Ephemeral post

 

What would you say about a woman who declared that she would leave her husband if he became suicidal? Here is the chain of reasoning she presented:

She could not tolerate his drinking and his marijuana use. He promised to give them up, but insisted he would then need his alternate self-medications of television and video gaming. She had seen from past experience that these activities were gateway indulgences leading back to substance use. She could not accept them, either.

But what she could accept least of all was his acknowledgment that he’d be unhappy to be sober. That is, he would be an unhappy sober person. He had joined her religion for the sake of mar­riage. She believed, with her heart and soul, that diligent practice of the religion would neces­sarily make a person happy and fulfilled. The contemporary persistence of his depres­sion, planted deep from childhood where his father neglected him and his step­mother abhorred him, meant his failure to be sufficiently observant, to “work” the beliefs.

And so I asked her: If your husband were to be one-hundred percent abstinent of all sub­stances and tawdry pursuits for several months, but became suicidal, would you leave him?

“Yes.”

To my slight regret, I let myself power into a lecture on “meaning” and on deeply religious individuals who rape boys. “Meaning” has different meanings – philosophical, religious, and psychological. Combative, to be sure, I insisted that the psycho­logical definition is the more valid. “Feeling is meaning. If you don’t feel something, it doesn’t have meaning for you, despite what you think. Therapy has the best chance of leading to happiness, while the inebriant of doctrinal belief may cover bad feeling but can never defeat it.”

Before she could respond, her husband injected this brilliant intervention: “Hour’s up. I’ll see you next week.”

Later that afternoon, I sent him an audio link to Mussorgsky’s Night on Bald Mountain.