Therapeutically Rotting Souls

Sunday, July 19, 2026

The trend we have experienced in recent decades – a trend towards normalizing certain kinds of social wrongs – has reached a new apotheosis.  At least it has done so in Great Britain and it threatens much more than the apparent.

I will be the first to admit that some of the morals and mores that control our social discourse seem arbitrary.  Or worse, they seem as if they are designed, almost purposefully, to maintain a social structure that excludes me.  But the older I have gotten the more I have discovered that there was good reason.  It was just that in my youth I lacked sufficient vision to see those reasons.

But we live in an age when such things are simply being stripped away.  For example.  When I was very young, the early 1960’s, my parents required me to dress for many occasions that did not to my young eyes seem to warrant it.  We took a train once from Texas to Chicago which involved an overnight and several meals on the train. My mother made me dress for dinner, actually pretty much whenever we left our sleeper compartment.  A couple of years later the company my dad worked for had a company plane that was making the same trip (My grandparents lived in Chicago) and we were invited to hitch a ride.  I was required to dress – coat and tie mind you – for the entire trip.  Nowadays it is not uncommon to board an airplane and see people in their pajamas.  Dressing up to travel seems pretty arbitrary and classist.  But then have you noticed just how much incivility there is in air travel these days?  Rarely a day goes by that I do not see a story about a flight cut short due to an unruly passenger.  I cannot help but wonder if there is not a relationship in the correlation of dressing down to travel and incivility in transport.

Much of the trend towards normalizing the previously forbidden is based, psychologically in the idea that shame is a bad thing.  There are indeed toxic levels of shame, but I think it far more rare than we realize.  It would seem that in trying to eliminate toxic shame we have taken things a bit too far and eliminated shame altogether.  If you have ever been on a plane when a passenger makes a complete a$$ of themselves and the flight has to be diverted, you will know the consequences of this absence of shame.

So from the UK, we learn:

On July 10 the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy, the largest body of its kind in the country, directed its members back to its guidance on gender, sexuality and relationships. Open that guidance and you find infidelity quietly rebranded. ‘Secret non-monogamy’ – ‘affairs or infidelity’, in plainer words – is called ‘a relationship model’, one the document rates ‘at least as common as monogamy, if not more so’. The counsellor is told that ‘the goal of therapy is not to stop the non-monogamous person’, and is encouraged to help clients ‘normalise how incredibly difficult lifelong monogamy is‘.

In other words, cheating on your spouse is normal.  In other words, “There is no shame if this happens, just move on.”  The cost here is far more than a diverted aircraft full of hundreds of people.  The anguish caused in the person cheated upon is very real.  The cost to the soul of the cheater is immense.  The cost to society is monstrous.  In the case of the diverted flight, the social contract is implied, but in the case of a marriage, the people have vowed to each other, publicly, their fidelity.  It is an explicit contract – one that cheating in a marriage shatters.

Too often these days Christian confession talks about the removal of shame.  The purpose of God’s forgiveness is not to remove our shame at our sins – it is simply to remove the hopelessness that our sins would otherwise imply.  The shame that we feel at our sins is to encourage us to sin no more – to utilize the hopelessness God’s grace has taken away.  As Jesus said, “Go and sin no more.”