After getting her off to school, Rachel walks into her 14 year old daughter Emily’s bedroom and starts gathering up her dirty laundry. The real challenge is sorting out which clothes strewn all over the floor are dirty, which are clean and which are borrowed from any number of best friends of the week. She holds up a pink tank top and tries to remember when she was last able to fit into something that skimpy. Bending over to pick up a pair of olive green sweats, she spies something sticking out from underneath. It’s her daughter’s diary, open to her last entry. Normally, she would think nothing of this, close the diary and return to her job at hand. But, lately, Emily has been acting so different. Usually a real chatterbox, her daughter has been hibernating in her room, hasn’t talked on the phone to friends for weeks and generally has been withdrawn and sullen. Mom worries that Emily is seriously depressed and may be suicidal, but every attempt by Rachel to talk with her is met with a sarcastic retort and look of annoyance. Mom picks up the diary and ponders whether to read it for clues into what’s going on with Emily or respect her daughter’s privacy.

A woman learns that her father, who abused her as a child and from whom she has been estranged for over twenty years, is dying of cancer. He has asked to see her one last time, but makes it clear he will not talk about the abuse which he continues to deny. She struggles with whether or not to visit him before he dies.

A husband feels stuck in a painfully unhappy marriage but is resigned to stay married for the sake of his children. He has an opportunity to have an affair, confident his wife will never find out. He knows it is wrong to cheat on his wife, but tells himself that he doesn’t feel married and but for the children would have divorced her years before. His wife feels the same and so they lead separate lives. He questions if he should have the affair and wonders if it could bring him harm.

A couple is going through a bitter divorce in which the mother is trying to turn their 15year old son against the father by fabricating vicious lies. The father wrestles with whether he should defend himself to his son and risk turning him against his mother, or worse, gamble having his son hate both his parents?

While, thankfully, we don’t often face these kinds of ethical dilemmas, they sometimes happen. How many times have we said to ourselves, "If I only knew then what I know now?" What that really means is, "now that I know the outcome of my decision, I should have handled the situation differently." That’s the problem, most times we try to figure out what to do based on what we want in the moment or think will happen. What if instead we looked at how to deal with the dilemma, not by what we want to or believe will occur, but by how we want to feel about our self.

Let’s take for example, one of the above scenarios. Say you’re going through an ugly divorce and your ex is working overtime to turn your 15 year old son against you by telling him vicious lies, none of which are true. Question: should you a) defend yourself to your son, b) return the favor by making up your own cruel lies about your ex, c) explain to your boy why your ex is doing this, or d) say and do nothing? The answer lies in what you want to accomplish. If your goal is convince your son not to believe what your ex tells him, you might explain to him why his other parent is saying such falsehoods. And, if you want to avenge your ex’s slanderous attacks, you might want to fabricate your own lies about your ex. But, if your goal is to act in a way to feel proud of yourself, you have to approach this in a very different way.

Imagine it is ten years later, your son is now 25 years old, you made your decision ten years earlier and the situation is now over. You still don’t know what you decided or how things turned out. Now ask yourself, how do you want to feel about how you resolved your problem ten years back? Do you want to feel guilty, ashamed, embarrassed or proud of how you dealt with your ex telling your son lies? This is an important question, for in your answer lies the key to how to address it. [If you want to feel guilty, ashamed or embarrassed - do not pass go - do not collect $200 - go directly to your therapist and pay for a lifetime of therapy in advance]. Since, presumably, you want to be able to look back, whether tomorrow or ten years from now, with pride on how you handled the situation, the only question you need to ask yourself is what must you do now to accomplish this?

Making decisions in the moment can be dangerous when we are emotionally caught up in the situation to assess it objectively. Distance helps create perspective and perspective enables us to make wiser decisions. Most of the time we can look back and know what we should have done ten years earlier to feel proud today, even if things did not work out the way we hoped they would. Success is not only measured by outcomes, it can be measured by how we choose to deal with a problem.

So, the next time you are faced with a moral or ethical dilemma, or even a situation you’re not quite sure how to handle, you can always seek guidance from within. In other words, when in doubt, go back to the future.

And remember . . . without rain there is no rainbow, and without a rainbow there is no pot o’ gold. So embrace your hardships and never give up on your dreams.

April 2006