Dear Bewildered,

Your friend’s problem is that he is a racist.

It’s not nice to label people. A racist may be an excellent builder of miniature racing-car models. He may be a good whistler.

But he’s still a racist. Being a racist is stupid and repugnant. What’s worse, it can spread. It’s each person’s job to not be a racist.

He can stop being a racist. You can help. You can tell him that while he may have certain racist thoughts, he can stop being a racist by not voicing any of these thoughts ever under any circumstances.

Maybe that would lead to some positive personal change. Or maybe he would give you a hurt, bewildered look of confusion and self-pity that makes you want to punch him.

Don’t punch him. That won’t help.

Well, it might help a little. It might temporarily curb his outward expressions of racism. But I’m against hitting people even as a gift of enlightenment.

Just tell him that being a racist is not cool anywhere in the United States of America or in Europe or Asia or Africa or North America or South America or Australia or Antarctica. which pretty much means the whole world, all the continents, plus the open oceans and in outer space also. Racism is not cool even in outer space or on other planets. It’s not cool, period. It’s not cool anywhere, not in public or in private. It’s one of those things that you just want to get rid of completely and be done with.

Tell your friend that the next time he says some kind of racist remark like that, that you’re terminating all contact with him.

Now, everyone has a shadow self that embodies the repressed. We all have our share of unvoiced hatred and fear, irrational beliefs, strange, criminal impulses. Thoughts come into our heads that we must censor because to voice them would disturb others.

We may have sexual fantasies about our friends’ wives or husbands, or their sisters or brothers or their children; we might have taboo curiosities. We may find ourselves imagining elaborate ways to connect physically that involve hydraulics, servo motors, pulleys and latex.

Some of us have so many of these thoughts that we move to San Francisco.

But let’s not complicate the issue.

Also, there are rumored to exist tiny protected intellectual zones where people have advanced degrees in things you never heard of and special vocabularies come into use in a specialized context, where you can say things that have several layers and degrees of irony and are understood in sophisticated ways that you couldn’t explain to your friend even if you understood them yourself, which you’re not going to.

That’s different.

There is also weird humor which unless you’re Sarah Silverman, don’t try that either. It’s too advanced for you.

And don’t get on your high horse and pretend there are degrees, that racism exists on a continuum. There are no degrees. There is no continuum.

Racism is bad. It’s evil. Nobody should be voicing racist thoughts.

If your friend keeps it up, just totally, radically de-friend him. Become his special not-friend.

Be done with it. It’s that simple.

I have immediately lined up a therapist, not being able to go through the crisis by myself. I have consulted the divorce lawyer as well, but decided that I simply cannot afford to leave him before I can secure some sort of support system, income, job, anything that would assure my landing on solid ground. Now, being middle-aged and with thin résumé, getting a job will be difficult in this economy, and I am more and more inclined to pursue separation, since staying in the marriage is not really emotionally healthy for me. I do give it a try every day, and every day is an effort, but, although he did give up his “encounters,” he still maintains virtual presence in the gay community through porn and his private Flickr account(s). Although not a deal breaker, his Internet activity makes me conclude that he is not willing to make an effort toward the true reconciliation of our relationship, and that his real orientation is something he will not be able to deny for much longer. I do realize that his orientation is not a choice, but his behavior is.

My priority is our girls, who are, hopefully, oblivious to the extent of our marital crisis, but I am asking myself lately if it is time to let him go, and hope for the best for all four of us? I do not want to hurt the girls, but I do not want to carry on with this agony for much longer either. This past couple of months have been hardest in my life, just watching everything I ever believed in crumble apart. My self-esteem is still pretty high, but self-pity creeps in every now and then, hurting my ability to think straight. I want out; the question is do I wait until the girls are off to college (another couple of years), or do I seek an exit now.

Your advice is appreciated.

Str8 Spouse

Dear Str8 Spouse,

You need concrete help. For that, you have wisely chosen a therapist and a lawyer.

What I can do is help you form a narrative or map.

Because you are human you will seek meaning in what happened. We seek meaning in misfortune whether we get cancer or have an accident or are bombed out of our houses by unseen jets.  It helps. It helps to make a story out of what happens.

Your story will be something like this. You fell in love and got married and had two beautiful children and had always thought there might be unexplored territory between you and your husband. But you did not go there. You may have learned a way of relating that, though intimate, allowed for certain unexplored regions. You may have termed this privacy, or given it some meaning. But you sensed that your husband was not completely transparent to you, that he had secrets or evasions. Having no clear guidelines, you let these areas, and perhaps these doubts, go unexplored. You didn’t press the issue. You made small incremental decisions that maintained the relationship and the family.

It may be that at the first you wondered if this was the way it was supposed to be. You may have talked to your friends about it, subtly suggesting that things were “good” but not “great,” that you wondered sometimes …

Maybe. Maybe not. I think it likely, if you are honest, that you had vague suspicions.

At any rate, now it has become clear that your husband has been hiding a great deal from you. So you are incensed, enraged, hurt, betrayed. You’ve had a terrible shock. Gone are the bedrock vows and beliefs on which your marriage rested. You are now in the sticky muck of uncertainty. It is hard to walk now; everything is harder.

For a while it’s going to be one day at a time, slogging through, some days better than others. You will have to decide if you can continue living with him and for how long, and under what circumstances, and for those decisions, you have help through a lawyer and a therapist. One way or another you will arrive in a future that was not the future you imagined.

What do I see for you in the future? I see a wiser woman; I see a woman who finds new strength in herself to protect her daughters and make a new life. I see a woman who now knows you never really know, who learns that when disaster happens you’re capable of more than you realized. And maybe there will be some new rules in this story — rules about hunches and doubts, a rule that says if something doesn’t feel right, it isn’t.

We are educated to be sensible and quasi-scientific in our decisions. In the conscious realm we operate on what we can see and hear. But in the unconscious realm, the animal realm, the realm of hunches and doubts, we need to listen more carefully to unformed notions we don’t fully understand and yet which persist, in their way, in their language of symbols and doubts and strange coincidence.

I wish to leave you with this: You are not alone. This has happened before. You have strength and support to call on. You can get through this and be stronger and wiser. You have help. You have people who love you and are on your side. You are going to be OK.

Now I’m 18 and have a little sister. Just like with me and my older brother, Mom breast-fed her really late, and now at 9 years old, my sister still likes to feel my mother’s breasts. My sister is my mom’s last child, and so in several areas Mom persists in regarding her as a baby.

I try to understand my mom. I realize the idea of her last kid growing up must be scary and depressing. But this behavior is disgusting to watch or even to know it is going on when you’re not there. Additionally, it’s delusional and perverse to excuse, and even encourage, such behavior in a growing young woman on the grounds that she’s an infant. Who knows why I wanted, and now my sister wants, to touch my mother’s breasts at age 9? Certainly not because we wanted to breast-feed. But Mom’s so convinced of my sister’s innocence that she refuses to consider she could be encouraging inappropriate impulses that my sister is too unaware to understand.

I know those impulses are there. It happened to me. But for obvious reasons, I can’t tell my mother that.

What I do tell her? That I’m grossed out and that my sister is too old? Mom won’t listen. My sister, of course, listens to Mom over me and gets mad at me for saying anything. So I’m at a loss for what to do, and I don’t want my sister to turn out with the revulsion of her own memories and the confusion of her feelings that I suffered.

I’m so disgusted it’s keeping me up at night. I’m angry and stressed.

What should I do?

Revolted

Dear Revolted,

I want you to consult with a psychotherapist. Look for someone who has helped others with experiences similar to yours.

You could read and study about this. It wouldn’t hurt to get a basic understanding of child development and how such experiences can later affect us in troubling and unexpected ways. But knowledge alone will not be enough to avoid the later effects of this early experience.

The best thing you can do for yourself now is to find a therapist who can respond to you in a clear, responsible and nonjudgmental way and sit with you, week after week, as you tell your story. That would also be the best person to advise you on how to talk with your mom and your sister should you choose to do so at some point.

You are in a great situation right now. You know what happened, and it is still fresh. You have not distorted what happened or rationalized it or put it out of your mind. So this is the time to act.

You will meet obstacles in your search for the right psychotherapist. So consider this a quest of monumental importance. It may be the most important thing you ever do — more important than your education or your later occupation.

Feelings of guilt and self-hatred may arise. As such feelings come up, remind yourself that they are not helpful. They are, in fact, the direct result of this experience that has left you feeling troubled and conflicted.

You may also hear voices telling you that talking about it is taboo or will expose others to harm. That is why the confidential setting of a psychotherapist’s office is the ideal space in which to tell your story. You will not be “outing” your mother or have to confront her; you will not be causing family conflict. All you will be doing in therapy is resuming, as a slightly older person, the course of development that was sidetracked at an early age by these unusual experiences.

You have the chance to live a happy, productive life, unburdened by this. Moreover, once you attain some understanding of this, you can be of use to others who have had similar experiences.

Now, I believe that a rich country like ours ought to provide for its people in certain basic ways. One of these ways is in medical care. Psychotherapy is a kind of medical care. So I believe that high-quality psychotherapy and psychiatric care ought to be readily available to people of all income levels.

This is not currently the case in America. Instead, we  must be creative, energetic and insistent to get the care we need. This is cruelly paradoxical, because it is precisely at moments when we are most burdened that we are called upon to be entrepreneurial and creative in our search for care.

You will need strength and resilience as you search for the right therapist. To keep on your quest you may need to repeat to yourself that this is indeed a life-or-death matter. People who have such experiences can later fall into depression, suicide and addiction. We don’t want that to happen to you.

Some people are uncomfortable with this topic, so they snicker and make childish jokes. Beware of shaming remarks. It would be great if they could just slide off your back, but the truth is that such remarks often do sting. Do not pretend that such remarks are not hurtful. Instead, feel the sting and wait for it to subside, like the sting of a bee. Accept that the world has many cruel and ignorant people in it, but you can survive and live a happy life.

Don’t listen to anyone who says to just get over it. We humans don’t often just “get over” stuff like this. Not without help. So get help.

You can find the help you need, and you deserve it. It’s not your fault what happened when you were just a kid.

I hired an archival researcher and a private investigator but no one can help me. Can you help me? I found out that many people came from all over the U.S. to attend this school and all I need is a list of names from around November 1961.  Please, please help me.

Into the Past

Dear Into the Past,

I love a mystery. I’m tempted to begin investigating myself. But I can’t do that. So you will have to keep at it.

It is hard to sustain a search without regular encouragement. So while I can’t fly there and help you look, I can offer encouragement to keep looking. Setbacks are to be expected. It will be slow going. You have to keep moving forward.

You may have begun to feel hopeless and want to give up. But if you give up you’ll never find out. At least if you keep at it until you have exhausted every avenue, you will have an answer. The answer may be that this man’s identity will never be known. At least that would be an answer. You will want the satisfaction of knowing you have done everything possible. So keep at it. If you become discouraged, take a break. Find elements of the investigation you can perform without expending much energy. But keep it going.

Be ready for your mind to play tricks on you. If discovering your biological father’s identity evokes any fear or uncertainty at all, then you may feel tired or discouraged because part of you does not even want to know. You may have thoughts like, Oh, who cares! Why bother! Beware of such thoughts. Your feeling that no one can help you may be one of those thoughts. Beware of the voice in you that says it is hopeless. That is the voice that really does not want to know.

But the real authentic you does want to know. Knowing where we come from is a deep human longing.

You hired an archival researcher and a private investigator. If their initial work turned up nothing, that is not so unusual. Such an investigation requires dogged thoroughness, going over ground already covered, doing things by rote even when it seems senseless, beginning yet again, trying illogical options on the off chance that something may lead to something. It can be maddening.

But there must be an answer! How many people can there be who attended ammunition-inspector school in Savanna, Ill., in November 1961?

The military keeps records. If this was a military operation there must be records. If there are records then they can be found. If you keep looking you will find them.

This column has many astute and creative readers. Perhaps one or more of them will have ideas or knowledge that may be helpful.

Good luck on your quest!

Now there is this new person in my life, and the usual thing has happened where I decide that I fancy them, and I have to work out what that means. This time I would like to proceed differently — you know how things often proceed in cycles with different relationships and friendships? Every time a situation comes round, it seems to turn out a little better — or at least I seem to learn a new thing each time I recognize that pattern remodulating itself.

This other person is pleasant, cute, older but not to an alienating extent. He’s a bit more in touch with his physical expressions than I am. I apply slightly more logical rigor to our conversations. He encourages my introverted, whimsical side. I delight in the strong, lively intellectual interplay between us. There’s a mutual physical attraction — personal spaces keep getting crossed in a way that gets more and more blatant. It’s already obvious to my life partner, who knows all about my proclivities and finds this whole story hilarious and adorable. But nothing has been explicitly acknowledged. Yes, it’s at that awkward stage!

On an emotional level, I have preserved enough awareness to realize my “just good friend” and I don’t go about things in the same way. I often find myself sort of “bearing with” his theories about personality and social interaction. It’s no huge ideological disagreement, I just recognize that we are not soul mates — we don’t have a tight, unconscious bond like the one I have with my life partner or even with some of my old lovers. I’m still deciding if that’s a good thing. I think on balance it will be, because I can really pick out that point of difference, the very deep and years-long connection with my true partner versus this scholars-with-benefits fling — it will help me be poly in a way that keeps everyone happy and reassured. Of course the question is, is that what I want …
A real source of annoyance is that while all this is going on, I know this person has a life of his own and a partner of his own. Now I’ve no idea how his life is arranged — we move in these liberal circles and perhaps he is free to go wander as he likes. Maybe all’s fair if nobody knows the particulars, or maybe he has the official blessing to do whatever. Most of me doesn’t care; that’s his business, I am going to let him do what he does and I won’t shoulder any moral burdens. But you know how life is in little arty circles — things get really insular — I am cautious. Actually I can’t pinpoint the precise reason for the cautious feeling. It’s not the force of moral convention. Do I stand to lose power or agency somehow? I’m not scared of rejection. Maybe it’s that uniquely feminine kind of retroactive self-doubt in action. I lack the intuition to work it out.

The options that I keep seeing before me are these: I can’t sit in limbo and flirt and pretend we are both unaware of what’s happening. That’s insulting to my intelligence and frustrating. I could make him back off a little, insist that what I’d like is a friendship uncomplicated by chemistry. I would actually accept this quite readily if I had no other option — there’s plenty going on between us as friends that enriches both of us, it’d mean fewer dramas, it wouldn’t change much in the friendship as it stands. But to have the choice in my hands is awful. I can’t let go of this atavistic feeling. It would also feel like I’d be denying my poly identity somewhat. The other thing I can see happening is that awful inevitable moment that so often happens — you know, the one where you both have a few too many glasses of wine, or you get down on your luck, or whatever the relevant excuse is to get into bed with each other. And I really don’t want that. Playing the dance of unconscious attraction is going to lead to that situation, I’ve seen it and I’ve been that person and … yuck. I’d find myself trying to justify it afterward and generally being a hypocrite. Nope, I’ve got to be at least a little true to myself.

So, what should I do, where’s the third path I’m not seeing, and how do I keep all this from turning into one of those awful crushes? I’m doing as much as I can right now not to fret — acquiring hobbies and new friendships at an alarming rate, doing the art thing and as you see, the writing thing — but that all feels like an attempt to stall the wheel of causality before history comes round for another pass.

De profundis etc.

Sincerely,

Ms. Moppet

Dear Ms. Moppet,

One thing you could do is to say to him, “I am going to make a decision by the end of today whether to sleep with you or not. What do you have to say in favor of my sleeping with you or in opposition to my sleeping with you? Do you have a position?”

If he hesitates, you might say, “This is called ‘giving you an opening.’”

See what he does. If he is truly enlightened, he will not circumlocute. He will make an answer.

He may say no. He may say yes. But he will give an answer.

If he engages in circumlocution, then he is not enlightened and you should not sleep with him.

However, as long as his answer is quick and clear, the matter remains open. You then have to decide what you want.

It doesn’t need to be hard. It’s like standing at the candy counter. Other people are in line so you have to choose. Your choice is not going to change the course of world events. You just have to decide: Either choose a piece of candy or walk out of the store. Just  do something. By the end of the day, as you have already promised him, make your choice about what you want.

There are four possibilities:

1. He wants, you want;
2. he wants, you don’t want;
3. he doesn’t want, you want;
4. he doesn’t want, you don’t want.

The fourth possibility should make things simple. Neither of you wants to have sex with the other. Actually, though, that can be the most dangerous of all. You may let your guard down and get drunk together. That would call into question the truth value of your avowals. But let’s move on.

The next-simplest is the first one: he wants, you want.

If you decide you want to sleep with him and he wants to sleep with you, arrangements should be straightforward.

If, however, he says he does not want to sleep with you, or does not think it is wise, but you want to do it anyway, then it becomes interesting.

You will have some work to do.

Fortunately, such work is pleasant. It involves breaking down his resistance by creating pleasurable enticements. There is nothing strenuous about such work. The only problem is that even your enticements may not work and then you will feel disappointment. But even this disappointment need not be soul-crushing. It’s just a matter of recognizing that you didn’t get something you wanted. At least failure will be clear: You decided you wanted something and were going to attempt it, there was a certain probability of success and a certain probability of failure and success was not yours.

Oh, but there is this: If you make your enticements in bad faith, you also risk ruining the friendship. That is, if you pretend the reason you are taking off your blouse is because it’s just too hot in here, that’s not fair. You have to be upfront and say that even though he does not want to sleep with you, you are going to try to make it happen anyway. That way, he knows the danger. He knows you are out to seduce him so if he really wants to not sleep with you he can take appropriate measures.

You have to be upfront about it: I understand that you don’t want to sleep with me but I am going to try to make you change your mind and here is how. Then he will know you are taking your blouse off not merely because of the weather. Then you can begin your program of subtly escalating enticements, secure that it is not a subterfuge.

If he can’t resist you, that’s his philosophical problem.

Nothing in this should be a barrier to honest friendship. It is more in the area of a friendly contest. Can he resist? Let’s find out.

Now, should he say he wants to sleep with you but you decide you do not want to sleep with him, that’s a different matter. He may be quite as determined as you.

If he wants to sleep with you and you do not want to sleep with him, your resolve may need buffering. When we find that having made this or that decision we cannot later stick to it, we must examine the conditions under which our resolve falls apart. Often, if we are honest, we will see that our resolve falls apart after several glasses of wine.

So if you decide you do not want to sleep with him but he wants to sleep with you, you will have to not drink with him. Drinking leads to sleeping with people. That is why we like it so much. Alcohol affects the ability to carry out a plan when the plan requires resisting impulses.

That raises the question, What does “want to” really mean? If you decide you don’t want to sleep with him but then you get drunk and sleep with him anyway, does that mean you really did want to sleep with him? Maybe it’s not “wanting” we’re talking about but “making a plan.” “Wanting” is not a static quality, but a fluid reality that shifts with our movements. When we say “decide what we want” what we’re actually talking about is “making a plan.”

Drinking changes how we regard our plans. What seemed ironclad and sacred earlier in the day now looms like some tiny and abstract prohibition scarcely worthy of our attention.

Anyway, that’s the practical side of it.

As to the larger question of consciousness and being, well, I suggest that you give some attention to the states of being that give rise to your questions. When we are agitated or anxious we formulate text strings with question marks attached. This activity is a result of our agitation. It does not mean that these text strings terminated with question marks have answers.

Anyone can construct such a thing? It doesn’t mean that human effort ought to be expended constructing the corresponding text string terminated with a period that would be considered an answer. I can do things like this? I can end sentences with these marks? It doesn’t mean there’s an answer to them? Does it? Which ones are legitimate questions? Which ones are merely text strings terminated with question marks? I’m fairly sure I know the answer? I think you do too? But how to implement it? That seems to be the question? No?

So if I were you I would concentrate on the quality of my consciousness by increasing my meditation. When I find my consciousness filling with these text strings terminated with question marks, I would return to my meditation. I would view them as random objects of consciousness, like noises and bird songs.

I would look for questions that have immediate answers, like, What am I going to do next? I am going to go into the house and make some tea.

Other questions I would consider as noise.

And, again, the important and interesting question to ask this person is, Are you in favor of, or against, us sleeping together?

Then make your own decision by the end of the day and stick to it for at least a year.

At the end of the year, you can revisit the question.