Читать книгу The Myth of the Shiksa and Other Essays - Edwin H. Friedman - Страница 16

Finally, I would like to deal briefly with some of the ethical questions raised by not being “dependable” about keeping secrets, either in one’s family or in one’s office.

First of all, let me say that taking this approach has not come easily to me. I still do a lot of soul-searching about it, and as each new situation presents itself, despite my previous successful experience, I do it with heart in mouth.

When you “betray a confidence,” as the expression goes, have you been a traitor to your family or your patient? Here is some of the thinking that has gone into the position at which I have arrived.

The management of information works both ways. I have decided that I am not bound to keep information secret if I am told it is a secret after I have been given the information. In other words, if someone tells you something and then says, “But promise me you won’t tell anyone else,” or “Don’t tell X or Y,” then they have in effect thrown a lasso around your neck and, with the request for silence, pulled the noose tight. It seems to me that what is unethical is to bind people with information or perceptions unless you have first asked them will they keep it secret, that is, are they willing to be lassoed?

In those situations where they ask for confidence first, before giving you the information, it would seem that the ethical thing is to say, “No, I can’t keep a secret.” I usually phrase this as, I feel I must be the judge of what I should do with information I have about the family. I am not going to run about as a tattletale but neither can I be bound to one member. I find most people are so burning to tell you the secret by that time they tell it to you anyway. And if they don’t, you’re still free, of course, to tell other members of the family that this one has a secret.

It is possible to argue that even if a member of a family has not gotten a prior commitment of confidence from you, that is their expectation because of the way psychotherapy and religious confession are practiced today. This seems to me to be a valid point. In actual practice, however, I have not found that point to matter much. I have almost never been attacked by a client for revealing a secret, if I can get the family to deal with it immediately. I believe this is true because I convey that my client is the family, and that I will be able to help the family best if I have no secret alliances with any of its members.³

Ultimately, however, my rationale for revealing secrets is pegged to two other ideas, one practical and one philosophical. The practical one is simply that I believe that when I engage in keeping confidences with certain members of the family from other members of the family, I am at the worst helping that family to destroy itself and at the least making all my other efforts to help the family a thousand times more difficult. I am stuck on a level of what I have previously referred to as secondary family process.

The philosophical point is that I deeply believe in civil liberties and the rights of human beings to have free access to all those aspects of their environment that might make their own choices better informed. It is really rather illusionary to try to formulate an “I” position when it’s not clear where you are standing. While some might think revealing secrets is playing God, I see keeping secrets as playing God, as acting with great presumption about what information is good for people to know. And my constant surprise at the effects on a family when a secret is revealed convinces me that revealing secrets can be a great humbler for the therapist, in terms of what he thought the problems and the causes were and what the proper direction should be.

I should like to conclude with one short story that illustrates my position. Last summer in Atlanta at a special seminar on death during a rabbinic conference I had been taking a strong position about the importance of openness in the face of death. One of my colleagues who disagreed with my position on openness gave as an example a woman in his congregation whose husband was killed suddenly in a 75 mph head-on crash. He had to be the one to tell her. While he was there, the family doctor arrived, said he had seen the body at the morgue, and added, in comfort, that she may be reassured, he was barely scratched. My colleague went on to say that he saw no need to tell her the truth about what a 75 mph head-on crash would do to her husband’s body. Perhaps now, two years later, as she was fully recovering from the trauma and again thinking of taking her place in society, she might be ready for the full truth — which she is probably beginning to admit to herself anyway. And my colleague turned to me and said, “What possible need could there have been to be open with her before this?”

My answer to him was, “You wasted two years of that woman’s life.”

About a year after this paper was delivered I was able to apply ideas originally conceived in its preparation to a situation I was quite familiar with in my own family. My mother had always told me that I was born with a spasmodic muscle in my stomach. Since I knew that my grandfather had been dying of leukemia during that period I imagined my symptom had something to do with my mother’s upsetness over his condition. Though I always wondered why she had been so upset — everyone does die, after all. The impression I had always gotten was that my condition lasted for about the first year of my life. Then one day she happened to mention that it lasted for eight months. That was exactly the period of time my grandfather lived after my birth. In other words, my stomach got better right after be died! And then it hit me. They had never told him he was dying. That’s why my mother was so upset during the terminal stage. I immediately called and asked her if my grandfather knew he was dying. “Of course not,” she replied. “Throughout the whole two years he had it?” I pressed. “Naturally,” she responded. “He was such a gentle man, we never could have done a thing like that.”

__________

1. Though it should also be stated that the opposite phenomenon, someone who is incapable of keeping a secret, also stabilizes pathological processes.

2. Three years later, after the order brother had remarried and moved out of town, the parents, having retired and wanting to moved to Florida, came back to work on the irresponsibility of the younger son.

3. Actually, my experience has been that the person to whom the secret is revealed is more likely to be critical of the therapist than the family member whose confidence has been “betrayed.” But then killing the messenger who brings bad news is an old tradition. In all events, such anger suggests that the secret-keeper in the family, far from always being the “manipulator,” may often be doing it for the one who doesn’t want to know!