Win or Lose

It is one of the most chilling moments in the Academy award-nominated documentary, The Gatekeepers. An Israeli security official is talking with a Palestinian doctor, who surprises him by saying, "We're winning." How can you think that, the Israeli asks. Your fighting forces are being wiped out, your people are being pushed farther and farther into a corner. We're winning, the doctor asserted, because we're causing so much pain and suffering for you!
That has become a more and more common attitude toward differences and contention. The goal has become not to acheive one's goals and dreams but to stymie one's opponents from reaching theirs! In other words, the battle becomes an end in itself where winning or losing are not merely out of reach, but not relevant at all.
So we have national elected officials who spend as much time preventing anything from happening as they do actually doing what obviously needs to be done. The goal would seem to be to cause as much pain and suffering as possible for the other guy.
And we have relationships where no one seems to want anyone else to achieve anything. Husbands stand in the way of wives going to work or for further education, even though they need the income and there is nothing to be done at home. Or, in a warped sort of caring, some parents encourage their children not to go for higher education, not to move on in a personal life, under the pretense of protecting them from the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. Such scenarios result in an on-going tug of war without any discernable reason or goal.
This modern-day version of the Red Queen's Race (see Lewis Carroll's Through  the Looking Glass) results in running as fast as possible while staying in the same place: frustration, despair, confusion. Oh, but our very resistance to anything productive enables us to continue our stance as helpless victims and to avoid risking responsibility.
I have never been a fan of our society's idealization of competition. If anything, studies have shown it as one of the least productive ways of interacting. But what we have now is nowhere near the old capitalistic ideal of winning and losing.
When we regain that sense of directions, goals worth working toward, then we can get past this societal gridlock where the struggle is all.

Never Say Always?

The young man calling was dismayingly common: he and his fiancee, with whom he had three children, were looking for couple's counseling. We ran into dat ole debbil moolah right away: I'm not eligible for Medicaid/Medicare, Husky, Title 19 or any of the  state insurance programs, and they couldn't afford even the minimum on my sliding scale.
But then he acknowledged they were just shopping anyway, so I could only suspect that they (or at least he) were just going through the motions.
It still raised the issue of relationships today. Ironically, at the same time that marriage equality has become an international battlecry for the LGBT community, straight heterosexual marriage has been more and more pushed aside especially by the younger  generation. The much-bandied-about statistic that nearly half of all marriages end in the divorce courts ignores the increasing number of couples who view matrimony as an expensive and extraneous institition. Justifying the lack of a wedding ring or marriage certificate as unnecessary for two people who are truly commited to one another, they move in together and go through very similar stages to their legally married brethren and sistern: buying property, having children, loving and fighting and reconciling like any husband and wife.
Of course, given the rocky status of matrimony, it should  be no surprise that the next generation might be wary of it. There is also a deep suspicion and rejection of traditional institutions such as marriage; we have a society that doesn't trust itself or any of the mechanisms which traditionally hold society together.
Inasmuch, as I said before, such couples might discard some of the legal ties (matrimony) but not others (property, children), it seems that people are being people and consistently inconsistent. Or may be it is a resistance to commitment.
Misunderstanding the reality of any relationship that no one is  signing on for forever, or at least shouldn't, couples should realize that,like everything that works in life, marrage is only for today, Carrying the issues of yesterday or worrying about potential issues of tomorrow keeps us from dealing with what is happening right here and right now. Otherwise, there will always be that little voice in the background that whispers, "You could always leave."
In any relationship, there will be days when things turn toxic. If we have made a commitment to keep trying, that is as much as anyone can do.

Boundaries

One of the givens today is movable boundaries.
No, it is doubtful that there ever was a time when there were consistently defined and universal standards, expectations of behavior, acknowledgement what is right and what is wrong. Sure, there were clearly codified rules ranging from Moses to Hammurabi, but we are talking about social norms rather than legal/moral dictates. And today it has become more fuzzy (or at least more obviously so) than in the past.
Part of this comes from the seismic social changes that have happened in recent times. Traditional ways (even those not always acknowledged or adhered to) have been questioned, even outright discarded. Yes, there are those who, even though they honored these ways more in word than personal deed, have sought to turn back the clock to times that may have never really existed save in nostalgic memory. And when it proves impossible to put the toothpaste back in the tube, the blame game begins in earnest.
Does this mean we should give up any attempt to set appropriate boundaries? Of course we need to define who each of us may be and what we may be willing to do or tolerate from another; otherwise we fall into a psychological maelstrom of enmeshment between our issues and everyone else's. Nor should we give way to what one author referred to as "raging narcissism," where we only care for our own needs (paging Ayn Rand!)
One of the biggest tasks in most psychotherapy is dealing with boundaries. On one extreme is the client who resists leaving at the end of a session. On the other is the client who consistently arrives late (if at all) and wants to leave early. The spectrum runs from those who do not trust anyone at all to those who suffer greatly from the burdens of everyone else's problems. In addition, there are clients who want to know the therapist in every detail, and clients who come with their own expectations of the therapist.
So should we not seek any standards or accept and follow any ethical mores? There is some evidence that certain actions or behavior is universally condemned (incest, for example). And we all seem to have from childhood a sense of what is "fair" or not(butting in line.) Of course,  we have religious dicta that we carry from our faith, but that is where we get into the gray areas because they do not always mesh and can differ tremendously depending on how they are adhered to (do you eat pork?)
Before you begin thinking I have painted myself in a philosophical corner, let me suggest that the problem is not setting boundaries or what form of boundaries we set, but how rigidly we adhere to them. If we see our ethical/moral standards as goals rather than strict behavioral guidelines, we might be able live more honestly than we tend to do now. We might also save a great deal of emotional energy and anguish by not having to come up with rationalizations when we would not follow our own code of behavior, or feeling badly if we do. The point is having a goal to work toward, a sense of direction, something which might be at times beyond us but still whispers in our ear, come on! You can do better!

Just a Joke

He'd posted this joke on Facebook, and no I'm not going to tell it here 'cause (a) it weren't funny and (b) it was based on a series of sexist and ethnic slurs. Enough to say it was a regression to the old vaudeville gags based on insults and slapstick (which, as we all know, is really a comic form of physical abuse.)
Since I have this unfortunate difficulty tolerating that kind of thing, I pointed this out, in a low-key, polite kinda way of course. Next time I'll stick to something less hazardous, like wrestling alligators and poking bees' nests. Lighten up, I was chastised, stop being so "politically correct." It's only a joke.
Let us not be distracted by an old right-wing shibboleth, "political correctness." Let me, rather, introduce you to a little thing called "verbal abuse." When you use slurs, or stereotypes, even in a joke, you are putting someone down. You are belittling them, as in "putting them below yourself." Consider: would you say the same thing other than in the pretext of a joke?
Freud had a theory that most humor is akin to anger and hurt and humiliation. He might have had a point; consider the archetypal example of comedy: slipping on a banana peel. Why do we laugh at that? Is it because we feel superior to the poor person lying there on the ground?
Granted, there are variations on humor that depend on clever wordplay or identification with what is being talked about (Bill Cosby springs to mind.) But think of the most popular comedies out now: they are filled with people being hurt, humiliated, made to seem foolish. They are aimed at that particular stage in our lives when we can think of little funnier than putting down our peers. (In boys, as I remember, it happens around adolescence.)
And regardless of age, it is a common defense when confronted. I was just kidding. Only a joke, man.  But that elides the difference.
Yes, I have a sense of humor. Like to think that I am even witty. But when someone moves into that kind of humor that depends on putting someone down, where the laughter is a cover for tears, that ain't funny anymore.