Tag:

Ethics

My Husband Is Moving Back to His Parents’ House for a Job

by Dr. Marie Hartwell-Walker June 6th, 2024

From the U.S.: My husband and I have been married for 4 years and we have a house together. We both work and are engineers. Unfortunately, due to economy, he lost his job and because of this he was involved in a gray area business. Now, he is about to be charged with a felony. His lawyer proposed that he should get a job as soon as possible before he gets charged. However, he can’t find a job where we currently live. Instead, he was able to find a job in his hometown in another state. Conveniently, the job is so close to his parents’ house. This is where I have a problem.

I do not like his parents, especially his mother for multiple reasons. His mother has been always supportive of him no matter if he is doing the right or wrong thing. When I feel that my husband is doing something wrong, I would try to stop him. She, on the other hand, will always have an excuse to support him to do whatever he wants. This puts me in a very bad spot. When we were moving away from the state where she lives, she was very upset. She has been trying to convince us to move somewhere else that she thinks she might move to in the future. She is very assertive in getting what she wants and most of the time she will get what she wants. I feel like I am in a constant competition with her. When I express my concern to my husband, he thinks I am wrong, his mother is a saint, and he felt that his mother does not always get what she wants.

I am concerned with him living with his parents will ruin our relationship. There are 2 choices that I have in mind to make this work.
1. He lives in apartment, we will alternate visits maybe twice or once a month.
2. He lives with his parents and can save money and he agrees to keep the holiday for me and fly home every weekend -no matter if his parents have emergency or plan for him on the weekend.

Can you advise which will be the better option for us? Do you have any other options so that our relationship can work? Thanks.

Your husband did not get into a “gray area” because he lost his job. He did something illegal because he was unable to hold onto his ethics and was willing to take the risk. Since he persists in seeing his mother as a “saint,” it isn’t healthy for him to live with her as she will support him in denying responsibility. Not questioning his mother’s view of him as perfect is partly what got him into this fix. It may be a relief to him to have more contact with his mother with whom he doesn’t have to deal with the blame and shame that go with his actions, but it won’t be helpful to his personal growth.

The problem you both face now is not where he lives, but whether he is willing to grow up and man up. That means accepting responsibility for his actions. That means making it clear to his mother that (a) he did make a serious mistake and (b) that she must be respectful of the woman he married. If he can’t be an upstanding citizen and a loyal husband when in the orbit of his mother, then he should put some distance between them by looking for other jobs. But that only takes care of the immediate problem. The more pressing issue is whether you are married to a guy who is worthy of your respect.

I wish you well.
Dr. Marie

June 6, 2024 0 comment

Assisted Suicide at Age 9

by Kristina Randle, Ph.D., LCSW August 24th, 2022

written by Kristina Randle, Ph.D., LCSW

Hey, so I recently admitted to my partner that I helped my friend with assisted suicide when I was 9 years old. For 11 years I didn’t tell anyone, not even my parents. No one knew what happened except me. I’m just trying to figure out if It was the right thing to do. I need help learning if I am evil for what I did or not. He was sexually abused by his father at a very young age, in very poor housing with no mother, Schizophrenic, and smiling when I helped him. After all these years of brooding and holding in the secret I’ve become jaded and unknowing of what’s moral and immoral anymore. I know I have PTSD from it because of all the hallucinations and nightmares. Can you help me determine if what I did was the right thing to do? I killed someone when I was 9 years old, how to I learn morality again?

There is a grand difference between the morality of a child and the morality of an adult. As a longtime teacher of human growth and development, I am very familiar with every widely accepted theory of morality. All of them, show the morality of the child to be quite inferior to the eventual morality of that same child, when fully mature as an adult. Every court system, in every free country in the world, realizes this and punishes children to a far lesser extent than an adult. The punishments for children are not only quantitatively different but qualitatively different.

If you were to research theories of morality, you would quickly realize that all theories conclude that children are not born with morality but need to be taught morality by parents, the church, society, etc. Let me give you a for instance. Probably the meanest things that were ever said to you, were said to you when you were a child and were said by other children. Children can be vicious. Ask anyone who has been bullied.

A study of theories of morality, will help you to understand the incapacity of a child to understand the impact of their actions. Can a nine-year-old sign a legally binding contract? No, because society recognizes a child is incapable of understanding that contract and the full ramifications that come from signing a contract.

As a nine-year-old, you were incapable of understanding the impact of your actions. A nine-year-old has a very poor and obviously incomplete understanding of death. As a nine-year-old, did you believe that you were helping your friend or killing your friend? Were you angry at him and desperately wanted to hurt him? From what you’ve written, it appears that you were trying to help him and thought that you were actually helping him. Did you know the meaning of death? Did you understand what was actually occurring or was it much simpler to you; a friend whom you liked asked for your help and you thought helping him was the right thing to do?

Read more about the morality of children. By all means, get therapeutic help. You need a professional who has already studied and well understands childhood morality. Perhaps the most important thing that you should understand is that there were two people involved in your friend’s suicide and that they are both victims. Yes, you are a surviving victim of that event. Good luck, my friend.

Dr. Kristina Randle

August 24, 2022 0 comment

Girl Friend Won’t Stop Mailing to Inmates in a Flirty Manner

by Daniel J. Tomasulo, PhD, TEP, MFA, MAPP May 13th, 2021

written by Daniel J. Tomasulo, PhD, TEP, MFA, MAPP

My girlfriend of 6 months is very interested in criminal psychology. She started mailing to different life sentence male inmates because she wants to do a study on them. My problem is that all the males she sent have flirtatious undertones and also lead them to believe she is single. Her reason for doing so is that it would be easier for her to extract info and get a reply. A couple of weeks had gone by, and now she wants to have phone conversations with one of the life sentence inmates who committed murder. I’m my view, he doesn’t fit the topic of research she is doing. When I asked what’s the end game, she replied to learn as much as possible and she is not going to stop the contact in the near future, he offered to help her with college and she would LOVE that opportunity. She claimed no book or teacher is going to tell me what the source itself will. She lets me read the mail she sent and received but I’m extremely uncomfortable how things had escalated. She claimed she is not interested in him and this is a jealousy issue I have to deal with. If I want to be with her, I need to trust that I’m the only man she loves. If I love her and trust her the rest doesn’t matter. I love my gf but Im not ok with the flirtatiousness of their interactions and she knows but she is not changing any aspects of her interactions with the inmates. Is it ground for us to break up?

Hmmm — something doesn’t sound right. Typically, conducting research requires some stringent guidelines, even at the exploratory level. At the very least if this is a serious inquiry about criminology someone should be guiding her. If this is just her own thing she seems to be doing just what she pleases without any regard for protocol, your feelings, or any sort of integrity in researching people.

If she isn’t in a program and engaged with an institution to guide her in doing this research, then I’m not sure exactly what she’s doing. If this is just an interest and she is on her own and using a flirting style to get a response, that doesn’t fit any type of research in psychology, nor does a subject offering to help pay for college and her being excited or interested by that.

This sounds more like her own project, with no guidelines, and letting you read the emails, if it were real research, would be at best an ethical violation. You explaining to her how uncomfortable and her brushing it off saying that no one is going to stop her, pretty much gives you the answer. You’ve told her this isn’t okay and her response lets you know she doesn’t care. Whatever it is she thinks she is doing doesn’t have the relationship or your feelings at the core of it.

If she doesn’t honor what seems like a very honest and real request from you at the 6-month point, why would you continue watching her do this, hurting your, and not caring about anything except her own agenda?

May 13, 2021 0 comment