The human psyche is like an intricate system of living walls presenting a broad range of architectural styles: brick walls that stop you cold, glass walls you can see through, walls with French doors that invite you in, high walls of learning and status, frescoed walls announcing conspicuous taste, walls taken hostage by everyone else’s graffiti, simple wood-frame walls superbly maintained, like the flawless red-and-white barns that seem to grow wild through the New England countryside.

I’ve been fortunate to have wonderful teachers, people of substance and depth; people who taught me that we need to extend ourselves beyond the walls of old beliefs and unexamined assumptions in order to climb to new physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual elevations, trusting that the next handhold will be there when we reach for it. But this is only half the story. Because at the same time that we need to open, to leap in the faith that we will land well, to say yes and risk who we have been for the sake of being more, we also have to be able to draw boundaries, to make a home within ourselves, to deny access to trespassers, to lock the door when it’s dark outside, to say no.

Many years ago, I taught philosophy to jail inmates as part of a special college outreach program. The readings for the course included the four dialogues of Plato sometimes referred to as The Last Days of Socrates, comprising the Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, and Phaedo. In the third of these, Socrates’s old friend Crito offers him a chance to escape from prison and flee Athens, which Socrates rejects, arguing that it’s better for him to suffer an unjust execution than to betray his freely accepted duty to obey the laws of the state. My captive audience reacted to this with boos and hisses, and more passion and involvement in the issues than anything I’d ever seen in a college or university classroom, where the imprisoning walls are far less apparent. Most of all, my inmate students were struck by the fact that even while doing time on death row, waiting to toss back the nefarious hemlock cocktail, Socrates remained free enough within himself to stay true to what he believed and valued.

Robert Frost could have written his famous something-that-doesn’t-love-a-wall line about prisoners, in and out of the slammer, to be sure—but no less about international affairs, or as a commentary on the state of human affairs at the end of the twentieth century, or an intimate observation on love and family. Think of the husband and wife who sit on either side of a newspaper or a wall of mute resignation, the teenager who can’t talk to parents who love her but they’re too busy trying to fix or rescue or judge her to learn her language, the old woman in a nursing home who’s jailed each day in isolation and loneliness and a life that’s become purposeless in the hour of its richest accumulations.

This is one of the sad ironies of our evolution to date as a species—that while we’ve conquered frontiers of air, land, sea, space, technology, medicine, and knowledge, we’re still flapping to get onto land spiritually, in the way we treat ourselves and each other and our planet. Despite all that we call progress, we haven’t done much to bring down the psychic and political walls that keep us trapped in pain, prejudice, fear, isolation, scapegoating, greed, exploitation, and other blunders of the psyche that never worked and never will no matter how much politicians gift-wrap them in glittering campaign rhetoric, no matter how much their verbal hit men try to spin the simple truth into something else.

Walls have been symbolic of an old world order more rightly described as a disorder. No doubt this is why the human race went out dancing on November 9, 1989, when the Berlin Wall came tumbling down. Evolutionarily speaking, it was a growth spurt. The uniting of East and West Germany struck us as a powerful metaphor, a harbinger of deeper healings and reunions and possibilities, globally and individually. Soon after the razing of the Wall and the democratic reforms that swept Europe and South Africa came the war in the Persian Gulf, assuring another body count for the twentieth century and reminding us that, despite the pontificating about a so-called new order, despite the real political changes that had taken place, some walls hadn’t even begun to come down; they were just being given a new coat of blood. Then, in December, 1991, the walls securing the now erstwhile Soviet Union crumbled, and with it, Lenin’s utopian experiment. Perhaps in light of all that’s happened since, the rise of terrorism and reactive populist surges, the intrusion of tech giants into our private lives through mobile and “smart” devices, and the exposing of a culture of predatory misogyny and sexual exploitation by those in positions of power and influence, we would be wise to turn our attention to the condition of our own walls.

Walls can keep us imprisoned or call us to newfound freedom. They offer a profoundly useful paradigm for self-examination, allowing us to recognize the ways we cling to the status quo, hold back, keep ourselves and others out, keep life out, keep awareness tied up in safe little habits that do everything but let us live—or the places where we give up walls we need, those psychic boundaries that tell us and others who we are. Some of our most basic beliefs may be called into question along the way. We may encounter the dark corners, steep climbs, towering cliffs, and quicksand pits that always appear when the journey is genuine and not just an advertisement for a new brand of detergent. In such moments, we must remember that a little heroism steels the soul and gives us a sense of worth, that greatness always demands much of us. Perhaps Frost’s line anticipates this, for not loving a wall is not the end of the story but the beginning. If we face our self-made prisons with courage, tearing down walls that overly limit us while acknowledging and securing those that serve us, we find we hold the key to our liberation. In this way, walls can call out the best in us, show us what the next step is, and dare us to take it.

If you try to cure evil with evil, you will add more pain to your fate.
| Sophocles

Socrates states in the Protagoras that no one knowingly does the wrong thing, that all evil is the result of ignorance. It is a generous view to say the least. In the Gorgias, however, Socrates argues that ignorance does not absolve the wrongdoer of responsibility for his actions nor mitigate the need for appropriate punishment. In fact, he goes on to say, it is imperative that the perpetrator be punished for to commit evil and get away with it is a harm in itself of the most grievous sort, since until the debt is paid, the wrongdoer carries a spiritual burden. Doing wrong thus harms the one who so acts, and as no one knowingly acts against his own interests, all wrongdoing, all evil, must be the result of ignorance. Socrates maintains, therefore, that we always act in the service of what we believe in the moment to be our greater good. One example of this might be a man who steals bread to feed his family. He knows that stealing is wrong, but under the circumstances, believes that he is acting in the interest of a good cause.

The argument has merit and more than a little appeal in cases where those who commit evil have a conscience. Dismissing their better knowing, they act out of ignorance due to blind reaction, shortsightedness, or what Socrates called “false opinion,” and by so doing, set up interference patterns in their psyche that they may experience as guilt, shame, remorse, the fear of reprisal, and so on. But what about the many cases where conscience seems to be absent, and we see something more like a fully formed evil intent operating? The sociopathic personality, for example, may derive pleasure from deliberately and knowingly inflicting pain. Depravity along these lines seems to know no limits, as anyone can attest who has perused the voluminous records of the Nuremberg trials or read with horror how the stormtroopers of repressive regimes have tortured and murdered children in the enforcement of a heartless ideology. In Socratic terms, the Nazis could be viewed as seeking what they regarded as the “greater good” of Aryan hegemony and the extermination of “inferior” ethnic groups. Like the thief, they are seeking “the good,” but taking Socrates’s claim this far seems to reduce it to absurdity, since good and evil become indistinguishable.

It is not a trivial question whether we are to regard a certain act as proceeding from ignorance or from a deliberately evil intent. If we side with Socrates, our response would be to educate, to enlighten, to rehabilitate. If, on the other hand, we conclude that the act is born of evil intent, then the appropriate response would seem to be some form of punishment commensurate with the seriousness of the wrong done. The entire criminal legal system tries every day to sort out just such matters. We do not want to execute someone who acted in ignorance, but neither would we want to attempt to rehabilitate someone whose character may be so deformed by the will to do harm to others that he or she is beyond rehabilitation. In such cases, Socrates’s argument in the Gorgias that punishment, though painful, is good for the soul of the wrongdoer, seems naive.

In a famous series of articles written for The New Yorker in 1963, entitled Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, Hannah Arendt describes how surprised she was at the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem to see that this architect of the Third Reich with its deportation programs and death camps and mass executions was not a sociopathic fiend or monster but a most unexceptional sort of man, one motivated not by ideology or malevolence but by careerism and obedience, a stupid man with no thinking life who had accepted the clichés of the Nazi regime and was simply “following orders,” who murdered innocent people by the thousands, stacking their bodies as routinely as any office worker might stack documents, then went home at the end of the day and kissed his wife and children, sat down for the evening meal, listened to music—all without a thought about the enormity of his actions. According to Arendt’s account, it was this banality, this complete lack of moral thought and reflection, that enabled Eichmann to carry out the innumerable crimes against humanity for which he eventually was hanged.

Arendt’s depiction of Eichmann as banal rather than monstrous has been contested, in part because she attended only four days of the trial, relying largely on the transcript to write her report for The New Yorker. Her critics claim that during the parts of the trial that she missed, Eichmann was exposed as someone far more driven by anti-Semitism and ideology, and that as the testimony showed, he had been well aware of the immorality of his actions. There also were allegations that Arendt was laboring under prejudices of her own that may have slanted her journalism. These controversies aside, the point here is that Arendt’s conclusion—that evil can result not from the intent to do evil but from the failure to think and consider and hold one’s choices and actions up to a moral standard—seems consistent with Socrates’s claim. If genocide does not count as evil, it is hard to imagine what would, and it does seem that Eichmann’s banality and moral vacuousness, as reported by Arendt, constitute an extreme example of what Socrates calls “ignorance.” But where does this leave us? Was Eichmann ignorant or evil? More generally, what is the proper response? To educate or to punish?

One could make the argument that the ability to “look the other way” while committing atrocities, to suppress every native impulse of empathy and compassion and fellow feeling, is precisely where ignorance becomes evil. Aristotle, disputing the Socratic ethic, holds that it is possible to knowingly do wrong, a state the Greeks called akrasia, translated as “weakness of will.” In such cases, evil would not be the result of ignorance but of a failing of character. Socrates might reply that akrasia follows from not understanding that the good and right and virtuous course of action is always the only workable and sustainable one, not to mention the only one consistent with longterm self-interest, in which case akrasia would amount to another form of ignorance.

To muddy the waters a bit more, there is the relative nature of good and evil. One man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter. Whether an act constitutes evil or serves some greater good depends largely on whom one asks. It is possible to adjudge a suicide bomber in an open-air café to be the very embodiment of evil while justifying the dropping of a nuclear bomb on a city in the name of saving lives. We can avoid moral relativism to some extent here by considering the question in the context of excesses. Even in those cases where someone commits a wrong in the belief that some greater good is thus served, there would be moral limits to how far the wrongdoer could go without committing what we might think of as an unjustifiable act. To kill the enemy in war might be defended as a “necessary evil.” It would be much harder if not impossible, however, to justify the use of torture. Even allowing that people see things differently, evil remains evil, and the question of its nature remains.

To be thorough in our considerations of these things, we have to allow not only that there may be a point past which ignorance becomes evil, but also that evil acts, even those committed with the full intent to do wrong, the awareness that such acts are evil, and with no weakness of the will involved may yet presuppose a type of ignorance. In such cases, the ignorance lies not in banality or a failure to recognize the nature of the act, but in the assumption that through doing wrong, one can bring about some desired end. In other words, the evildoer may be ignorant of a profound truth that history has demonstrated time and time again, i.e., that evil as a method is doomed to fail, since it relies on force and on imposing one’s will upon others, strategies that invariably backfire. Beyond this, there may be yet a deeper current of ignorance at work in the assumption that one can achieve any good end by manipulating worldly conditions. Tyrants do seem to be ignorant that happiness and “human flourishing,” as Socrates tells us, are states of the soul, not the world. Using force to drive the world to its knees, in the end, leaves one far worse off in every way that matters. The mentality that tries to use force to exploit the world and others is rooted in ignorance, viz., the failure to understand that happiness is an inside job. It cannot be wrought through conquest and domination. In light of this broader perspective, Socrates may have been right, after all.

Whether we side with Socrates and his idea that “no man knowingly does evil” or subscribe to the view that there are those who, whether through thoughtlessness or cruel intent or weakness of will, commit acts of evil with full knowledge of the nature of their actions may matter little in the end. How we respond to such acts, however, matters greatly. It is crucial that we understand that in reacting to evil, we run the risk of committing evil ourselves, and it is not overstating the matter to say that the future of humanity may well depend on our steering clear of this danger. Evil, however it originates in the human psyche, begets evil. Especially in what many moderns now think of as the “age of terrorism,” with acts of evil erupting in the headlines regularly, we may feel so outraged and threatened that we deny the humanity of the evildoer and unwittingly become the thing we hate. Some exploit this dark potential. They stoke the fires of fear and in the name of law and order and security, make a bad situation worse while wiser courses of action are swept aside. To deal with inhumanity humanely; to meet evil with clarity and measured determination; to hold to a higher ethical standard than the worst among us; to respond to those who do monstrous things without becoming monsters ourselves—these are the virtues of what Socrates calls the “well-ordered soul,” the only real remedy to ignorance and evil, in others and in ourselves.

A strange game. The only winning move is not to play.
| From the film “War Games,” spoken by Joshua, a supercomputer after running all permutations for “Global Thermonuclear War”

As a rule, destructive behavior will lead to painful consequences for the perpetrator, but in relational systems, the resulting pain is dynamic—that is, it can move to someone else within the system, provided the host is willing to accept and carry it. Since painful consequences are inherently instructional—if only in teaching us what not to do—appropriating someone else’s pain preempts his or her opportunity to learn, self-correct, and develop. It is an act of meddling that interrupts the natural circuit of another’s evolution, deforms love and compassion into martyrdom and victimhood, creates a closed system of chronic imbalance and disorder, and leads to potentially harmful outcomes for everyone involved.

Destructive behavior ranges from rash or reactive judgment and ill-considered choices to more damaging forms, such as antisocial acting out, passive-aggressive manipulation, narcissistism, victim thinking, and the aberrant interpretations and justifications of the sociopathic psyche. In all cases, such behavior gives rise to increasingly adverse consequences—”increasingly,” because life lessons deferred by the displacement of pain tend to become more insistent the longer one puts them off, due to the dialectical nature of experience.

In philosophical counseling sessions, we see this most among parents who are carrying responsibility for the choices and behavior of their adult children. The weary mother whose adult son or daughter keeps ending up in an abusive relationship or in trouble with the law, the father of the drug user or shoplifter, the grandparents who, seeking to insulate their grandchild from the inevitable adversities of growing up, unwittingly interfere with the child’s development are examples of how pain can move, since in each case, the well-meaning parent or grandparent pays the price of taking on the displaced pain in the form of emotional, financial, or even physical suffering. As if this weren’t enough, the one to whom the pain rightly belongs may come to resent the one who has taken it on, because—good intentions notwithstanding—usurping another’s pain is an insidious form of interference in his or her life curriculum and development—which is why it’s been said that “the one for whom you do the most resents you the most.”

The mother who lets her teenage children control her through tantrums and the withdrawal of their love may suffer the displaced pain of this mutiny so deeply that she becomes an emotional hostage. It may not occur to her that the pain she’s carrying is not native to her choices or actions but originates in her children, that they count on her to be in pain as proof that they have power over her, and that her enabling distracts them so they never deal with the painful consequences of their destructive behavior. The woman who suffers in silence while being verbally abused by her husband is carrying displaced pain. In some cases, the displacement is obvious; in others, it may be difficult if not impossible to map, but in all cases, pain resulting from the actions of someone within the system is being appropriated by someone else in the system, enabling continued destructive and irresponsible behavior.

Those carrying displaced pain may at times feel half crazy. Their experience doesn’t add up, because it isn’t their experience. One way philosophical counseling can help someone immersed in the murky waters of displaced pain is to ask questions that encourage “surfacing” into an awareness that the suffering isn’t original but appropriated. Some of these questions are:

Whose pain is this?

Where did the pain of this situation originate?

Is this pain being carried for someone else?

What would follow from refusing to carry the other’s pain?

It’s wise to keep in mind that a relational system that’s been deformed through the displacement and misappropriation of pain has been significantly compromised, and that solutions aren’t likely to spring up overnight. It may take more time that we’d like for those in the system to get the message that the rules have changed, that the old configuration no longer will be accepted. That said, the relief of refusing to participate as the usurper of another’s pain can be immediate and profound. Refusing to take on another’s pain restores order in the soul, puts the perpetrator on notice that destructive behavior will no longer be enabled nor the consequences deflected through reframing the system in terms of power, and frees the one to whom the pain belongs natively to experience both the consequences and the instruction implicit in them.

We give a priceless gift to those we love when we remember that love is not a license to interfere. One of the greatest forms of love is respect for another’s curriculum and timing. Getting out of the way so we aren’t standing between our loved ones and the lessons they need to learn takes clarity, strength of character, and a deep and abiding conviction that, as Michael Crichton writes, “Life will find a way.” There is a distance in all genuine closeness, and no buried treasure is ever found without the hardship of digging.

Individuals dealing with domestic violence should contact local law enforcement, social services, abuse shelters, or other community resources for immediate intervention.

The ancient Greeks recognized that, while pure wisdom (sophia) is exclusive to the gods, we humans can achieve a practical wisdom they called phronesis, which involves discerning the appropriate response in any situation, bringing the force of one’s character to bear for the greater good, encouraging others to virtuous action, and so on. Those who pick their battles demonstrate phronesis, as do those who make skillful compromises. Cultivating phronesis allows us to live a life of beauty and excellence, so that our being-here becomes not unlike a work of art.

One good example of phronesis is this business of picking one’s battles, because the ability to do this presupposes a certain self-overcoming or self-possession. Picking our battles implies choice under fire—that is, the clarity that allows us to act deliberately rather than by default, to respond rather than react, and this requires that we gain a certain mastery over the more prevalent tendency to react, which is often destructive. One fascinating thing about this is the immediate impact it has on the world and others. Racing into battle in the heat of reaction tends to escalate conflict, whereas remaining cool and reasonable have a mitigating effect. This appears to be the point Lao Tze makes in the Tao Te Ching in the statement: “The sage cannot be beaten because he does not contend.” Phronesis is, in this case, disarming. It “stops thing when they’re small,” as Lao Tze puts it, and therein lies the art of it. One doesn’t need to dodge bullets that were never fired.

Think of road rage. In most cases that cross the line into tragedy, we can imagine something like an irresistible force meeting an immovable object. There is usually an opening, however brief, to disengage, to “lose” in the confrontation and by losing, to skillfully prevent the thing from becoming something far worse. For those lacking in phronesis, disengagement is difficult if not impossible in practical terms. Ego presses us on, into meaningless violence, past points of no return. But ego and phronesis do not speak the same language, any more than do foolishness and wisdom.

Disengaging when confronted with belligerence turns out to be a wise thing to do for many reasons. Belligerence, for one thing, is the favorite posture of fear. The bully, for all the pain he inflicts on others, is a scared child. It is almost always the victim who victimizes. While reaction might insist that we condemn and retaliate in the face of belligerent behavior, phronesis prompts us to respond with understanding and compassion. In that wiser choice, we dodge the bullet that, if it struck us, might make us a victim, too, in a vicious cycle that can end only in the self-overcoming of phronesis. So are we saved by the cultivation of our character, and our example may well serve to save others.

On the path of phronesis, we do not shrink from those tests of character that can appear without warning. Indeed, we welcome then, since they show us where we stand, and where further self-work is needed. It helps to remember to breathe, to slow down, to take a step back. Living deliberately is challenging, but the self-overcoming that allows us to live beautifully and well is the foundation of meeting and overcoming all other challenges. We are wise to take it up with a willing spirit, and without delay.

Popular wisdom advises us to “go for the gusto,” and in the pursuit of happiness, which it mistakes for this or that arrangement of outer conditions, to “make it happen.” This exaltation of the will may be one of the greatest errors of modern thinking, one that flies in the face of centuries-old wisdom that instructs us to release our will and let things happen. It is an odd idea to the mind steeped in traditionally Western assumptions that have led to “taming” nature (think deforestation, the ozone layer, frac sand mining, etc.), splitting the atom (was that a good idea?), so-called Manifest Destiny, “globalization,” and the invasion, conquest, and exploitation of whole cultures whose only inferiority to our own was military. Those who assume it is our place to exert and impose our will are likely to hear any suggestion to let go of willfulness in favor of allowing things to unfold and find their level as an invitation to passivity, even sloth—one of the seven “deadly sins,” and our natural reaction—or what seems to us natural—is one of aversion.

It hardly occurs to us that the whole universe got here, and at least for the time being, is moving in its course, without our managing things, without our agendas, timetables, and strategies. We did not create the Earth or set it spinning in the void of space or set the clock of the seasons or the rhythm of the rolling tides. Indeed, the arrival of modern humankind on the great geological timeline took place only the barest fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a second ago, and the opaque, driven infatuation with our will made its appearance even more recently. Whatever creative and organizing principle has been operating since time and space first “banged” hardly could be called passive, yet nowhere in the cosmos do we see the slightest evidence of anything resembling the exertions and presumptions of human will.

Moreover, while the universe in its natural state is beautiful—wild, sometimes violent, madly prolific, yes, but beautiful nonetheless—willfulness is flat-out ugly. There is nothing graceful or elegant or attractive about it. On the contrary, willful personalities are off-putting. Full of themselves, they lack empathy and the willingness or ability to listen to others. They are grandiose, constricted, and overbearing. The more willful a person is, the more complacent and strident he becomes, until his very presence seems to crowd out those around him. One can see it in almost any political debate these days. Willfulness, fully entrenched, is always absolutely right and anyone who disagrees absolutely wrong, and in this, there is nothing even remotely appealing. One can only imagine how it looks to the world, when a nation will not stop willfully declaring its greatness, or when the poster child for this sort of arrested development (around age two, cultivation of the will is a good and necessary stage) is a U.S. Presidential frontrunner.

Beyond aesthetics, willfulness can become dangerous, even deadly. It contains within itself the means and mentality to despoil whole ecosystems, even while our best scientific minds are telling us that the very survival of our planet is in jeopardy. Willfulness drops bombs on hospitals, because it lacks the essential humility to acknowledge its own capacity for error. It pursues the development of weapons that can kill entire cities, never considering whether a thing that can be done should be done, or what the longterm consequences of doing it may be. It walks explosive vests into nightclubs and flies commercial airliners into office buildings. Myopic, awash in hubris, it has no idea that there is a principle operating in the world that rewards the willful use of force with unpredictable and unwanted results.

If passivity were the only alternative to “making it happen,” then willfulness might have a case. But it isn’t. There is another, much overlooked third possibility, one in which we, recognizing the limits of our will and having learned the painful lessons of what happens when we force situations or timings, step back and give things room to resolve, while we remain alert and responsive, open to creative solutions and directions—not passively, never passively—neither laying back nor marching blindly into battle but engaging through willingness. A pause is a powerful thing. In an argument, it can break a spiral of escalating resentment and reaction. If one will simply stop and take a breath, stop and disengage the will, something new can show itself. Letting go is often the first step in letting something come.

It is a beautiful thing when what we want comes to us. Whether this takes the form of a spontaneously reciprocal love interest, good fortune in business, or civilized international relations, the unfolding of events is so much more satisfying when we have abandoned the role of the pursuer, the hunter, the one who “makes it happen” and let the thing we want come to us. In his commentary on Patanjali’s Yogasutras, Satchitananda talks about this in terms of the siddhis—the powers that the yogi inherits on the path of yoga. These powers, Satchitananda states, should not be the reason for spiritual study or practice, which is never self-aggrandizing. He then raises the question of why Patanjali even mentions them. Wouldn’t it be better to have left them out, and let the yogi discover them on his own? Satchitananda goes on to explain that the siddhis are beautiful—if the yogi lets them come by themselves at the right time. The instruction is clear: A good thing, when it is pursued, becomes untimely and a disadvantage. Conversely, even an adverse situation met with willingness can be instructional and beautiful. Socrates says essentially the same thing in the Republic. Happiness, then, is not just an arrangement of outer conditions but a state of order, balance, and harmony in the soul, made effective by release of the will, a state without which even good things fall from our hands, and with which, even “bad” things improve our lot. How well we live, it seems, is determined not only by the path we’re on, but by how we walk the path.

The release of the will is an experiment worth making. Perhaps there’s something you’ve been wanting, doing all you could to “make it happen,” pursuing, pushing, working every angle, all from within an exhausting state of preoccupation. Why not see what happens if you release your will, take a breath and a step back, disengage, and allow room for what you want to come to you? Not pushing does not mean adopting a passive stance. When we let something go, we go about living our life. We don’t sit around waiting for the thing to come to us, which would be passive. Such passivity is just as willful as trying to force outcomes; it is simply willfulness sitting quietly in a chair with its hands folded. Getting busy with other things helps. Staying alert and responsive in the grand experiment of “letting it come” doesn’t mean watching the pot. It means more than anything else, resting in the confidence that when life knocks at your door, you’ll be there to open it—self-possessed, beautiful in willingness, and ready to be pleasantly surprised.

Once I saw a greeting card with these words on the cover: “The secret to happiness is…” and on the inside: “Try not to get too personally involved in your own life.” I consider this a fine bit of wisdom, rarely found in greeting cards or anywhere else these days, because this habit of taking things personally seems to have infiltrated our national character to the point that people kill each other over parking spaces. In the age of terrorism, with violence escalating on both sides of the law, we’re all a little jumpy, and would do well to take a deep breath and a few steps back. It is possible to “fight fair,” to find common ground, and along the way, to disagree without being disagreeable, to discuss charged issues without raised voices, finger-pointing, or churlish swagger.

To illustrate: Sometimes in couples counseling, one person comes to the session with the complaint that the other did some hurtful thing, and in the cases where the suffering runs the deepest over, say, having been lied to or disregarded and so on, part of the narrative invariably is, “I can’t believe he/she did this to me.” You see, this “to me” is the bit that confesses that the hurtful action is being taken personally. So, the first thing we try to do is see what happens to the complaint if we subtract this “to me.” We step back and take a deep breath and ask the one who was hurt by the act to reframe it so it becomes simply, “He/she did this.” When we make this little change, what else changes? Suddenly, a space opens up around the problem. Reactions slow down; there’s an easing of the constriction, and it becomes possible for the hurt party to look at what happened more on its own terms. As the firestorms of personal reaction subside, both parties become less defensive, and the one who committed the act can take newfound responsibility for its consequences. Most of us don’t do things “to” anyone. We do things. We have our reasons. Sometimes those reasons come out of inner contradiction, unexamined assumptions, life script imperatives, or pathological imbalances that never got addressed and resolved. When the wounded person lets go of the “to me” and considers the hurtful act in this broader light, it becomes possible to take it less personally, less as a betrayal, and perhaps even to begin to understand it, to see it for what it was, and in this seeing, compassion enters the conversation. The act was destructive. It was thoughtless. Maybe it was a deal breaker. But it wasn’t personal. We can hold to our human and ethical and emotional requirements without making ourselves a victim and someone else the “bad guy.” I’m not saying hurtful actions are never committed with the aim, wittingly or not, of inflicting pain of one sort or another, but this sort of thing appears to be rare. In those cases, where it actually is personal, the problem is more serious, and a different sort of intervention is needed.

Which brings to mind the current political climate here in the U.S. One can hardly turn the television off fast enough, as there seems to be no end to how low candidates are willing to go in taking things personally, name-calling, and puerile posturing. It is not something the electorate should tolerate. We have a right to expect maturity, disinterest, and self-possession from those who claim to be fit to lead the nation. Most of what these candidates have shown us about their character should have disqualified them months ago, but their belligerence and demagoguery seem to have captivated and rallied the disenfranchised. These days, more than ever, we need our national leaders to be mature, thoughtful men and women who can engage the issues calmly, consider diverse approaches and creative courses of action, encourage real dialogue between polarized factions, and bring people together to work out inclusive and healing solutions, to “build not walls but bridges,” as Pope Francis put it recently. In a volatile world where violence has become increasingly hard to predict and prevent, the last thing we need is a volatile president fighting wars of arrested development and taking matters of state personally. I, for one, certainly hope that come November, the national electorate will prove to be at least as wise as a greeting card.