“Lets not go there,” is the other side of “all options are on the table.”   One says, “even hypothetically, I do not want to entertain any idea like this.”   The other says, “hypothetically, we will forget about law, morality and everything else and reserve the right to do the worst things you can imagine.”  Both are terrible reactions to stress, whatever Realpolitik value they may have.

I learned, in the last five years of my mother’s life, to be much more patient with her.  She was dying a long, slow-motion death from endometrial cancer.  There were periods of remission and times when the disease would rage back.   I had a lot of compassion for my mother, which my sister told me was easy for me because our mother clearly loved me so much.   That may have been part of it, but there were other factors.  One thing I learned was not to press an issue once my mother resisted it strongly enough.   

I would from time to time get a call from my mother, in a fury, after spending a few hours with my sister.  She would recount the episode that had infuriated her.  She’d close with the warning not to tell my sister any of this.  I’d hang up and soon I’d have a call from my sister, giving her account of the same horrific few hours.  She too would close with a stern request that I not mention our conversation to our mother.

Having heard both sides I was in a unique position to see how relatively simple a partial solution to this unsolvable personality clash could be.   A skilled mediator, I knew, could frame the issues in such a way that with relatively few adjustments in behavior tensions could have been dialed back.  The issue involved ingratitude and harsh criticism, if each had been aware how much their behavior infuriated the other, it would have been possible to mitigate the main source of recurrent anger between them.  I pitched the idea to them several times over a period of months, separately and together.  They were united in their resistance to trying it, though both acknowledged it could have some value, if the other party were not such an intractable, self-righteous and infuriating force.

“Don’t go there,” warned my sister.   “Besides,” she predicted, “she would never go for it.”   My mother said something similar.  I soon dropped it.  Over time they did a pretty good job pretending this mutual rage was not lurking between them.  As my mother got weaker and weaker she protested less and less, my sister became more and more of a caretaker, almost a parent, and they came to rely on each other much more.  The issues that drove them to call me and vent receded in those final couple of years.

But to this day, when my sister describes certain traits of our mother’s, she does so with the same anger and vehemence she might have had when the wars between them were raging full force.

When I hear “let’s not go there” this impasse between two people I love always leaps to mind.  It tells me again that most people would rather complain about a bad situation than do the hard work that would be necessary to change it.

As a recently declassified CIA report, written around the time of the 1976 Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, better known as the Church Committee, stated in regard to torture and mind-control techniques:  “If the debility-dependency-dread state is unduly prolonged, the arrestee may sink into a defensive apathy from which it is hard to arouse him.”  I guess that’s right.