Truth, love, and uncertainty


	Alan Bodnar, Ph.D. is the Co-Director of Psychology Training at Westborough State Hospital, Mass. and a consultant in the field of leadership development.

By Alan Bodnar, Ph.D.

As the country gears up for another presidential campaign and candidates place their stories before the American public, we will be listening for themes that resonate with our own experience. Politicians count on this resonance and are masters of the art of presenting themselves in a way that will strike a responsive chord in the minds and hearts of the greatest number of citizens. Party lines, political philosophies and social and ethical positions on everything from reproductive issues to foreign policy will be dusted off, highly polished and put on display for all to admire and endorse in the privacy of the voting booth.

Unfortunately, there is usually little nuance in the pronouncements of candidates for office. Republicans are expected to be conservative; Democrats, liberal; and Independents, usually associated with a single good idea like protecting the consumer or the environment. If a candidate dares to consider publicly the costs as well as the benefits of the party line, he or she is accused of being disloyal or, perhaps even worse, indecisive.

As frustrating as this situation may be for some, it is actually quite consistent with the way many of us live our lives. We like name brands. We trust that Kleenex will deliver a better facial tissue than Brand X and, if both companies come up with the same good improvement, we are more likely to buy "The New Improved Kleenex" than "The New Improved Brand X."

We are vulnerable not only to the attraction of recognized brands but also to the belief that one brand is better than the other because it is completely different, sometimes its polar opposite. This dynamic is not exclusive to the political scene nor are we as psychologists immune to the follies of the human condition just because we happen to make it our area of study. In the setting where I practice, we have our own variation of the liberal/conservative polarity in the way different staff interpret and enforce hospital policy, in our on-going dialogue between the interests of patient rights and community responsibility and in the scores of decisions that we make every day about how to respond to people who need structure as well as understanding.

Consider the woman who tells the group that she believes a patient from another part of the hospital has been coming to her unit and directing her peers to "do bad things" to her. In response to her disclosure, an equally paranoid man leaves the room and, after a few minutes, returns to ask if the group was talking about him when he was gone. Assured that he was not the subject of conversation, he takes his seat as another group member asks if she is the suspected culprit and, if not, is it anyone else in the room. The original speaker identifies a heretofore silent peer who protests her innocence. Now group members begin to take sides, some supporting the accuser, others coming to the defense of the accused.

The therapist does not have the choice of providing structure or understanding because both are clearly needed. While empathy calls for an acknowledgement of the vulnerability that several of the group members are feeling, reality clamors for equal time. Enter psycho-eduation and an attempt to explain that paranoid thinking is a common symptom of serious mental illness making its appearance among us even as we try to identify and define it. If group members have enough trust and goodwill for the group leaders and one another, some of them may listen to the alternate explanation for their paranoid assumptions. Over time, one or two may even come to entertain the possibility that the alternate explanation is correct.

The twentieth-century philosopher Edith Stein concluded that love and truth are inseparable. Her work admonishes us neither to accept anything as truth that does not contain love nor to accept anything as love that does not contain truth. Stein's writings on empathy challenge us to understand not only the content of our patients' experience but also the experience of their content. It is not enough to know what the paranoid person thinks but we must also be able to acknowledge how he or she feels. As psychologists, we are not above falling prey to the polarized thinking of political ideologies, religious dogma, clinical theories or individual preferences for a tough or tender approach in our dealings with others. We may slip into believing that our way of assessing a situation is the only correct interpretation, think that we can dispense unconditional love without sometimes hard truths or proclaim the truth without regard to its impact on the listener.

We do this because we value our education and experience, we want to be helpful, and we know what is right for our patients. To think otherwise is to give up the same kind of certainty that tempts us to buy the brand name or vote the party line. To think otherwise is to admit the possibility that the solutions to our patients' dilemmas are not always clear and that the beginning of change is an uncertainty that we are called upon to share.

Truth, love, and uncertainty (April 2007 Issue)

By Alan Bodnar, Ph.D.

Truth, love, and uncertainty
(April 2007 Issue)