn’t required but would have contributed to getting a fuller picture. I used procedures wisely to cut short the other side’s sometimes rightful but mistaken or sloppy attempts to get their version of the story in front of a judge or jury. I played the games lawyers play, and I played it well, to my clients’ advantage, even though playing the game never felt quite right to me. Also, and maybe most importantly, along the way, it was necessary for me to hurt other people in order to win, and I was always willing to do this, to whatever extent was needed, no matter how much it might hurt those people, as long as it was professionally ethical, and it would benefit my client. Technically, I am still a lawyer, meaning I have maintained my license, but on “voluntary restricted” status. I can go back to the practice of law if I ever want to, but since I am not currently practicing, I don’t have to pay the full license fees or earn continuing education credits every year.

Being a therapist means that I can use all of the parts of me to help people, and not hurt them. “Do no harm” is the first ethical principal of any health professional, including being a therapist. I never need to harm anyone to help my therapy clients. I use my skills at reading people, not to manipulate them or trick them or scare them into saying something that I can later use to cause them problems. I try to read my client’s words and nonverbal cues to come up with ways to help them, always. My desire and my clients desire for their benefit are always aligned. I can be and want to be as transparent with my clients as I can be, so they can trust me. I want them to trust me, so I can be better at helping them. I believe that I become a better person when I help my clients. I rarely felt that way when I was a lawyer. 

I reached out to that young associate many years later to thank him for telling me what he’d told me. I found him at an executive search firm, no longer practicing law. By then, I’d been a therapist for several years and the practice of law was already becoming a distant memory. We had coffee. After explaining the impact of what he’d told me and thanking him for it, I asked, “why did you take the risk of telling me all of that, when you could have just submitted your resignation and left?” He said, “I felt like I owed it to you because you’d saved me from being fired and gave me a chance to work with you instead. I also thought you had something in you that might allow you to hear what I was trying to say to you and I wanted to give you the opportunity to hear it in case I was right about you.” Well, obviously, and thankfully, he was right, because I did hear him, and it turned out to be one of the most important conversations of my life.

So, there you have it—the reasons I decided I didn’t want to practice law anymore and then later decided I would be a therapist. I feel lucky to have been able to choose two very different, but each in their own ways very rewarding careers. “Choose” is the operative word here. I chose to be a lawyer. Until I chose not to be a lawyer anymore. Then I chose to be a therapist and continue to choose this every day when I get out of bed, until some day I come to a point where I will choose to retire and do other things with my life. From my early days in college to right now, at least in terms of my career choices, I have lived intentionally—with premeditation, research, long reflection, and then taking action—to have the kind of life and work I want for myself.

Copyright, Michael Kinzer. Blog entries and other materials available on Jupiter Center’s website are only intended to stimulate thoughts and conversations and to supplement therapy work with Jupiter Center clients already in therapy. If you or someone you know suffers from a mental illness, you are strongly encouraged to seek help from a qualified mental health professional. For further information about this blog, or Jupiter Center, contact Michael Kinzer at 612-701-0064 or michael(at)jupitercenter.com.

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I recently decided to get back into photography and music because I was letting work, life, politics, the internet–all the things commanding my attention–to dictate what I was paying attention to, which is not good for me. I want to pay some attention to these things, but not too much. I guess I probably think it’s not good for anyone to do this.

Creativity is not escape though. It is a kind of “Transcendence.” For more about what I mean about transcendence, I encourage you to take a look at the Chapter in my book, Firewalking on Jupiter, with the same name. Unlike other forms of escape, things like drinking, getting high, or even watching a movie for pure entertainment, with creativity, you are bringing some part of your unique self with you to the enterprise. When I am walking through the woods, or a city, with my camera in hand, I am intentionally thinking about what kinds of images I want to capture. When I am editing my photos, I am trying to remember what it was I was trying to see and say about the world or that moment when I took the picture. While it is true that this exercise takes me away from worrying about the war in Ukraine or what might be happening in Washington DC, it is still very much me doing the looking, thinking, walking, and considering what I am noticing before I take a picture. When I am engrossed in creating some kind of soundscape on one of my synthesizers, it is me immersed in making decisions about the filter cutoff, or how hard to press a key to get the resonance or frequency modulation I’ve previously set for that expression, and now this particular note. In other words, “I am in it” when I am creating.

I’ve decided to add a creativity section to my website because I’ve recently re-discovered how important creativity is for my own mental health, having sort of left it off to an occasional experiment here and there. Being more intentional about it has inspired me. I am hoping that sharing this process and information with you will inspire you to find your own ways, not necessarily either photography or music, to take yourself out of yourself out into the world (transcendence) in an intentional way and make something that means something to you. If you do, this could reduce the impact of allowing your attention to be dictated exclusively by the news of the day, the latest post on social media, or the most recent email you received from work. This is you taking your attention back and doing something interesting with it, whatever that might be to you.

So, if you feel up to it, or are just curious, I encourage you to see what I am doing with my creativity, for now including both Photography and Music, where I also muse about what the things I’ve created tell me about mental health and living a good life.

Photography

Music

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John Gottman, a leading researcher and therapist in the area of relationship well-being for several decades (he has lots of books) has emphasized the importance of the third R in relationship conflicts—repair. I seem to remember him saying somewhere, in one of his books or an interview, that the number of arguments a couple has is not a determining factor of longevity or even happiness in a relationship. Specifically, he said that he could fairly well predict the sustainability of a relationship by looking at the mutual interest each participant had in repairing the relationship after a conflict arises. I completely agree with this (see my blog post “Should I stay or leave?”). The problem is, many of us are conflict-avoidant, and very uncomfortable with conflict in the first place, so when it does arise, we mostly just want it to go away and get on with our day, so we are quick to leap to repair, without even asking if the conflict itself has been resolved. If the primary motivation for relationship repair is conflict resolution, rather than strengthening the relationship itself, by digging into the underlying causes of the conflict, rooting them out, and making changes to avoid them in the future, it will just come back, and next time, will be added on top of something new (like the mound of dirt that accumulates when you repeatedly sweep it under the rug).

The first “R:” Conflict aRising

Near the end of my book Firewalking on Jupiter, I define “conflict” very loosely as arising when two or more people (or parties or nations) are in a situation in which at least one of them (or all of them) believe that there are insufficient resources to meet the needs of everyone involved. I define “resources” equally loosely, which could be things like time, choice, priority, chores, money, parenting modes, attention, preferred “love language,” travel plans, dinner plans. You name it, and people can (and maybe should) argue about it (or at least discuss it). My definitions are intentionally loose so I can demonstrate that conflict is to relationships what breathing is to staying alive. Conflict happens all the time, and it needs to. It is inevitable. We walk around internally conflicted all the time (see my blog post on Ambivalence). Humans thrive precisely because we have an innate and very powerful capacity to weigh and then resolve our inner conflicts about seemingly contradictory or mutually exclusive choices. Why would it be any different when weighing similar considerations, not within ourselves, but with others? It shouldn’t be any different, and it (mostly) isn’t.

The biggest problem with conflict is not conflict. The biggest problem with conflict is how we respond to conflict when it comes up. Unlike inner conflicts, which we are weighing quite literally all the time in pretty much everything we do, conflicts between people carry with them a large amount of mistrust, misunderstanding, language problems, histories, differing personalities, identities, and self-interest. We always want what’s best for ourselves (I actually believe there is no such thing as an inherently and completely altruistic act). We care less about what’s best for others when compared to what we believe to be best for ourselves. We prioritize our own interests above the interests of others, all the time. Since we know this about ourselves, we absolutely presume this is the case with others. And we should! 

Conflict, by its very definition (my definition) comes up when what we believe to be best for ourselves seems to be in contradiction to what someone else believes is best for themselves. Add to this opposing set of interests all the problems associated with language and subjective motivations and experiences (we can’t get into each other’s heads so we have to interpret and guess at what others mean and if what they say they want is really what they want), and it’s no wonder at all that we spend so much wasted energy on conflict avoidance rather than addressing the conflict more directly.

Just imagine any kind of conflict you might have with a friend or partner, even the most trivial examples, and you will find a complex web of potential errors in the exchange. Tom tells his partner Jenny that she forgot to run the dishwasher before bed last night. Jenny doesn’t remember saying she would, but wonders why Tom is complaining about it with more than a little irritation. She asks herself, “is he mad about something else?” She responds, “I don’t remember saying I’d do it, but what’s the big deal, why do you complain so much?” Tom is now more than irritated and tells himself, “she does this all the time, says she’ll do something, and then doesn’t follow through because she knows I’ll do it if she doesn’t.” Now we have conflict that is clearly about more than just the dishes. It is about a set of relationship patterns that have gone unresolved over time, and built into something bigger. Tom doesn’t respond to Jenny. Instead, he runs the dishwasher, goes into the basement to work out and doesn’t say a word to her about it (but hopes she knows his silence has meaning).

The second “R:” Conflict Resolution

This is the step most people skip. The reason is simple: it requires both people to stop long enough to entertain the stated conflict, and any underlying (not stated, not obvious) reasons for the conflict. Let’s examine the example above. Conflict arises (one person needed to run the dishwasher, neither did it, someone should have). The topic is broached—Tom complains to Jenny about it. Both people get ready for what may come (agitation, accusations, self-doubts, all the rest). Neither want this (who does?). She responds with a normative statement (“you shouldn’t be complaining about this, you complain too much”). It is a response, but it doesn’t actually address the conflict (about the dishwasher). It is conflict avoidance. Tom shuts down, feels hurt, dismissed, ignored, scolded, for even bringing it up. A pattern is identified, and followed. He assumes the following message from Jenny’s response: “Conflict is bad, no matter how trivial. Don’t rock the boat. Just live with whatever is bothering you.” He’s pissed. Leaves. No resolution.

Actual resolution of this issue would have looked very different. Tom might have said, “no one ran the dishwasher last night, and I thought you said you were going to do it?” Jenny might have responded, “Yeah, I don’t know if I said that, but you’re right, waking up with dirty dishes is not great. Next time, let’s both try to remember to check if it’s been done. I need to get better about it, and am open to being reminded about it, but I know that’s not your responsibility.” Tom says, “I appreciate that because it does seem to me that you often say your going to do something and then you don’t and I don’t want this to continue to be a pattern.” Jenny says, “like what?” Tom says, “a couple of days ago, you said you going to pick up more coffee at the grocery store. I know you don’t like coffee, but I do, so the next day, when there was no coffee, I was not too happy.” Jenny says, “I do remember that, and you’re right, I did forget,” but also asks, “why didn’t you say anything then?” Tom says “Well, actually, I also considered asking you last night if you ran the dishwasher, but you already tell me I complain too much, so I try to avoid complaining when I can and just see how things go. I just want you to know, it doesn’t happen ‘all the time’ but it happens frequently.?” Jenny says, “I guess I need to get better at this and try to work on follow through. I also need you to let me know when things are bothering you and will try to avoid scolding you for ‘complaining.’” Tom is relieved, says, “you’re right, I need to speak up and not blame you for my staying silent when I am irritated with you.” 

Note that resolution means identifying the immediate problem (no one ran the dishwasher), looking around or underneath the immediate problem for reasons that it became a conflict (why was Tom irritated about it, why did Jen not do it), and how to do things differently in the future in a way that both people find acceptable so it doesn’t keep happening (Jen will pay more attention to follow through and Tom will be more assertive when he thinks she doesn’t). This is nearly complete resolution for the immediate problem. The only remaining question is will they actually change their behavior in accordance with how they decided to resolve it. If they do, this particular problematic relationship pattern will diminish or even disappear.

The third “R:” Conflict Repair

Conflict repair is maybe better described as relationship repair. When conflict arises, it can (but often doesn’t) result in damage to trust, mood, connection, closeness. If there is a disruption or damage to the connection between you and your relationship partner, it is a very good idea to find ways to get back to how you were before the conflict arose (your baseline or “steady state.”) Otherwise, conflicts can become tears in a relationship that can eventually bring it to an end. Repair is just another word for healing. This often involves both identifying the reasons the conflict came up, how it was handled, how it could be handled differently in the future (conflict resolution) and then, and only then, asking, “are we okay?” And “Is there anything else we need to talk about?” The focus of this blog post though is that couples can engage in “repair” without actually resolving the conflict, which is just a procrastination of conflict that can look like resolution (but isn’t). 

In the example above, in the “arising” part, Tom complains. Jenny scolds him for complaining. Tom walks silently down to the basement to work out. He expresses his irritation, not at her, but at his exercise equipment. Eventually he works out his muscles and his irritation. An hour later, he’s done working out, has taken a shower, asks if Jenny wants a bit of breakfast. She says “sure” (with a light touch, hoping he’s back to his old pre-complaining self). While eating breakfast, he suggests they go to a local art fair. Everything is back to normal (but they both kind of know it isn’t). In the next argument, Tom will carry the coffee thing, and now the dishwasher thing, and all the other examples of Jenny forgetting to follow through and all the times Tom has stuffed it down. Jenny will carry resentment for Tom bringing stuff up later, after everything is in the past.

Now let’s look at repair after actual resolution. Tom and Jenny discuss their perspectives, come up with a plan, and both feel good about both the plan and also the way they each handled the issue. They go to the art fair, not harboring resentments and fears, but instead more connected, more hopeful, more trusting. The next time Jenny forgets to do something, Tom doesn’t wait, he says something in the moment, reminding Jenny she was going to try harder, and that she’d asked Tom to be more assertive. She agrees, in the moment, and then follows through on what she said she’d do, reinforcing their plan, so they can both see it is working. This is repair, real repair, and is the only way couples can actually change their interaction patterns. It doesn’t happen all at once. It happens over time. It can only happen when both people are willing to actually stop, look and listen to their partner and themselves about what needs to be different for both of them to be satisfied about the way they each handle a situation that can lead to conflict down the road, so it doesn’t keep happening.

Everything I’ve said in this blog post can apply well beyond the context of a partnership relationship. The three “R”s of conflict resolution apply to families, parents and kids, friends, work colleagues, businesses–if you can think of any relationship between humans in any capacity, these principles apply equally.

Copyright, Michael Kinzer. Blog entries and other materials available on Jupiter Center’s website are only intended to stimulate thoughts and conversations and to supplement therapy work with Jupiter Center clients already in therapy. If you or someone you know suffers from a mental illness, you are strongly encouraged to seek help from a qualified mental health professional. For further information about this blog, or Jupiter Center, contact Michael Kinzer at 612-701-0064 or michael(at)jupitercenter.com.

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More than ten years ago, I wrote a blog post called, “To the weak I became weak.”  This is now a chapter in my book, Firewalking on Jupiter.  In that Chapter, I say that there is this paradox that can exist between two people, in which they experience both vulnerability and closeness, or rather, that the only way to achieve real closeness sometimes requires that they are also both vulnerable to each other.  Since writing that Chapter, I’ve had time to ponder, question, discuss and expand on those ideas with the many client sessions between then and now. I guess this is a sort of an addendum to that chapter.

Here is a definition of “intimacy” provided by ChatGPT: 

Intimacy is a deep connection between individuals that goes beyond mere physical proximity or casual interaction. It involves a sense of closeness, trust, and understanding, where people feel safe to be vulnerable, share their innermost thoughts, emotions, and experiences. Intimacy can manifest in various forms, such as emotional intimacy, which involves sharing feelings and personal details; intellectual intimacy, which is the exchange of ideas and beliefs; and physical intimacy, which includes affection and sexual connection. At its core, intimacy is about building a bond where individuals feel deeply known and accepted by one another, fostering a relationship that is both nurturing and fulfilling.

Not too bad.  The ideas are just fine for our purposes in this blog post. This definition states pretty well that intimacy refers to a special kind of closeness between people, one that has a lot of meaning, and one which we aspire to have in our lives in various forms. The definition also includes two other concepts, both essential requirements for intimacy that I want to explore: safety and vulnerability. In its most basic form, this is how I define intimacy: intimacy occurs when two people share the simultaneous felt experience of safety and vulnerability. In this blog post, we will be focusing on intimacy between two people, but I can imagine situations in which there are more than two people involved (example: two parents and a child shortly after the child is born).

There’s a lot going on in my definition of intimacy. What do I mean by “simultaneous felt experience?” For true intimacy to occur, both people need to have similar feelings of being both vulnerable and safe related to each other and the situation. The most obvious (but by no means only) example is sexual intimacy between partners. It is possible for people to be physically or sexually open to each other without much intimacy at all. You may have had this situation yourself. Imagine being in a sexual situation in which you don’t really want to be sexual, but your partner does, so you go along with it, you fully consent to it, but are not all that interested. Assuming you know this person well, it may feel very safe, but you are not allowing yourself to be emotionally vulnerable. It is almost entirely a physical act, one that brings some physical pleasure for both of you, but isn’t gratifying in the way that sexual encounters can be when there is deep emotional connection along with the physical acts of sex. In this situation, what’s lacking is vulnerability. You and your partner have not opened yourselves to be vulnerable. You may be tired, guarded or distracted and so might he or she. The entire point of the encounter might just be physical pleasure or release, and that’s about it. There’s nothing intrinsically wrong with this as long as it is fully consensual and authentic (no one is pretending it is something it is not) for both of you. It just doesn’t achieve the kind of closeness or connection that comes with emotional intimacy.

We often use the term “physical intimacy” to describe the basic intimacy that comes with a sexual encounter, whether or not it also includes emotional intimacy. The very act of being naked with someone else in a sexual setting, of touch, contact, or some kind of intercourse is by itself an exceedingly vulnerable situation. This is one reason people will often confuse physical intimacy with emotional vulnerability. They might think or experience the physical intimacy as sufficiently vulnerable (because it is a kind of vulnerability) to amount to emotional vulnerability. There is also a connection at a physical level that is usually unique between the two, at least for a time. The problem is, if either person is not interested, available, or capable of emotional vulnerability during the time they are going to be physically vulnerable, than there will not be emotional intimacy along with the physical or sexual intimacy.

Several years ago, a client came into a session unsure how to respond to her husband’s complaints about the lack of sex between them. She acknowledged that they hadn’t had much sex at all in the past year, by her choice–that she’d rejected his initiation on many occasions which had caused him to become increasingly frustrated and sad about it. I’d known her for quite some time, and had previously also seen she and her husband together in sessions. They seemed to have a strong and loving marriage. I asked her why she had not been interested in sex. She listed several examples of fights, tiffs, unresolved arguments and conflicts they’d been having. She was resentful. She was guarded. One example is worth repeating. They’d been out shopping in the evening. He was upset with her about some purchase they’d made. They argued in the car on the way home. When they got home, they skipped dinner, she went to bed, and he stayed up and watched TV. When he came to bed later, he woke her up, trying to initiate sexual arousal with her. She rebuffed him, and then they argued about why they never had sex anymore.

We role played how she might explain to him the impossibility of her wanting to be sexual with him in this kind of situation. She told me she wasn’t interested in sex with him if there wasn’t going to be any experience of emotional vulnerability to go along with the basic physical vulnerability of sex with him. She didn’t feel emotionally safe enough to want to be vulnerable with him if they’d argued and she’d just gone to bed. I asked her to describe what would need to happen for her to be open to emotional vulnerability during sex with her husband. She described how it could have been different if, on the evening she’d previously described, instead of arguing in the car and getting home mad at each other, they’d solved their differences on the way home, and when they got home, they’d made dinner together, had fun cooking, eating and then cleaning up, then went into the living room, watched a TV show or movie they both liked, snuggled, talked quietly and then went to bed together. I suggested she consider telling her husband, “if you want to have intimacy in the bedroom, then I need us to have intimacy at the grocery store, in the car, in the kitchen, the dining room, and the living room first.” She later told me she’d used this, which led to a conversation that helped her husband understand better her needs for emotional safety that would lead her to become more open to emotional vulnerability and physical and emotional intimacy.

Now that I’ve defined intimacy as including both vulnerability and safety, I need to define “vulnerability.” Here comes another dense sentence. “Vulnerability” is a function of an investment in an attachment to a desired outcome. Please feel free to read that sentence again, as often as you need. I’ve given it a lot of thought, and talked about it with many clients over the last several years, tweaking it a bit here and there until reaching this wording. Now, let’s pick it apart. Think of vulnerability as existing along a line with three joints in the line, including 1. investment, 2. attachment and 3. desired outcome.

Investment—–> Attachment—–> Desired Outcome—– = Vulnerability

Another way to put this is that the amount of vulnerability we feel in any situation is based on how much we are invested in our attachment to a desire outcome. You might be thinking that “investment” and “attachment” are redundant. In a sense they are, which is intentional. I want to give people a way to understand how the choices they make in how to respond to situations gives them more flexibility about how vulnerable they wish to be. The main point is that we can have a very strong attachment to a desired outcome, without necessarily having a large investment in that attachment. Let me offer a couple of examples to help make the point.

Parents are often very worried, frustrated, and confused about their children’s choices as they enter adulthood. This is a kind of vulnerability, but without much safety (we’ll get to safety later). Parent’s feel understandably concerned that their child will make a choice that will be life-changing and the child may not realize the consequences of their choice. These choices and their consequences (desired outcome) can range from avoiding pregnancy, marrying the “right” person, or picking the best college or major course of study. I would never, in any of these situations, suggest a parent let go of their attachment to the desired outcome that their child make choices that will benefit rather than hinder them later in life. So, go ahead, be very attached to your child’s welfare. At the same time, I remind parents that their level of control is and needs to be reduced as their children mature into adulthood. So, when it comes to the parent’s vulnerability in relation to their child’s decisions, I ask them to reconsider their investment in the attachment to the desired outcome. In other words, the parent can decide, “I very much want my daughter to continue toward medical school,” and also understand that “I am not in the best position to decide whether this is the right decision for her. She is.” In making this decision about how to think and feel about her daughter’s decision in choosing a major in college, she can both be very attached to wanting what’s best for her daughter, while reducing her emotional investment in that attachment and thereby reduce overall feelings of vulnerability to whatever choice her daughter ends up making.

Here’s another example, in a work situation. Let’s say you really want a promotion, but you know there is some likelihood that the promotion will be given to a co-worker. The promotion will give you opportunities for growth in your career, validate your skills and attributes, and provide a substantial raise in your income. You have a very strong investment in this promotion, but the job you’d be doing is only a stepping stone and you know that even if you don’t get this promotion, other chances to excel and grow will come your way. So, you maintain your attachment to getting the promotion by following up with your boss, by seeking alliances with other co-workers that will support your efforts, but because you know you have co-workers who are also well-placed for this promotion, you limit your emotional investment in getting this particular promotion, which reduces the vulnerability you feel about it.

In a primary relationship context, vulnerability comes up all the time. The stakes are very high. What we hope, expect and want from our partners is greater than what we want from anyone else in our lives. This is why we can feel so vulnerable to even the smallest things with our partners. We have a huge investment in our attachment to them and to the continuing sustainability and health of our relationship with them. This also gives them a significant amount of power over how we might be feeling, which is just another way of saying we are vulnerable to their decisions and their responses to us. The advantage of intimacy within the context of a primary relationship is that it can become a source of sustainable and deepening feelings of safety, which then supports and encourages vulnerability, in turn leading to regular and sustainable intimacy at many levels (at the grocery store, in the car, the kitchen, living room, and bedroom).

Why do we as humans constantly strive for intimacy with each other? We need connections that help us feel safe and ready to face the world because we are not alone in the world (they’ve got my back). Intimacy could be described as the deepest, most fulfilling experience of connection. The world is not a safe place. Natural disaster, disease, misfortune and death surround us. For much of our evolution (and even now for some), the world outside of our cave/home was downright hostile and dangerous due to predators and other groups of people. So, where can we ever feel truly and completely safe? With our family, close friends, and our romantic or life partner.

For those of us who have experienced genuine emotional intimacy, especially in the context of a deep romantic connection, it is as if, for a time, the world almost doesn’t exist. There is you, your partner, your time together, and the connection you feel in that space, that moment, and that’s all that matters; it’s the entire world and you feel completely safe within it. This is safety at its most powerful and complete level. The tricky part is that this will not happen, cannot happen, unless you both give yourselves to being vulnerable with each other. This is risky, though, if you do it with the wrong person. It can also be the kind of peak experience you might cherish and remember for your entire life, if you are able to find this with the right person. Why else would there be thousands of years of poetry, songs, literature, stories, plays and now movies about the pitfalls and the joys of finding, wanting, needing, losing, recapturing and holding onto deep intimacy with another person?

I hope for every person they are able to find others with whom they can share the simultaneous felt experience of both vulnerability and safety and how to sustain this with someone. Nearly all people do, at least for a time. I also hope no one shies away from this to the point of never having this experience in a romantic setting, due to fear of vulnerability, fear of being hurt, not being able to manage the hurt, or choosing the wrong person, or time. If that’s the case, I hope they find whatever supports they need to explore the internal barriers that prevent them from allowing themselves to become vulnerable so they can create opportunities to seek and find the right person to share this with. I want us all to have a chance at peak life experiences, intimacy being one of them, whether that is in a bedroom somewhere, or alone with their partner after a long day’s hike, at the edge of a campsite on a ridge overlooking a gorgeous verdant valley as the sun begins to settle behind the ridge on the other side, and they are there together, watching it silently, one hand slipping into the other’s hand, and it feels a thousand times better than that same sunset would ever have felt without their other person right there with them. You know what I mean. Or, at least I hope you do, or I hope you will someday.

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“Should I stay in this relationship or is it time to leave?” This is probably the second most asked question I receive from new clients in therapy.  Second only to “Are you taking new clients?”

I am not surprised by the frequency of this question coming up in therapy.  After all, I am a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist. So, it seems natural that people would come to me for exactly this kind of question.  I am glad they do.  Here’s the surprising thing though.  I almost never directly answer this question for a client.  

Why?  Well, for starters, I am legally and ethically prohibited from answering this question. “A therapist must respect the right of a client to make decisions and must help the client understand the consequences of the decisions. A therapist must advise a client that a decision on marital status is the responsibility of the client.” Minn.Reg.Sect. 5300.0350, subp.5.K.  I take this to mean that the client, and not me, must make any final decisions about whether they should stay in a relationship (not just a marriage) or leave. I am glad this regulation on my profession exists.  It relieves me of even having to venture into answering this question for clients, which I’d not want to do in any case.  It isn’t my life.  It is yours.  I don’t suffer the consequences of trying to answer this question for a client, they do.  I firmly believe that in almost all cases, you the client are in a far better position to answer this question for yourself, your relationship, your life, than I will ever be.

Notice, though, that I said I “almost” never answer this question.  I make one exception–when the client or someone else (especially a minor child or vulnerable adult) is being hurt in the relationship. In this circumstance, I will strongly encourage my client to leave and help them find the resources to do so. As a licensed therapist, I am a “mandated reporter,” which means I am required by law to report to local child protection or law enforcement if a child or vulnerable adult is being abused or has been abused in the past three years.  This duty alone has prompted clients in the past to leave their abusive relationships. Even if there is no abuse of the kind I need to report, if the relationship itself poses other kinds of emotional harm or the risk of harm, to either my client, or someone else, I will ask the client to look at the emotional cost of staying in the relationship and consider leaving.

That’s the “easy” case, though (when it seems clear that leaving is the best option), and not really what this blog post is about.  I am more interested in discussing and providing tools for how to address the question of whether to stay or go in when it is not so obvious or clear, when you are sitting on the fence, when you are not sure what to do, when there are both good reasons to stay and good reasons to leave. Here, I would not answer the question about whether you should leave.  Instead, I’d provide you with more detailed questions about your situation so you end up making the best decision for you and for anyone else involved (your children, if you have any).

The first time this question came up for me in a therapy session after starting in private practice, it was a real doozy!  I was totally unprepared for what was about to happen.  I was also in my first year of licensed practice. A married couple came into my office for the first time. They were a woman and a man. The woman set up the appointment.  She did almost all of the talking.  I began the session the way I usually do, with a very open ended and inviting question.  I asked, “So, what bring you into therapy?”  She said, rather calmly, but also emphatically, “I want a divorce.”  A bit startled, I asked for more information, context, history, thinking I could help them sort through whatever was happening in their marriage.  Nope. She wasn’t having any of that. I asked, “Can you give me some context for your feelings?”  She said, “No.  I am not interested in any of that.  It is too late.”  The guy seemed just as startled as me.  He began to plead with her, “Honey, let’s just calm down.  I am sure we can work this out….” She interrupted him, and gave us both a quick history of her arrival at wanting a divorce. She said, “Three years ago, I told you I was very unhappy in our marriage, and I need us to fix things. You ignored me. Two years ago, I said we should get marriage counseling. You ignored me. A year ago, I told you if we don’t get help our marriage wasn’t going to survive. You ignored me.  Okay, well, here were are, and I want out.  I am done!”  She wasn’t yelling, or even really all that upset. She was stating facts, as far as she was concerned. Realizing how serious she was, her husband apologized, began to plead with her to reconsider.  “I am sorry for not taking you seriously before, but here we are now, I am here, and I am sure we can fix things.” He suggested they go out for dinner after their session, and work through things before going home.  

Here’s where the “doozy” comes in. She said to her husband, “You are not understanding me.  I am not asking you if you agree with me about a divorce or whether we should get a divorce. We are getting divorced.  I am done.  I’ve already hired a lawyer and have drafted the paperwork. You will be served tomorrow at home or work, whichever you prefer.  We are not going home tonight. I have signed a lease on a new apartment. While you were at work today, I moved my stuff into the new apartment.”  She stood up, looked at me and said, “I apologize for not giving you any warning about any of this.  I didn’t feel comfortable telling him without someone there.  This will be my only session with you.” She looked at her soon-to-be-ex-husband, who was now in tears, completely distraught and unprepared for any of this, “feel free to use the rest of the hour with the therapist to work through whatever you need to work through.” And then, she left.  He cried for a while, but didn’t’ say much. At the end of the hour, he thanked me and left.  I never saw or heard from either of them again. 

A few years after this session, I read an article in the Journal of Marital and Family Therapy (my profession’s academic journal) that addressed the “success” of “marital therapy.”  Keep in mind that I read the article about 15 years ago, so my memory is a bit sketchy on it, but the important points are still in my head. The article was a “meta-study,” meaning it was a study of other studies on the issue. It defined “success” as something like, “upon the conclusion of therapy, the couple has met their goal of continuing the marriage.” I have some issues with this definition, in part because I almost never set goals for “how to stay in the marriage” unless specifically asked to do so. Instead, I usually state the goal more neutrally and open-ended, and this is what most clients want at first. I say something like, “the client will be confident in their decision about whether to stay in the relationship or not, and how to continue on whichever path they choose in a way that feels more healthy and satisfying to them.”  

Anyway, getting back to the meta-study article. Guess how often marital therapy worked?  Here’s a hint: not very often.  Clients achieved success only 25% of the time.  Roughly 75% percent of the time, they broke up.  Why do you think that might be?  If you guessed, “too little too late” or “they waited too long,” you’d be right on the money. What I have found over the years when I see couples is that, by the time they come to therapy, it is usually because one of them has either outright threatened a breakup, or has started to move in that direction.  In other words, one of them already has a foot (or both feet) out the door. The woman in the “doozy” session told this exact story revealed in the study.  She’d wanted to fix things, but according to her, her husband wasn’t interested, until years later, when it was too late. That, by the way, is a very extreme example.  Most of the couples I’ve seen over the years have at least some interest in trying to work things out. More often than not, though, I do sincerely wish they’d come to see a few years before they show up.  

Partly as the result of that “doozy of a session,” I now use a tool when seeing couples for the first time.  I draw on the whiteboard or sheet of paper (in a Zoom session) the following diagram, which I will explain below. Apologies in advance for the lo-fi nature of the diagram (and maybe also because it looks like a chicken foot).  I tried to figure out how to do it in a graphics app on my iPad but it was a total hassle and looked worse than the one I drew by hand.   Let’s just call it, “the personal touch.” 

When I show them this diagram, I ask them to review it with the following question: “How seriously do you take the problems going on right now in your relationship?” and then explain each of the numbers in the diagram.

1. Denial. “What problems?  As far as I’m concerned, everything fine just the way it is and we don’t need to fix anything.” This is basically never true. If one spouse is anywhere else on the diagram, a “1” is denial.
2. Indecision. “I am at a fork in the road.  I can see this marriage getting better, staying the same, or ending, and I don’t know which would be best.”
3. Improvement. “I have no interest and am not even contemplating ending this relationship.  It needs some work to get to a better place, to improve, but I am invested in getting there.”
4. Status quo. “We have had some speed bumps, and have some unresolved issues that we need to address. Once we do, we can go back to the way things were, which is what I want.”
5. Contemplating leaving.  “I am leaning heavily toward breaking up, but haven’t made any final decisions and I am amenable to being convinced that the relationship is worth saving.”
6. Done.  “I have made my decision and it is over.”  They are either in therapy to say they tried, or there is some other reason to do couples therapy, like helping the kids or their through the divorce and stay amicable if possible.

With these explanations in mind, I ask the clients to come up with a number in their head from the diagram that describes how seriously they think their relationship problems are at this time. Unless it is obvious that one or both of them are already at 6, I give them the option of sharing their number or keeping it to themselves for now. Most of the time, they do want to share their number. As often as not, this is a surprise to one or both of them.  

As a therapist, it doesn’t matter to me one way or the other where people are on this scale. I do empathize when couples come in very far apart on the scale. This can be a very painful realization for both of them.  What I would like to accomplish, if possible, is to help the couple work toward being on the same number, the same space in the diagram, even if that is number 6. Then we can work together to make the split go as well for them and others (kids) as possible.   I will confess, though, that I have a bias.  Unless the relationship is doing real harm to someone, or there really is just no reason to think things will change (like when a spouse has addiction issues who’s had years to change and isn’t interested in changing), I almost always hope they can get to number 3, as long as getting there does not involve self-deception, co-dependency or unsupported wishful thinking.  

Here’s why I generally hope to get to number 3.  No one ever gets married hoping they will someday get divorced. People usually get married because they both love each other so much, they feel sure they will want to spend the rest of their lives with this person. When a person or a couple comes to therapy to get help in deciding whether to split, I ask them this question, “Do you remember if you loved the other person when you got married?”  They say yes, always.  I ask them, “okay, do you still feel that way about them?”  Most say yes.  Those that don’t are usually experiencing some kind of deep unresolved pain related to their relationship, or resentments and distance have built up so much over the years, they can’t feel it anymore. I ask them to consider whether working through the pain, distance and resentments might be possible so they can reconnect with something that resembles the love they felt when they married this other person.  In my experience, people often think they can, but maybe just as often, they don’t think they can or they simply don’t want to. I need to be respectful of both conclusions. Again, not my choice. Not my life.

This leads to a second tool I use for framing the question of whether to stay or leave.  It is a two-question decision-tree.  

1. Do I want to stay in this relationship if things stay the way they are right now?  
   • If the answer is yes, then we’ve eliminated numbers 5 and 6 in the diagram.  Breaking up is not on the table. 
   • If the answer is no, then go on to question number 2.

• Do I believe it is possible for this relationship to change to the point where I would want to stay?
  • If the answer is yes, then options 3-4 are still possible–staying for now makes sense.
• • If the answer is no, you are probably between 5 and 6, or at 6 already, and staying no longer makes much sense.

You might be surprised at the number of people who stay at the second option under question number 2–staying in a relationship they don’t want to be in, and with no belief that things are going to ever get better.  This might be related to entanglements, like kids, finances, cross-family relationships. It might be related to fear of being alone, fear of abandonment, long-lasting co-dependency, an identity crisis (see the chapter in my book, Firewalking on Jupiter, called “Situational Identity”) or just plain-old familiarity.  I call this scenario “a recipe for misery.”  It is a self-imposed misery. “I could be better off if I leave, but I stay anyway.”  I then try to work with them to see if it’s possible for a change in perspective related to their answer to question number 2.  Clients might just need time to process a reality they do not want (going through the admittedly difficult process of a divorce). It can also happen that clients will reconsider, will push for change, with success, even after they’d initially concluded there was no hope for change. What I mostly don’t want is for clients to make any decision–leaving or staying–based on fear. Making major decisions about your life, including decisions about a relationship, mostly due to fear is never good.

Here’s another reason I tend to be biased in favor of clients’ saving the relationship.  Many years ago, I took a training to teach “Healthy Relationship” classes to prisoners and their families.  During the training, they noted a five-year study of something like 5,000 couples in various locations across the country.  They pulled public divorce records. They then contacted divorced couples five years after their divorce.  They asked each person that had been married, “do you now, five years after the divorce, wish you had decided not to get divorced?”  What they found really surprised me (and still strikes me as counterintuitive). Roughly 75% of the people said they wish they’d stayed married. Keep this number in mind. Because the number is over 50%, that means at least 50% of the people who filed for divorce regretted it, and that’s assuming all of the other people, the people who didn’t file, also regretted it.  This study also tracked down the roughly one-third of people who’d filed for divorce but then changed their mind and stayed married. Among these people, 90% said they were glad they’d changed their minds and stayed married.

If this study is to be believed, what could explain it?  This is my interpretation; when we are in a marriage and thinking about leaving, we desperately want to be rid of whatever is going on in the marriage that is causing us distress. We falsely believe that leaving will solve our problems. It won’t.  It will only eliminate some current problems.  Leaving will also create new problems.  Divorce is most accurately described as an exchange of problems, not an elimination of problems. Also, when people finally decide to end a long-term relationship or a marriage, they often do so with some sense of urgency. That’s fine. The problem is that they become so focused on what they are leaving, they give almost no thought to what it will be like for them once they’ve left. Yes, good, “out of the frying pan,” but then, into what kind of “fire”? I use this study to mark a note of caution with people headed toward divorce.  It is never to talk them out of a divorce (remember, I am prohibited from doing so and wouldn’t do that even if I could).  It is merely to help them be as sure as they can be that divorce is their best option, and will likely still seem that way after several years. 

At the risk of repetition, I do not have any emotional investment in whether any client stays in a relationship or ends it. This is the “what” of the decision about whether to stay or leave. “What” am I going to do?  I do care very much about the “why” and “how” of a person’s decision to stay or leave a relationship. “Why” am I staying? “Why” am I leaving? If I do decide to leave, “how” should I leave?

Getting back to the decision-tree, I hope those who answered “no” to both questions 1 and 2 don’t linger too long in that space.  I’d rather have them wake up to their reality and take action to make things better for themselves, even if that means turning their lives upside-down for a temporary period of time by leaving a long-term relationship.  Staying in a “recipe for misery,” especially if it goes on for years, is such a waste of time and life.  For every day you stay in that relationship, you will not know the possibilities and the joys that await you, whether you remain single, or find someone else with whom you could find much greater life satisfaction. None of that will happen if you force yourself to stay in a relationship that you believe will never bring to you what you’d at one point hoped it would.  If you’ve already concluded that you don’t want to be in a relationship and things are not going to get better, things might get worse, or the relationship will continue to harm you or someone else, there is usually no good reason for staying. Guilt, denial, co-dependency, fear of being alone, fear of self-reliance–these are all unhealthy reasons to stay. Staying can also be a paralyzing barrier to having the kind of life and relationships you might want for yourself. It can also do more harm than good to stay, depending on the situation.  Not leaving is a decision just as much as leaving is a decision. 

There is a third alternative to staying or leaving–trial separation. It is mostly a euphemism (one or both people are ready to be done, but they aren’t ready to admit they are ready to be done), which is why it rarely works. In some cases, though, it is worth a try. Knowing what it will be like to not be together for a time can supercharge a willingness to really try to fix things. The only downside is that it can drag things out needlessly and can offer hope where hope isn’t warranted. If you do want to try a separation before making a final decision to split up, I recommend two things. First, have measurable goals and a deadline, don’t just leave things open-ended. This way, the separation will serve a point, without just dragging things out. Second, make sure both people know the rules of engagement, and have the same expectations. Is dating other people allowed? What kind of disclosures are required? Without these kinds of rules and expectations clearly stated, couples will sometimes engage in “accidental infidelity” where one of the people engages in some kind of physical intimacy with someone else, thinking this is fine, but the other person considers this cheating. Now the relationship ends, not because it needed to, but because there was confusion over what a separation meant. This is obviously not a good way to end things and can easily be avoided by skipping the separation phase or making things very clear about what the separation means if that’s what you want to try.

If you are on the fence, not sure whether to stay in a relationship or leave, I hope you will consider at least some of the questions and issues I’ve raised. I also hope you will ask these questions on a regular basis regardless of where you are in your relationship, so you don’t end up as one of those couples in the academic study that waited too long before seeking help to address whatever problems you might be having.  All long-term relationships require work to stay healthy and sustainable. Work is needed to identify and then address whatever conflicts, changes in life, changes in personality, changes in health, changes in needs and wants, will come up for both of you over time.  It is a good thing to address these issues as they arise.  That way, staying in the relationship can remain the best, most viable option.  Sometimes though, relationship changes are so fundamental, so basic to the relationship, or so destructive, they cannot adequately be addressed while staying in the relationship.  Sometimes people also discover that they need to not be in a relationship in order to grow, heal and address parts of themselves they didn’t know were there when they started the relationship. Admitting these realities when they are present is just as important as admitting any other kind of problem that happens in our relationships.

My job in therapy is to help clients ask the right questions so they can decide for themselves whether to stay or leave.  I only hope they can be honest with themselves, so whatever they decide, there is a good chance they will find themselves five years after their decision confident that it was the right decision for them.

Copyright, Michael Kinzer. Blog entries and other materials available on Jupiter Center’s website are only intended to stimulate thoughts and conversations and to supplement therapy work with Jupiter Center clients already in therapy. If you or someone you know suffers from a mental illness, you are strongly encouraged to seek help from a qualified mental health professional. For further information about this blog, or Jupiter Center, contact Michael Kinzer at 612-701-0064 or michael(at)jupitercenter.com.

The post Should I stay or leave? appeared first on Jupiter Center.

I have not edited this piece at all, and it was the first and only one I requested, but I did review it to ensure that it didn’t contain any “hallucinations” (false statements about objective reality) and was not grossly or obviously harmful to its intended audience (you). With those basic standards in mind, it passed my review–maybe there are safeguards in place behind the scenes that keep things within the guardrails of what might be offensive. I am really just doing this for fun, even though the topic itself is also more than a little relevant to therapy and personal growth (see my various blog posts and book chapters on flavors of denial and self-deception written over the past 20 years).

I do have a couple of observations about the post “Michael Kinzer’s personal writer GPT” wrote. The post includes no personal anecdotes or stories, which is a relief because it isn’t supposed to share anything specific within the files you’ve used to train it unless you direct it to do so (and I gave it none). Also, the length and depth of its treatment of the subject seems short, like “it” (GPT) was in a hurry to get in, muck around a bit, and then get out quick–so maybe there is some kind of character or word limit in place that I don’t know about, or that I am supposed to specify in advance. In that sense, it isn’t all that much like me. My blog posts vary greatly in length and my SEO (Search Engine Optimization) tools are always telling me I am too verbose, my sentences are too long, my paragraphs are too long and my word choices are not conducive to google searches. I completely ignore all of this and have never once changed anything in a blog post to improve these criticisms. I suppose that means I don’t really care. “I am what I am!” The AI blog post clearly does contain some style elements that are accurate reflections of how I write and even has some ideas thrown in that seem to reference some of the content I’ve written and fed to the AI to train it. So, in that sense, it is a blog post that might convince the casual observer that it was written by me, if I hadn’t made it clear that it was not.

On the other hand, this trained, personalized, version of ChatGPT isn’t really me at all. It is just ChatGPT with a few stylized elements and some predictions of “the kind of things” Michael Kinzer might say or the way I might say them, sprinkled into some formulas the creators of ChatGPT baked into the software before I gave it any files. In that sense, it isn’t particularly useful to me, other than having some fun. Creating blog posts is not at all why I created a personalized ChatBot. I did it to see if I can train it to summarize and create outlines of previous writings that I can then use as a starting point for podcast episodes that sound more natural than just reading the entirety of the blog post word-for-word. This is a work in progress. I continue to train Michael Kinzer’s personal writer GPT by feeding it increasing amounts of information about me and the way I think and express myself (which is pretty limited by the relatively inexpensive plan I’ve purchased from them and the current state of their GPT model). I am also continuing to train myself how to create the right kind of instructions to tell it what I want in my summaries. The results have been mixed at best, and might prove not very useful.

As I just mentioned, I’m planning to start a Podcast (see the previous blog post, which is intended to be its first episode, maybe). I’ve toyed with calling the Podcast, “What would Michael say?” Yes, it sounds a bit narcissistic and grandiose. It’s actually based on an inside joke with a particular client. She’d been planning a large family reunion with her siblings. They considered creating T-shirts with the family name on the front, and then one of them jokingly suggested they put “WWMS” on the back, since I’d either met so many members of her family, or they’d heard about me from those I had met. The joke involved wondering how many in the family would be able to guess what “WWMS” meant. Thankfully, they did not actually create any T-shirts with that acronym on it, but the client continues to bring it up from time to time. I bring this up because it now occurs to me that, if I were able to create a truly useful and much more sophisticated ChatBot based on the full extent of my writings, including everything I’ve used to train it, but also my now thousands of pages of journal entries, emails, letters, and everything else I’ve written over the course of my adult life, I might be able to call this new ChatBot: “WWMS?” and then hand it off to the world before I die, just in case anyone ever wanted to know, “what would Michael say?” after I am gone. I do realize that the likelihood of anyone wanting to do such a thing is pretty small, but it might make me feel good just knowing the legacy exists just in case. It does seem pretty likely that humans with more notoriety might end up having “Legacy Chatbots” () created for themselves or by others for this very purpose. Can’t you imagine being able to ask, “Would Warren Buffett invest in this?” based on some massive amount of data related to his investment strategies?

Even if Artificial Intelligence is currently a marketing misnomer for now, it does seem we are at the precipice of something very new and exciting, potentially very useful, but also something which can be silly, and even dangerous or deceptive (note the topic I chose for ChatGPT to write about). In that sense, this experiment seemed worth sharing with you. Take it with a grain of salt. And maybe use it to think about what it would have meant if I wasn’t transparent about my plan here. How would you have felt if I had just posted the artificially-created blog post on self-deception, and maybe ten other blog posts on various topics, with my personal GPT writing all of it, and then you found out later that I hadn’t actually written any of it? Would you feel betrayed, deceived, and want to throw in the trash any of your own reactions to all that artificially created content you thought was me? Was it even me, at all?

As useful as these tools can be, I also wonder how we will be able to continue to know what is useful information, rather than just regurgitated information thrown at us by software algorithms, rather than actual people. Does it matter if the email your uncle just sent you wasn’t actually written by him, even if it does contain what he hoped to say? Will you know? Will you be insulted? Will you care? I suspect we have at least a few years ahead of us for all of this to shake out. We will need to come up with social guidelines for things like, when is it okay to have a computer program do the writing for us and when should we be sure to do it ourselves. This is already coming up on college campuses with questions around plagiarism. This, by the way, is the reason I made it clear up front that anything on this website that was not written by me will be clearly spelled out, and only a very rare exception (like this experiment). I might be wrong, but I make a strong assumption that those that come to this website to read my blog posts or other information consider it very important that what they are reading actually comes from me, Michael Kinzer, the human being. And so, it will continue to be the case that what you read here (with the obvious exception of what follows in this blog post) will always be written entirely by me and no one or no thing other than me.

So ends the actual writing of Michael Kinzer and begins the writing of “Michael Kinzer’s writing GPT” on the topic of self-deception.

________________________________________________

When we deceive ourselves, we’re essentially turning away from our own lives. We avoid facing the issues that might force us to make difficult changes. The bad news is, the more you do this, the deeper the psychological toll. And often, this is how many mental health problems start or persist—by staying locked in patterns of avoidance and denial. You begin to create a world built on falsehoods, and over time, you lose the ability to differentiate between the story you’ve told yourself and the reality you’re avoiding.

Take anxiety, for example. It’s common for someone with anxiety to convince themselves that they’re “just stressed” or that “it’ll pass” without ever addressing the root cause of what’s triggering them. They lie to themselves about the extent of their struggles because it’s easier than confronting the truth—that their lifestyle, choices, or circumstances need to change. But the anxiety doesn’t go away; it worsens. And each time you lie to yourself about it, you add another layer of deception, deepening the anxiety rather than addressing its core.

Depression works similarly. We might say, “I’m just in a funk,” or “It’s not that bad.” But deep down, we know better. A lot of people stuck in depression refuse to acknowledge the depth of their hopelessness. Why? Because if they did, they’d have to confront the scary, overwhelming thought that their life needs to be overhauled. Instead, they deceive themselves, and in doing so, they prolong their suffering. This kind of avoidance is not passive. It’s a form of action—self-deceptive action—that leads you further away from healing and resolution.

And self-deception doesn’t just apply to anxiety or depression. It shows up in almost every psychological problem. Think about addiction. How many addicts deceive themselves into thinking they can stop anytime they want? They convince themselves they’re still in control, that their dependency isn’t that serious. But that’s self-deception, plain and simple. The addiction gets worse, their life spirals, and yet the lies they tell themselves remain intact—until, often, it’s too late.

Now, why do we deceive ourselves? It all comes down to fear. Fear of change, fear of facing uncomfortable truths, fear of doing the hard work that it will take to fix things. People cling to self-deception because it feels safe. It lets you hide behind a comforting illusion, even if that illusion is slowly destroying you. But this “safety” is a trap—because while it might provide temporary relief, the problems you’re hiding from are still there, growing bigger with each passing day. The longer you live in self-deception, the harder it becomes to break free from the mental prison you’ve built.

Breaking the cycle of self-deception starts with brutal honesty. And that’s terrifying. It’s a bit like firewalking (a concept I’ve written about before) where you have to step onto the burning coals of your own reality to make it to the other side. But it’s a necessary step for anyone who wants to get out of the psychological mess they’ve found themselves in. You have to look in the mirror—really look—and see the lies you’ve been feeding yourself. This isn’t easy, but it’s vital. 

So how do we stop deceiving ourselves? The first step is acknowledging that we do it in the first place. That’s the hard part—admitting to ourselves that we’ve been lying about something that’s important. But once we acknowledge that, we can start to face the truth. And facing the truth is liberating. Sure, it’s uncomfortable at first, but in the end, it’s empowering because you’re no longer hiding. You’re no longer locked in that self-imposed mental cage. 

In therapy, the process of uncovering self-deception can be one of the most transformative aspects of healing. Clients often begin by insisting that everything is fine, that their issues aren’t that serious. But with time, they start to peel back those layers of denial. They start to see the truth for what it is, and only then can they begin to heal. Therapy helps people build the courage to face their truths—and in doing so, they often find that the reality they feared isn’t as terrifying as they imagined. In fact, it’s manageable, fixable even. But that journey can only begin by confronting the lies we tell ourselves.

In the end, self-deception is like a wound. It festers if ignored but heals when you finally clean it out and let in the fresh air of truth. So, stop lying to yourself. It’s only making things worse. Face your fears, confront your truths, and begin the journey to becoming the person you were meant to be. Because the truth, though painful, will always set you free.

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Should I help Podcast

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You can probably imagine how many times clients have asked me over the years, “Should I help?” (this person in this situation). Let’s just say, many, many times. 

Over the years, I’ve come up with various ways to answer this question, by asking a client to ask themselves a few pertinent questions to get to their own answer. Maybe this sounds like a copout, but as I’ve said in other places in my book, Firewalking on Jupiter, and in other places on my website, I only very rarely actually think it is my role to answer a client’s question about their own lives and relationships. In the case of the question, “Should I help?” the answer depends on so many possible circumstances and issues, with too many possible consequences, I couldn’t possibly answer the question for a client in any meaningful way. Besides, I am not the one who has to live with the answer, or any possible regrets (for helping or not helping).

Before getting to the “decision-tree” (a set of questions that lead to an answer one way or another), let’s just throw out some general questions that usually come up. So, imagine someone has asked you to help them with something and you are not sure you want to help, for one reason or another. Questions that come up include the following. Who is this person to you? Have they actually asked for help? Do you know what kind of help they need? Do you have the resources, knowledge, skills or other capacity to provide the help they seem to need? Do you want to help? Are you obligated to help? What might be the possible negative impacts of helping—short term and long term?

One question that might seem obvious, but often isn’t, is “Have they asked for help?” I raise this one because parents will often automatically jump in to help their kids, when it is not so clear their kids need, want, or have asked for help. This makes a lot of sense when you consider that parents spend years helping when their kids are too young to be able to ask for help, to know when they need help, or when waiting for them to ask could allow them to become injured in some way, starting in infancy and leading through adolescence. As kids age, it becomes important to (when safe) give them the opportunity to succeed or fail on their own, so they can develop a sense of agency, and also learn from their mistakes (thinking they had all the requisite skills or information to complete a task and then later discovering they did not). 

Okay, so let’s get to the decision-tree.

In its first incarnation, the decision-tree I created looked pretty simple–something like this:

1. Did you create (or help to create) the problem? If yes, you should probably help. If no, then go onto question number 2.
2. Will helping require you to take ownership of the problem (it will become your responsibility to solve the problem for the other person)? If yes, you might not want to help. If no, go onto question number 3.
3. Will helping cause harm to you or the person asking for help? If yes, you might not want to help. If no, consider helping. 

Let me give a little context to this simple version of the decision-tree for helping. Several years ago, a client, William, asked me if I thought he should help his brother who was in financial distress. William’s brother had a long history of addiction. The brother was once again in treatment for drug addiction, and their adolescent children needed financial support during the sibling’s stay in treatment. This was not the first or even the second time this brother had asked and received financial help from William due to the sibling’s struggles with addiction. William loved his brother, and his brother’s kids. He also had the financial means to provide the help, even though he’d already given so much to his brother. William’s primary concern was fear of regret, either way. He told me, “If I don’t help, I worry that the kids won’t be okay and it will be my fault. If I do help, I wonder if I am just perpetuating the problem, by giving my brother permission to relapse, knowing when he does, I will come to the rescue.” 

William and I went through the three-step decision tree above. Question 1: “Did I create the problem?” Answer: No. So, no obligation to help based on anything William had done. But, he loves his brother, and their kids, so this doesn’t end the matter for William. Question 2: “Does helping require me to take ownership of the problem?” William thought about making a loan to his brother, but he knew his brother had no way to repay him, and his brother’s kids had no reliable source of income. The answer was yes, then. William would be solving the problem. For this reason, William decided not to help. He did not create the problem, but was being asked (again) to solve the problem. Question 3 was not really relevant. Although it would technically have “harmed” William to make the financial sacrifice by paying his brother’s bills while he was in treatment, William had the resources to do this.  But it might have harmed William’s brother by enabling him to hand his problem off to William, again.

In the end, William did help, just not in the way his brother asked. He provided his brother with resources and information for him to seek the assistance of his local county for medical and other living expenses for himself and his kids while his brother was in treatment, leaving it up to his brother to seek these resources, thereby solving his own problem.

After William’s dilemma with his brother, I continued to use one version or another of the decision tree (set of questions) above to help clients figure out when they should help and when it might not be a good idea to help. This question often comes up in the context of co-dependent relationship dynamics (as in, “I am not okay unless you are okay”) or with clients who are self-described “rescuers” (they seem to be on the lookout for people who need their help). One client described this in the context of a book they were reading about rescuers, and referred to it as “white knight syndrome.” The common thread of these situations is that there is no clear moral or relational obligation to help, but the client feels somehow compelled to help, even when a part of them knows that they shouldn’t help. More often than not, they rightly wonder if helping would take away resources better used elsewhere (like for themselves) or whether helping would actually injure the other person by enabling poor decisions or disempowering them from solving their own problems, or injure the relationship by creating an unwanted power or dependency dynamic.

With these additional considerations in mind, here is another, somewhat longer version of the decision tree This was created by a client recently who generously gave me permission to use it in this blog post—”Thank you!” If you’d like, you can either open the document in a new window or download it for your own use.

I really like the emphasis here on whether helping could solve the problem or cause harm, which is really at the essence of the question, “should I help?” Notice too that the client inserted the “Jupiter Center” banner at the bottom. Nice touch!

Before concluding this blog post, I want to go back to parenting. I am about to contradict myself. Earlier, I suggested that parents often step in to help their kids when it might be better for their kids (and themselves) if they didn’t help. Letting your kids fail, when the consequences are not too severe, can be good learning opportunities. This is especially true when they are still around and failure is easy to spot and rectify as necessary (they still live with you or in a dorm at college). On the other hand (here comes the contradiction), I have often said to clients that parenting is the only kind of relationship in which we are sort of mandated to help (where it is not harmful to do so) for the duration of our kids’ lives. We owe it to them. Why? Take a look at the first question in my decision-tree, the one I created or the one created by my client: “Did I create the problem?” When it comes to our kids, the answer is to some extent always “yes.” We created the problem of our child’s need because we brought them into this world, and therefore they have a right to expect us to help, wherever it makes sense for us to do so. Our kids did not have a say in whether to be born. They did not ask us to bring them into the world. It was entirely our decision. By the way, I also firmly believe this is not a bilateral obligation. It doesn’t go the other way. On purely moral grounds, I do not believe parents are entitled to expect their kids to help them, although it is nice when they do. I also recognize and respect that in many cultures and families there is a strong pull and expectation that kids will help their parents later in life. I am just saying an expectation is not the same thing as a moral obligation.

Getting back to the main question in this blog post, “should I help,” I want to be sure to specify that this question mostly comes up in a therapy context when it is a real dilemma—when there are good reasons to help and also good reasons to not help. I strongly believe that we should help each other as often as is practicable when it doesn’t cost us much to do so, and the help, little by little can go a long way. Hold the door open when someone is behind you. Let someone into your lane who just wants to merge and didn’t cut you off. If you have a cartful of stuff at the store, and the person behind you has one or just a few items, consider letting them go ahead of you. Whenever possible, be nice, be helpful. That’s easy to agree with. And I do. What’s harder is to know whether you should help when helping would or could cause harm to you or someone else. In these cases, it is worth the time to consider the questions in the decision tree above, starting with, am I obligated to help? If not, will helping take my time and attention from other things that should be a higher priority? Will helping potentially bring harm to me, to others, or to the person asking for help. Will I be stepping into a role in which I am held responsible for providing solutions to problems I did not create? You can avoid lots of unwanted and unexpected problems by asking these questions first. Then, make the best decision you can, to be the best person you can, for yourself and everyone.

Copyright, Michael Kinzer. Blog entries and other materials available on Jupiter Center’s website are only intended to stimulate thoughts and conversations and to supplement therapy work with Jupiter Center clients already in therapy. If you or someone you know suffers from a mental illness, you are strongly encouraged to seek help from a qualified mental health professional. For further information about this blog, or Jupiter Center, contact Michael Kinzer at 612-701-0064 or michael(at)jupitercenter.com.

The post Should I help? appeared first on Jupiter Center.

Grief is about coping with a loss. As I said in my previous blog post on Grief, it is both a feeling and a process. I have also come to believe that grief quite often includes a sense of “wrongness” that we experience as cognitive dissonance—as in, “how can this be happening?” or even, “this should absolutely not have happened, and yet it did.” This applies not only to death, but also divorce or some other breakup, the end of a dear friendship, the loss of a job, diagnosis of a disease, or a natural disaster. It can sometimes happen when we are thrust into a sudden change in our lives we simply didn’t expect, or even if we expected it, didn’t realize how it would feel when it happened. It can definitely feel like life itself has betrayed us.

We are designed, engineered by natural selection, to use our brains to percieve the world in a way that make sense to us, even when it turns out that this is not actually possible. This is the root of all cognition. We identify patterns in the world and then try to adjust our responses to those patterns for our survival, well-being, and flourishing. We do this at a basic physical level to make sure we have shelter and enough food to eat. We also do this to maintain our important relationships. Relationships are so complicated, contain so many variables, patterns, needs, individual agendas, we are often understandably confused by the patterns we have and see with others. This is especially true when what we thought we knew about someone suddenly looks to be completely wrong after they make decisions that leave us feeling bewildered and betrayed. That feeling of having been betrayed might be very well justified when it is based on expectations someone else has helped to create and then failed to meet. When they have done so without regard to your feelings, or even in spite of knowing the harm it would cause you, the feeling of betrayal can run deeper than we thought possible. 

If you promise me something in a way that seems believable and consistent with who you are and especially who you are to me, and then I rely on that promise, if you don’t keep that promise and I am harmed, I have every right to feel betrayed, and angry about it. In other words, betrayal is both a decision (your decision) and a feeling (my feeling). This is such a basic tenet of human interaction, it shows up in the law, where it’s called “promissory estoppel,” which means the person who’s broken the promise they made is not allowed to later say, “there wasn’t any written contract” to get out of the harm they’ve done by making, and then breaking, their promise.

It is fairly easy to know when you’ve been betrayed—when a promise was made, and then broken. It is more difficult to know if a feeling of betrayal is warranted when the expectation you had, which has not been satisfied, is based less on an overt commitment by the other person, but by a situation which creates an obligation (in your mind). A simple example comes up for all of us with someone we consider a “good friend.” What does “good friend” mean? To most of us (maybe all of us), it means at the very least, “they will be there for me when I really need them.” At some point, you do really need them. Maybe you’ve suffered a grievous loss, a breakup, the death of a family member, a disruption to your daily life, or just need a ride to hospital for an outpatient procedure. Your “good friend” is suddenly unavailable, or even worse, nonresponsive to your requests. 

Things get even more tricky when you have a relationship with someone who has shown themselves to be inherently contradictory, as we are all prone to be, sometimes. This is the gift and curse of our capacity for ambivalence. (See my blog post on the topic of Ambivalence.) In the tagline to that blog post, I quoted Walt Whitman, who said: “Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself (I am large, I contain multitudes.)” We all contain multitudes. It can be very difficult to know whether the people in our lives will contradict themselves when least expected. It can also be confusing to understand when we have led ourselves to believe someone is reliable when paying more attention would have revealed that belief was not justified. Betrayal often comes with feelings like these: “I should have known this about (insert person)” or “I should have seen this coming” or “how could I have been such a fool?” I see these kinds of questions plague clients going through a divorce, a layoff, or some other sudden change prompted by the decisions of others that were trusted. This can be a necessary part of learning from loss and transition (“what can I do differently next time to make sure this kind of thing doesn’t happen again?”).

I do not mean here to suggest in any of these scenarios that reaching the conclusion of having been betrayed is normally wrong. On the contrary, most of the time when we do feel betrayed by the actions of others, there is at least or much more than a grain of truth in it—it has at least some legitimacy. I am only saying that we often get to a place of betrayal almost any time we are thrust into unexpected loss, regardless of whether an actual betrayal has occurred. So we need to be careful that we are not projecting onto others intentions which might not exist, or which might be better explained by our desire to force an unwanted situation to make sense, no matter what the cost.

Many times, the end of a love relationship is one in which betrayal seems most intractable, and hardly even survivable at the time. When someone we have loved, maybe with “all our heart,” someone we have trusted completely, decides for whatever reason that they no longer want to be with us, or does something that utterly destroys our trust in them, we hold these two contradictory truths: “this person seemed to have all the qualities that justified my love and trust and none of the qualities that would have diminished my love and trust” and now also “this person has just done something that completely undermines my love and trust in them and my most basic understanding of the kind of person they are.” Jarring? What an understatement. Perhaps even worse is this contradiction: “this person has just hurt me more than anything I could have imagined feeling, especially from this person” and also “I still love this person.” Which can lead to this kind of question: “if I could be so wrong about this person, and give this person so much of myself, how can I ever trust in my capacity to judge others or love another again?”

This is complicated stuff, and as Walt said, contains “multitudes.” In therapy, I try to help clients unravel these contradictions by asking them, gently, slowly, whether they might have had some clues about the behavior or the other person’s propensity for it, before it happened. Had their unfaithful spouse had an affair in a previous relationship? Had the gambling problem ending in financial distress or ruin come up before with unexplained lack of assets when she first met her boyfriend? Had there been gaps in communication for lengths of time that might have presaged an eventual ghosting? It is not about “blaming the victim” (hardly something I am inclined to do with my clients). Rather, it can be helpful to move off the shock, dismay, incredulity of the now by comparing it with a past that might be different than we currently remember. Most people would rather conclude, “there were things I failed to see, or didn’t want to see” than “I was completely blinded and had no clue at all.” And more often than not, they’d be right.

Either way, in most of these cases, the betrayal is real, it happened, and the feelings attached to it are usually proportionate to the wrong committed. The opportune question, then, is how do we reconcile what “was” with what “is?” We merge them, bring them together if at all possible. We link them, by helping the client see that the previous and current realities may not have been so far apart as they had seemed at the time of the loss. What “was” might not have been the ideal we now think it was and what “is” might be less catastrophic than we first thought it would be. When dealing with infidelity, after the person who’s suffered the infidelity has a chance to express their feelings (which can take several sessions and months, and there is no hurry), we begin to explore honestly how the relationship was before the affair. Most of the time, there is a lengthy history of relationship discord, distance, and unresolved conflicts. This is not done to justify the infidelity–after all, infidelity is always an act of dishonesty–but it does help the client, and sometimes their partner, come to terms with how to avoid this in the future, and if they are interested, reconcile the breach as best as possible.

A sense of betrayal makes perfect sense when someone has actually betrayed you—by breaking a promise or failing to meet a legitimate expectation that they knew would hurt you. Betrayal at the hands of life itself is a very different thing. How many times have you heard (or said yourself), “Life is not fair!” By itself, this makes no sense at all. “Life” exists. The universe exists. We come into the universe, live our lives, and then leave it. I don’t get any sense (yes, I could be wrong here), that the universe itself cares one way or another about us, our lives, our feelings, our needs, our expectations, or what we think would be fair. In my mind, “fairness” applies only to a decision-maker. If your boss promotes someone over you who clearly does not deserve the promotion as much as you did, solely because that person has attributes unrelated to the job itself (e.g. frat brothers or sisters, romantic involvement, nepotism), this is clearly unfair. The boss made an unfair decision. Is there a deciding factor in life? Even though it understandably feels unfair, there is no decision-maker in the basic aspects of our lives. The parents we were born to? Nope, no decision maker. Just happened. The century or nation into which we were born? Nope. Our socioeconomic status at birth? Nope. Our genetic makeup? Again, nope (unless your parents knew of a genetic likelihood or a prenatal test and gave you life anyway). Not a fairness issue. No matter how much it sucks, it just happened.

To those of you who strongly disagree with me on this point, I understand. Perhaps there is an omnipotent being in charge of the Universe, something you might want to call God. Okay. You might be right, and I do respect my own ignorance about this, and your belief about it. I will say, though, that I find it quite liberating to assume that, even if there is a God, it is not an intervening God. Maybe God is, as Aristotle put it, “the unmoved mover,” meaning, God got things going by creating the universe, and then stepped back to let it unfold on its own. Wisdom on this can come at an early age. When he was four years old, I was at a playground with my son Kalvin. He told me he had to go to the bathroom. I told him the bathrooms were closed and to go behind the bushes (no one was around). He said he had to go “number two” (poop). I said, in that case, we needed to go home. He was mad. In the car, he asked, “why did God make people so they have to go poop?” I said, “what makes you think God made the people?” He said, “I think God made the people so he could sit back and watch the never-ending story.” (Direct quote). I praised his wisdom, and rushed home.

Why do I find it liberating to assume the Universe doesn’t care or make decisions about my life and what happens to me (or anyone else)? Because it removes all sense of betrayal, unfairness, or moral wrongness to the bad things that happen for seemingly no reason at all (meaning no person has been involved in it). I am free to see it as it is, with nothing else behind it; no motive, intent, bad actor.  It just is.  With this belief, I can get to acceptance much quicker than trying to figure out, with no hope of actually doing so, why this particular thing happened in this particular way.  

As it turns out, in my mind anyway, the world is not fair, or unfair. I tell clients, the world is “nonfair.” I mean by this that the concept of “fairness” has no application to the world. Or, the physical world itself, life itself, is outside the realm of what can be fair or unfair. The world doesn’t care about us. Does a rock want to know how I feel? Does a tornado feel bad when it rips up a farm house or charitable when it skips the house across the street, leaving it untouched? Does rain feel happy knowing it is providing essential life-giving contributions to the village crops? Does an earthquake stop and think about what direction it wants to go to either hit or avoid a densely populated area? Wouldn’t it be lovely to say yes to these questions? Truthfully, that would be terrifying. But, it doesn’t matter, because the answer is no, no, no, and no. The world doesn’t make decisions about us. Or, if it does, there is no way for us to know, feel, or predict if it does, so it doesn’t matter.

As you may (or may not) know, I have Type 1 Diabetes. I was diagnosed at the age of 33. I am one of 12 kids in my family. Other than a sister, who’s a drug addict and has destroyed her liver and pancreas with drugs and alcohol, I am the only child with Type 1 Diabetes, despite the genetic likelihood that 4-6 of us should have it, despite being fit, eating relatively well, not drinking or using drugs for decades. Neither of my parents have it, nor did any of their siblings or their parents. Why me, and only me? Seems unfair that I was singled out, selected for it? Haven’t I had enough to deal with already in my life, and now this? You have got to be kidding me! I could really get stuck in this self-pity, this outrage, this sense of having been targeted, the sense of unfairness, that life itself has betrayed me. The truth is, I can’t blame anyone for it. No person gave me diabetes. Nor did I do anything to bring it upon myself. Life did this. The world did this. The Universe gave me diabetes. Okay, no it really didn’t. Random bad luck gave me diabetes.  I have an autoimmune disease based on an unfortunate genetic disposition and then was exposed to some kind of viral infection that kicked in that genetic fault. That’s it. So, no one decided anything here. No unfair decisions. There is no fairness issue. All of the questions I might ask about “why me?” simply make no sense at all. They are worse than a waste of time and energy; they are illusory, as well as harmful. These kinds of questions not only serve no purpose, they could keep me stuck in the throws of blaming the world for something it did not do, or if it did, doesn’t know or care that it did. Asking myself, “why did the world give me Type 1 Diabetes?” makes about as much sense as, “why does this teacup sitting here in front of me just now refuse to clean itself when I am done with it?” Nonsensical and pointless. 

Well, then, why do these questions sound so familiar? Why did I myself turn to these kinds of questions for a short time after the diagnosis of diabetes, despite even then believing, knowing, they were not at all helpful questions? Because we want answers. We need answers. We need to believe that we can understand the world, that we can predict things, so we can survive, do well, live our lives as we see fit. We want to believe that, even when we don’t have control, something does, somewhere. A farmer does a rain dance or a prayer hoping that something, someone, somewhere will bring it rain for its crops. A parent has a child stricken with cancer, and seeks in consolation beyond the doctor’s limited means, some kind of assurance that someone, God, is watching out for their little one, will do what’s necessary to save them. I am not criticizing the prayer. I have seen how consoling it can be, have done it myself when my child was sick. I am only saying that blaming the world for being “unfair” doesn’t get us anywhere.

I have watched many of my clients go through the process of discovering and then addressing a diagnosis of cancer, either with themselves or with a family member. The common understanding of the stages of grief, which include anger, denial, bargaining, grief and acceptance generally apply, although not necessarily in that order, and also depending on how life-threatening the diagnosis might be. So, why anger? And why is it often the first stage to come up? The answer: betrayal and cognitive dissonance. In case this is helpful here, this is how ChatGPT defines “cognitive dissonance:” “the mental discomfort or tension that arises when an individual holds two or more contradictory beliefs, values, or attitudes simultaneously, or when their behavior conflicts with their beliefs or values. This discomfort often leads people to attempt to reduce the dissonance by changing their beliefs, attitudes, or behaviors, or by rationalizing or justifying the contradiction.” It’s a good working definition, and will serve us just fine. In the context of grief, loss, or some other sudden and unexpected transition, we experience cognitive dissonance as the need to hold at the same time two contradictory realizations; both “how we thought things would be” (how they were before the loss) and “the completely different way things actually are now” (how they are now that the loss has occurred). This contradiction doesn’t just affect our emotions. It goes all the way down to the way we see the world, and see ourselves in it. It is not just an emotional dilemma, it is an existential dilemma and can even get to our sense of self, our very identity.

One of the primary ways we “justify” the contradiction (during a period of adjustment) is to attribute it to a cause, which may not actually exist, but which gives a sense of control, or relief at having some explanation, when even a remote explanation is better than nothing. “There must be a reason,” “God works in mysterious ways,” “Did I do something to deserve this,” “I always have such bad luck, it figures this would happen to me,” “if I only drink carrot juice and eat nothing, skipping western medicine, I will cleanse myself of this pancreatic cancer” (Steve Jobs). We want control, and will sometimes give ourselves permission to hold really untethered beliefs to render the world sensible (to us), at least until we have sufficient time and information to process the reality of our limited control and how we might use it to make the best decision to cope with our losses. We give ourselves permission to project onto events in our lives fault, intent, betrayal and unfairness for which none of these things even remotely exist.

At some level, this tug of war between what can and what cannot be explained, and thereby can or cannot be controlled or predicted, is unavoidable. It is just who we are, how we are made to be. So, it will continue to be the case that when we suffer catastrophic losses, especially ones we could not have foreseen, we will turn to the projection that we have somehow been betrayed by something—that life is so unfair. That’s okay. It can give us the time and mental space to later realize that these things just happen. Now we need to figure out what to do with it. If there is something that can be done, even if the only thing to do is to make the best of whatever we are left with after losing something important.

Sometimes the process of going from rage against the unfairness of a loss makes it easier to accept the loss later, by recognizing how much the loss has meant, or as an explanation for the heights of our outrage, followed by the depths of our sadness. The point is this: staying in betrayal because we were in fact betrayed, or shouting to the heavens about fairness because life dealt us a nasty blow without any intentions, will eventually lead to bitterness, which serves no purpose at all, other than to continue to deprive you of the capacity to ask, honestly, “okay, so what’s left?” Moving through grief toward acceptance of what “is” now that either life or someone in our life has thrown us a curve, provides us with the capacity to eventually ask, honestly, “okay, so what now?”

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