After a relatively short-term but intense relationship, you and your partner become sexually active. Much to your surprise, despite various precautions on your part and assurances on his, you discover that you are pregnant. After feeling shock and disbelief, you immerse yourself in an intense period of reflection about your choices. You consider the impact of this pregnancy on your relationship, on your family, and on your plans for further education and a career. You reflect on your own values with respect to human life. Eventually you decide that your best option is to seek an abortion at the local family planning clinic. You contact your partner and discuss your decision with him. He recognizes that the decision is yours to make. At the time he seems extremely concerned and supportive. He offers to go with you to the clinic. You feel very grateful for his willingness to accompany you. You hope that he will be the only other person to know about this pregnancy and the decision to terminate it. It is hard to believe that your family would handle this situation with the compassion, support, and understanding you need. You call the clinic for an appointment and then call your partner to let him know when to meet you. He promises to see you at the appointed time. During the next few days you reflect on your decision, review your values, plans, and hopes. It is a very stressful time in your life. On the day of the procedure, you work your way through traffic to the clinic. In the parking lot you look for your partner’s car but do not find it. You look for him at the entrance, but he is not there. You look around the waiting room for his familiar face, but he is not in the room. You wait until your name is called, hoping that your partner, though delayed, will appear. As you hear the nurse call your name, you look around the room one more time and realize that your partner is not coming. When you return home after the abortion, you check your answering machine and see that no one has called while you were away.

• After the abortion what do you do? Do you contact your partner to let him know how you feel and about the impact of his absence? How will you respond if you hear a string of excuses and explanations? How will you respond if you hear an explanation that sounds legitimate (a car accident, a medical emergency, etc.)?
• What would lead you to forgive him for his absence, his failure to communicate, and his failure to keep an agreement? What would cause you to withhold your forgiveness?
• Do you want to talk with him before deciding, or have you decided that the failure to keep his promise in this situation is grounds for breaking off the relationship?

As a junior at a university where you major in Biology you take an elective class in Philosophy. You know this class will be a stretch but you need a break from “hard science” classes. With some anxiety you turn in your first paper on Plato. A week later your professor returns your paper. After looking through his critical comments, you see that he has given you a “D” for the paper. Because your scholarship depends on maintaining a certain grade point, and a “D” would hurt that average, you make arrangements to meet your professor during his office hour.

During your meeting he explains his critical remarks. Suddenly, though, you sense that the conversation has changed directions. He begins to ask more personal questions that leave you feeling uncomfortable. Eventually he seems to hint that he is willing to discuss your grade over a meal or movie together.

• Do you trust your instincts about the shift in the conversation?
• Do you pretend that you haven’t heard what you think you heard?
• Do you ask him to clarify his expectations?
• Do you discuss this situation with friends or even the chair of the department?
• Or, are you clear enough about his boundary violation that you confront your professor on the spot and point out the transgression?
• What are your reasons for your decision?

Imagine that you are a junior at the university. In the fall of the year, you begin to suffer from insomnia. You lose your appetite. Your interest in sports, basketball in particular, seems to have waned. You begin to withdraw from friends and make excuses when they invite you to participate in social events.

After several weeks of deepening depression, you consult a doctor at the health center. In the course of the interview, you tell the doctor about persistent memories of an incident when you were about eight years old. As you recall, you were at home one day after school. Your mom was still at work. Three teenage boys, living in the neighborhood, came to your house. Initially, they expressed interest in seeing your remote-controlled car. After a while, however, they began to engage in coercive sexual play and forced you to participate. As you give an account of this violation, you realize that, as horrible as the original incident had been, in the present you are even more troubled by the way your mother reacted when you tried to tell her the story on the telephone. She expressed skepticism about your account and eventually denied that the incident happened.

You tell the doctor that you feel doubly betrayed, first by your mother’s failure to protect you, and second, by her refusal to believe you. You attribute much of your current depression to the lasting trauma of this incident and to your mother’s refusal to take your story seriously.

Planning to return home for Thanksgiving, you feel a lot of internal pressure to work through your anger and sense of betrayal. In the two weeks leading up to Thanksgiving, what do you do to try to help yourself? What do you do with the anger? How do you think you’ll approach your mother? If you decide to approach your mother, hoping for a conversation, how will you begin?

You work with one other member of a team that does graphic design for an advertising firm. You and your partner have agreed to come up with a proposal for an ad campaign on behalf of a company that makes sunglasses. Though your partner seems as excited as you about working on this project, every time you propose time to work on it you hear excuses that cause delay. The Sunday before you are due to present your proposal you work all day and into the night, having turned down invitations from friends to do something outside the office.

Monday morning you go into the meeting feeling tired and only half-prepared. Your partner shows up silent and chagrined. Without exposing your partner’s lack of help, and making no apologies for a proposal you did your best to complete, you show your ideas to the boss. She seems particularly unimpressed. At the end of the process she comes down pretty hard on you as though this proposal was your responsibility alone. When the meeting is over you get outside the door and your partner catches your eye and says, “Hey, I’m really sorry about not contributing to the presentation.” You are in no mood to hear this.

• Do you accept this apology quickly, passing over your feelings, so that you can move on to something else?
• Do you let your partner catch the full force of your frustration, never mind the consequences for your future relationship?
• Or, do you say something like, “Thanks for the apology, but you’ve got to know that I’m really frustrated that I caught all the criticism and you didn’t even help me with the proposal. I’ve got to cool off. I can’t talk about this right now. After I work through some of my feelings we will talk. I don’t ever want to be in this situation again.”

In January you get a call from your brother-in-law. He says that your sister has a Stage Four cancer in her brain and lungs. You immediately make arrangements to spend time with her. Over the next several weeks, you help her in every way possible. You take her to medical appointments, arrange for neighbors and friends to bring meals, help her evaluate her treatment options, simplify her closet and kitchen, take her for a drive through the countryside. Given the assurances of her oncologist, your sister and her husband decide that chemotherapy is the best option for extending her life. Your sister is rushed through the ordeal of this treatment on a Friday afternoon. Within days of receiving the chemotherapy, your sister is semi-conscious and confined to bed. This response to treatment is drastically different than what you were led to expect. Ten days later your sister is dead. During the final stages of your sister’s dying process, a supportive friend of the family, who also happens to be a nurse, spends time with you. After your sister’s death she says, “You know, I think the chemo killed her.” Her words correspond exactly to what you have been telling yourself. You decide to learn more about what happened. In the course of your investigation, you and your brother-in-law discover that some of the records related to your sister’s treatment seem not quite right. Strangely, the amount of medicine administered on the day of treatment has been obscured. Using your copy of these records, you decide to confront the oncologist.

With other students, develop a role-play in which two people play the surviving sister and brother-in-law and another person plays the oncologist. If you are the sister and brother-in-law, how do you approach the doctor? How do you respond to what you hear? What do you need or want from her? If you are the oncologist, how do you prepare for this conversation? Develop both a defensive, self-protective strategy and one in which you may be willing to acknowledge some contribution to this outcome and issue an apology.

Imagine that you are a young female enlisted soldier serving in Iraq. Two days ago, three soldiers from your unit, two men and a woman, were ambushed on a night patrol as they tried to protect an oil facility against sabotage. All three of them were good friends. You feel devastated by the loss, aware, too, that you could have been on that same patrol. After the losses, your commanding officer warns all of you in the unit to be extra vigilant in the days leading up to the Muslim holiday of Ramadan.

On patrol yourself a few days after this incident, you see a white van traveling toward an Army checkpoint. Estimating speed and distance, you conclude that the van will not be able to stop at the checkpoint and may even be a danger to the soldiers monitoring all vehicles passing through the area. You fire a warning shot in front of the van. It does not stop. Fearing that the van will ram the checkpoint and may even be loaded with explosives, you fire a rapid volley of shots through the side windows of the van. Moments later the van veers into a roadside ditch and stops. You and several soldiers from the checkpoint run toward the van, weapons ready. Encountering no further threat, you open the van and try to determine what has happened. In the front seat are two adults, a man and a woman, both dead. In the back of the van you find a crying child. She has been wounded not by your bullets but by a land mine explosion. Through a translator who communicates with the child, you learn that her parents were rushing her to the hospital after the explosion. Suddenly you realize that you have killed the child’s parents as they tried to help their daughter.

Immediately other soldiers come to your aid. They reassure you that you did exactly what the situation required even if these people were not an actual threat to your unit. Despite their support and time off to recover, you have nightly dreams that haunt you. In one you are in the van being shot at. In another you shoot at the van and, as you approach, see your parents in the front seat.

In the days ahead, the post-traumatic stress associated with this event and the death of your comrades makes it increasingly difficult for you to serve effectively. You ask permission to see the chaplain assigned to your unit. As the time for the first appointment approaches,

• What do you want to tell this person?
• What do you want to hear from this person?
• What would make it easier to begin the process of self-forgiveness?
• What would make the process much harder?

For a few weeks, your partner’s behavior has seemed suspicious. Several times he has arrived home later than he promised. While on a business trip, he called to say that the meetings had been extended for a couple of days and that his return would be delayed. When you called the hotel where you thought he was staying, you were informed that “No one by that name is in the hotel.” You feel shaken by your suspicions. After his return you feel irritation as he works on his e-mail late into the night, protecting the screen when you approach. The next day you do something you swore you’d never do. You enter his e-mail records. Torn between a sense of guilt about compromising his privacy and a desperate need to know, you read the record of his affair. Armed with this information, you set a time to confront him.

In a role-play with others, enact the first part of this conversation. Remember and apply the communication approaches we describe and recommend. Speak your truth with as much strength as you are able. Imagine your partner acknowledging responsibility for the affair in one version and vehemently denying the affair in another. What is your reaction if he accepts responsibility and seems forthcoming? What is your reaction if he denies responsibility and demeans your perception of the situation? What is the impact on the relationship of “truth” or its denial? Do you think that your approach affects the outcome? In other words, does one approach facilitate the telling of truth and another make it more likely that the other person will respond with denial?