Imposing values on clients

More from the "discouraging divorce" discussion:

     I challenged SM with a case history: my client's mother was dying from emphysema; all the children had grown up and moved away; her father had one of the brothers move everything out of the house except for one chair, one bed, and one place setting; and then he left her for a woman who lived a few blocks away.  So she hanged herself.  Whereupon, he immediately claimed the house and insisted on his right to arrange her funeral and bury her with his people.
     If he had come to you beforehand, you could have "explored other options," but it would have been finely parsing the "imposition of values" issue: doing the rotten thing actually led to a very vigorous "subjective sense of well-being."
     Yet every decent mental health counselor must cut across the grain of their clients at multiple points.  Otherwise, no-one would ever deal with resistance; no interpretations but the trivial would ever be offered; no schemas would be exposed and adjusted.  All psychotherapies (or 90%) would begin in session 1 with the client crying for help, and end in session 5 with the client blocking any reasonable suggestions or strategies for change (well mine do anyway, but that's a different story).  
     All counselors (or 90%) have an implicit theory of what happiness looks like.  As Christians, we know that there is natural happiness, which is available to believers and non-believers alike (via what you might call common grace); and that there is a supernatural happiness, available only to those who have the Holy Spirit.  Natural happiness cannot be achieved by pursuing a side-effect of flourishing (i.e., the subjective sense of well-being), just as the funnest games are those in which the participants do not "try to have fun."  Thomas Nagel (1998) said, "We do not need a scientific investigation to be certain that the number 379 does not have parents.... If someone rebuked us for being closed-minded, because we can' t predict in advance what future scientific research might turn up about the  biological origins of numbers, he would not be offering a serious ground for doubt" (p.338).   In precisely the same way, we can be certain of what human nature is, and therefore, of what makes for human happiness, up to the supernatural limit (hint: it looks a lot like the Google slogan, "Don't be evil").  And there is no reason why this shouldn't be the goal (discussed openly and respectfully), rather than the usual goal of pleasure, which is almost always implicit, and always disappointing.

Reference

Nagel, T. (1998). Conceiving the impossible and the mind-body problem. Philosophy, 73 (285), p.337-352.

Is it wrong for a counselor to discourage divorce?

In our Marriage and Family class, the prompt said: "A frequent criticism of faith-based counselors is that we counsel couples to remain in marriage when spouses are expressing intent to end the marriage.

"Can our passion for the institution of marriage block our objectivity in preforming a professional/contractual service? Does the morality of marriage extend to offering a subtle resistance or outright impediment to a person who seeks to end a marriage? As a professional counselor, what role does divorce play in your philosophy of marriage and family therapy? Present your argument with compliance towards your ethical obligation to the profession and your moral obligation to your religious views."

S. M. replied: "I approach the topic of divorce similarly to other culturally difficult issues. My first question is “Does God have a will (or a preference) on this topic and if so, can I understand what His will is?” In other words, is this topic addressed clearly in Scripture? If not, I choose to act or believe based on my understanding of what would be consistent with other Scriptures. If Scripture has a plain meaning on a topic, I take that as God’s will or preference which compels me as a Christian to believe and obey. If there is not a plain meaning, then I use Scripture to interpret Scripture as well as other sound theological methods to discern as best I can what God’s will is. Since divorce is addressed in Scripture over 30 times, I have come to an understanding of what I believe is God’s will on that topic. See Smith (2010) for an excellent discussion on divorce, culture, and religion.

"Despite having a personal theological position on divorce, I do not present impediments to clients who seek to end or save a marriage (unless helping them explore the emotional, practical, social, and spiritual consequences of divorce or remaining married is impeding). My role as a counselor is to help clients explore the full implications and impact their choices have on themselves and their loved ones. I do not advise clients to remain in a marriage or to actively pursue divorce even when I disagree with their decision. They must make that choice for themselves."

I said: "Does the proscription of divorce spring from the will of God merely, or does it spring from what is perfective of human nature?  In other words, is it an arbitrary law which we obey because God told us to, or did God tell us to because obeying the law leads to human flourishing?

"Also, would you (do you) present data which would tend to downplay the negative effects of divorce, or do you (would you) share that data which will help people do good? 

"I have a client whose mother was very ill: her father had their youngest (adult) son move all but the barest essentials out of the house while he and his wife were away for the day, and when they pulled into the driveway, the husband ran to his truck and left forever.  Her mother, who was not abusive, or unfaithful (since you ask), and who carried on living in the big empty house with one chair, one plate, and one set of silverware, told my client that her father was living with another woman a few blocks away.  A few days later, she cut ceiling and floorboards away so she could hang herself from the floor joists, which she proceeded to do, succesfully.  Whereupon, her husband rushed back in to occupy the house, claim the life insurance, and insist on his rights to make funeral arrangements.  I tell the story because it is inherently interesting, but also because there was no downside for the husband, from either a utilitarian perspective, or from a therapeutic/expressivist point of view.  What would you have advised him, before the fact? "

      S. M. replied: "I think you are asking me what I would have advised the father in this case.  First of all, he set a boundary in a very harsh way and with deception.  He also set that boundary by triangling in his children, forcing them to participate in his abandonment of the family.  Finally, he left your client with an unstable parent, abandoning and not protecting her and leaving her to manage her mentally unstable mother.  Had the father been my client, given me the scenario of the wife's illness and his desperate desire for something to change (maybe he wanted her to go to the hospital, get evaluated, get on meds, whatever), I would have helped him explore options that would have set boundaries in a more godly way.  He did not have to leave punitively. He should not force his children to solve his marital issues. He should not abandon a child to live with a grieving, unstable mother.  His actions show vindictiveness, not boundary setting.  

      "This father's choices will most certainly have a downside, and already have - he has lost a trusting relationship with his children and caused them great emotional (and probably spiritual) damage.  I firmly believe that scripture teaches that God's justice will reign.  Whether all is made right in this life or in eternity for this man I do not know.  What "right" looks like could take many forms and is up to the One who judges to ascertain whether justice has been served.  Sometimes justice ends in punishment and eternal separation from God.  Sometimes justice ends with acknowledgement, repentance, and restoration. 

     "There are many steps along the way to divorce.  It is sad that clients often wait until the situation has escalated to a near frenzy of panic before seeking help.  Exploring ways to respond to hurts without inflicting punitive, vengeful consequences on the offender (the father in this case) or on the innocent but highly impacted bystanders (the son and daughter) would be my therapeutic goal.  Each week I struggle alongside clients who must make hard choices in "knotty" situations. 

     "Finally, I'm not sure, at this stage of my life, whether it matters to me why I obey God - whether it is "just because" or whether it is for my own good.  Either way, He is God and I am not.  Because I trust His character, I try to obey in faith, similarly to how my children had to obey me at times.  I am okay with not understanding the "why" behind some of God's directives because I am confident in His goodness."  

     So I said: "Thanks for your response.  You seem to have understood me to ask about your own motivation, but that was not what I was thinking about.  What occupied my mind was why God commands us not to divorce--just because he wants to, or because it is perfective of our natures?  In your own life, you don't need necessarily to bother answering why you obey (I can see your motivation is probably "both"); but it is an urgent question with regards to how counseling works, so I will impose on your patience one more time. But first, a couple of clarifications: the mother was physically ill, not mentally ill; second, my client was an adult and out of the home at the time of the incidents. So mental illness and child welfare do not enter into the case.

      "Now, on the standard, ACA view, there is no reason to advise my client's father not to divorce. And in your original post, you said you would not advise clients to stay or go; yet here you clearly (and quite rightly) imply that you would advocate for a different course of action for this unhappy man: your hypothetical approach would be based on the facts that he should not ask his children to get involved, that he should explore less "harsh" boundary-setting, and that he should not resort to deception.

     "You are absolutely spot on, but by ACA lights, you have no right to be. What, after all, is wrong with being harsh? And what's wrong with using deception? Everything worked out great for the father, who, alone, is your client: he had a new relationship with a woman to whom he was attracted, he was financially secure, he was unfrustrated. Since the only basis for the proscription of divorce (or of harshness or of deception) is (let us say for the sake of argument) that God said so, then the only basis for "helping him explore" other options is our own religious bias. Again, don't get me wrong: in my experience, secularist counselors all the time use "help explore" as a convenient euphemism for "subtly influence," according to their vague utilitarian ethics.

     "If, on the other hand, it is objectively bad (unhealthy) for a client to pursue a morally evil course, then the situation is completely different. If, that is, being a bad person objectively leads to unhappiness for that person, then it would be wrong not to try to help your client to avoid such a fate."

What is Marriage?

Another assignment from Marriage and Family.  Professor Sells wrote, "Writing as a scholar, what “Identifies” marriage, and particularly, what identifies Christian Marriage?"

       Material logic shows that to identify anything, we must identify first its membership in a group, and then differentiate from other members of that group (e.g., Simmons, 1961, pp.41-53): a marriage is a relationship; but it differs from other relationships, in that it is an organic bodily union. Just as our organs each have separate functions, yet work together towards one goal (the sustenance of the body), so one male body and one female body are separate yet have one ultimate goal (the engendering and nurture of children)(Girgis, George, and Anderson, 2010, p.245-287).

        There are, of course, a number of objections to this way of looking at marriage. What about polygamy? No marriage is between one man and many women (or vice versa), although one man may have many marriages (Girgis, George, and Anderson, 2010, p.247). What about couples who cannot have children? There are baseball teams who will never win a championship or even a game; nevertheless, they are constituted essentially differently from a team of umpires (Girgis, George, and Anderson, 2010, p.267). What about mutual comfort and encouragement? The love of husband and wife is inherently good, yet it does not define a marriage (although it may characterize many marriages, and it may lead to many marriages).

        Which leads us to the capstone question. What about Christian marriage? Doesn't the traditional conjugal definition limit or trivialize Christian marriage? Shouldn't we be talking about glorifying God instead of trying to bump up numbers by popping out miniature Christians? The objection reveals an artificial distinction between the physical and the spiritual (Feser, 2006, p.19-48). Engendering and nurturing children is profoundly spiritual, and is yet another way of using our bodies to glorify God. There are hardly any spiritual acts (if any) we can do which do not involve our bodies (you use your body for silent prayer, after all). Married people worship God corporately, ideally, by having and nurturing children.

        So it could be subtly confusing to speak of Christian marriage. All married humans are designed for the ideal of marriage, but Christianity makes it clearer and easier to attain. We could also ask, "What is the purpose of the Christian life?" But to be a Christian is to claim that the purpose of life is the same for everyone (McInerney, 1997, p.35-59) and best achieved (or not at all) through Christianity (Kreeft & Tacelli, 1994, p.341-360). If marriage is related to the meaning of life, then it is related to the meaning of life for everyone everywhere. Non-Christians are married for the same reason Christians are; but they do it imperfectly, in the sense that they do not see, yet, the ultimate reason and purpose for their marriage. Again, all people feel that murder is wrong (allowing for differences in definition), but to be a Christian is to say that Christianity teaches us most clearly the ultimate implications of murder. "What is Christian murder?" can be a good question but it would seem to imply that there are also equally valid Buddhist murders and Jain murders.

        And so what? We cannot see clearly what is wrong unless we see clearly what a thing should be, its essence. All efforts to help marriages must be based on an idea of what marriage is. This is also the basis for any coherent ethics, the only way to get a "should" from an "is" (McInerney, 1997, p36-37). There has to be a clear view of the good, because there are a vast multiplicity of ways a thing can be good, but only a limited number of ways it can suffer a deprivation of the good.

References

Girgis, S., George, R. P., & Anderson, R. T. (2010). What is marriage? Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy, 34, 245-287.

Kreeft, P. & Tacelli, R. K. (1994). Handbook of Christian apologetics. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press.

McInerney, R. (1997). Ethica Thomistica, rev. ed. Washington, DC: CUA Press.

Simmons, E. D. (1961). The scientific art of logic: an introduction to the principles of formal and material logic. Milwaukee, WI: Bruce Publishing Co.

What's love got to do with it? Marital satisfiction

This is a small assignment for my Marriage and Family class.  We were assigned to respond to Wilcox and Nock (2006), a very interesting study on marital satisfaction.

Andrew Marvell famously sang, "But at my back I always hear Time's winged chariot hurrying near." I will not analyze, as I would like, the interesting and encouraging aspects of this article, nor the several errors in logic (Wilcox & Nock, 2006), nor will I enter into a detailed consideration of what marriage should be or could be; confining myself, instead to this solitary observation. The assumption of this article and many other articles written from within the viewpoint of Wundt's empiriological psychology, is that the ultimate standard for everything is the maximization of pleasure and the minimization of pain. But that makes life meaningless, and destroys the very thing it values (cf. the destruction of Companiate marriage, mentioned by Wilcox and Nock, 2006, by the very pursuit of Companiate marriage). Pleasure is always a by-product, merely, of a good thing. Pleasure is good, but its function is to be the handmaiden to good actions, to reward good actions and make them more likely. One of the reasons this is so is that we are changeable; the object of all our dreams quickly becomes last year's Christmas present.

So the proper question is not really, "How pleasurable is marriage to its incumbents?" but "How well are the incumbents performing marriage?" I think this article illustrates a corollary to the principle of the subordination of pleasure, mentioned by Aristotle in his Nicomachean Ethics, which is this: that those who have the strongest habits of good action will also tend to be the most satisfied anyway. Christian housewives tend to be more satisfied than Sinead O'Connor (as Wilcox & Nock 2006 also discover); but even if they were miserable, their lot would be preferable to someone living a fake "happiness" in the Matrix or on the Truman Show.

The really important Dependent Variable here is how much the husbands attend to their wives' emotional needs--because it is the only good action investigated. There are other variables which would be equally useful to measure, but the point is that good action is more important than the subjective result of good action. In fact, continually asking people how "happy" they are in the marriages would seem to lead to the invidious comparisons which lead to unhappiness--and then to "unhappiness."

For further thought or discussion, here is an interesting article from the Telegraph: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/9572187/Couples-who-share-the-housework-are-more-likely-to-divorce-study-finds.html

Reference

Wilcox, W. B. & Nock, S. L. (2006). What's love got to do with it? Equality, equity, commitment, and women's marital quality. Social Forces, 84 (3), p.1321-1345.

Other topics: higher education, especially of psychotherapists and counselors.

Welcome

Welcome to the Rational Animal blog.  The purpose of Rational Animal is to provide myself with a place to write about psychology from an analytical Thomist (or Aristotelian) (or essentialist) viewpoint.  If anyone accidentally stumbles in here and starts discussing issues of philosophical anthropology, or Thomism, or psychotherapy, then so much the better.  As I am a beginner, this blog does not pretend to any authority; I will be reading and reporting my reading as accurately as possible. 

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