Guest Author - Barbara Rice DeShong, PhD.

Enjoying mysteries is about thinking through what it is to be human. Mysteries are about the intrigue of learning what people are really like, which is my field—psychology. Watching a mystery movie, we look for clues to the real person; we search for inconsistencies in behavior. Most important, we strive to see the true nature of relationships between people.

Murder isn’t necessary for a movie to be a mystery. The recent movie, Doubt, (with Meryl Streep and Philip Seymour Hoffman) we viewers are tossed the most intriguing sort of problem. Did the priest take sexual advantage of a young boy or is the nun making the accusation imagining a misdeed? To solve this mystery, if we can, we have to confront an important element of human behavior that affects each of us every moment of every day. We have to face that each of us is a “reality-making machine.”

“Which is more important in determining our lives, the world as it exists or the world as we have made it up in our heads?” We do not, in fact, respond to the world we can touch. We respond to the world as we are making it up. We view the people in our lives from our own fears and needs. We treat others “as if” they are the people we have made up. They act toward us “as if” we are who they think we are.

That’s a lot of psychology from a mystery movie, but this one aspect of living, so beautifully presented in Doubt, determines the very quality of our life experience. Streep plays a nun afraid of human desires and impulses (even something as neutral as adding sugar to tea). Afraid of new ideas and particularly emotional intimacy, she interprets the more emotionally open priest’s relationships as sinful, horrid, and maybe illegal. As the nun’s orientation was set many years ago, she has interpreted each new situation through the prism of her beliefs, which makes it impossible for us to know for sure if her distorted view in charge or if she “sees things the rest of us are too naïve to see.” When the situation is a potentially dangerous one, such as the possible abuse of a child, our fears and past experiences go into overdrive influencing our choices.

Clients and families present problems in my office not unlike the mystery in Doubt. Whose version of the family do I believe? Or can I keep in mind there are many versions of the same event? I operate in therapy using a Natural Systems theory which means I recognize that each participant in a marriage, a family, or even a work situation, operates as she has a camera in her forehead recording events as directed and distorted through her own belief system. Thus, like the view in Doubt, I cannot grab on to one person’s version of events as “the one true version.” I have to fight off the client’s desires to have me either take her view or, more often, fight off the demand that I, as the trained person, interpret what’s going on and present my view as the one objective story.

Doubt, is a most delicious mystery because we walk out not knowing who is innocent and who is guilty. Deliciously, we must leave the theater pondering our own guilt and innocence.