"You are not the first clients to worry about that! Some clients take the precaution of selectively removing my memories of my sessions with them at the end of our time together, and I have consented to that in the past. I admit I'm somewhat worried that they might have erased more than they were supposed to in some cases... or maybe I'm just very bad at keeping track of my keys. In any case, if you possess the magical skill to do that, I'd consider it."

"It is probably not a good idea to erase my memories during the time we work together. It is helpful for me to remember who my clients are from one session to the next."

"More generally, I consider the baseline risk of coercion fairly low. For someone to force me to reveal your secrets, first they would have to know I was your therapist and be able to get to me, both of which are difficult. The agency that facilitates your placement with me guarantees that they cannot be suborned, though I don't know if their guarantee is legible and robust enough to be meaningful to you. You are welcome to investigate that on your end, of course."

"What do you think? Would you like to go away and think this over, or would you like to proceed?"

"Shelyn conveyed that She'd selected someone from another planet to mitigate confidentiality concerns and I do think that very dramatically mitigates them. I'd expect She can evaluate the placement agency, too. I think Alfirin's secrecy concerns strictly supercede mine, so I'll defer to her about whether we want to take any precautions on top of that. I do have concerns about your policy for endorsedly breaking confidentiality, though. 'serious preventable damage to someone' seems like a very broad set of possible exceptions, especially with the possibility of different cultural understandings of damage, and especially when a ...relationship issue... is my concerns that Alfirin might someday do Evil things. Such as, uh, damaging people, that's an Evil thing in many contexts. Is more confidentiality than that available with corresponding assurances? Though I was also thinking that Alfirin might feel more able to discuss matters relevant to our relationship with my assurance of confidentiality."

"It seems better to proceed while being careful to not discuss anything we're very interested in keeping secret than to abandon the project entirely, and we can take the time to think about where we can afford to speak more freely between sessions. I have no way to erase memories on the relevant scale which does not incidentally give me access to all your other memories, which seems contrary to your obligations.

...I am indeed disinclined to discuss the details of any specific Evils that I may or may not expect to commit in the future, especially ones which might fall under the confidentiality exceptions, but I don't think a greater degree of confidentiality would change that." She turns to Iomedae, "I appreciate the offer of confidentiality from you but I don't expect anything to come up where your promise not to repeat information would make a difference to whether I'd be willing to share it, absent a commitment not to act on such information which, even if you would give it, seems possibly contrary to Shelyn's intentions here."

"It seems possible that there is relationship progress that you could usefully make via talking to me with a promise I won't act on it, and then having that inform which non-confidential conversations you want to have with me."

"I will keep that in mind as an option, if such a conversation seems likely to be productive." And then she'll have it somewhere else, with no other witnesses.

"That was a lot of negotiation, some of it with each other, and some of it that I didn't actually understand, so let me recap where we are now."

"Alfirin, you're prepared to go ahead. You will keep your own counsel and not reveal information to us that you do not wish us to have. This seems entirely sensible and reasonable and I think most clients actually do that, whether they are willing to admit it or not."

"Iomedae, you were previously interested in whether I could make stronger guarantees than the ones I already offered, though I think you mostly wanted those guarantees on Alfirin's behalf, and so maybe it's moot."

"Let me tell you about the reasoning behind that set of guarantees and we'll see what we can negotiate."

"In general, I want you to feel free to tell me roughly everything. It is much easier to solve problems once we have shared knowledge of what the problems are, and secrets often mask important components of problems."

"However, there are certain things you could tell me that would be very concerning. For example, if one of you tells me in secret that you are plotting to kill the other one, I am going to have a hard time keeping a straight face while we have three more sessions talking about dirty socks on the floor. That doesn't feel right at all. So I need to let you know in advance that I am here to serve both of you, and I will not be an accessory to that kind of harm. I value keeping you both alive more than I value the benefit you gain from being open with me, and you need to know that up front so you can navigate accordingly."

"Similarly, if you are planning to destroy my planet, I am not going to sit idly by while you tell me all of your plans for that. I like my planet and while my power to stop you from destroying it may be limited, I'm going to use whatever resources I have to try to prevent you."

"If you're planning to destroy someone else's planet, well, I wish you wouldn't do that, especially without a good reason, but I probably have so little recourse that I might as well just keep your confidentiality and help you think it through. But I wouldn't be neutral the way I am about most topics. I consider that -- well, I don't know what the word evil actually means to you, but destroying other people's planets is pretty evil according to me. And again, you need to know that about me before you confide in me about your annihilation plans."

"There are many other possible scenarios, but I'll stop and ask if that clarified things."

"I understand you to be saying that under ordinary circumstances you consider yourself to have a duty to try to - not incline us towards a course of action on the basis of your own values, but you don't consider yourself to have that duty if our goals are committing atrocities. And that you would have difficulty maintaining secrecy if we were intending to kill each other, and wouldn't want to commit to trying, which is commendable.

I have no plans to kill Alfirin. I - hope very much that if we found ourselves in a situation where it made sense to try to kill each other we would talk first to see if we could do something that wasn't that."

"It is useful for us to be open with each other and with you, without worrying about how you might share things we discuss here or use that information against us, and so you have a policy of keeping confidential everything we say during relationship therapy. I infer that relationship therapy may include times when one of us speaks to you without the other present, and in those cases your policy extends to keeping the contents of those conversations private from the other person. You are, however, mortal, with only a mortal's ability to not act on confidential information, and are either as a matter of principle or due to expectation of failure not going to attempt to keep confidentiality in cases where we intend to harm ourselves, each other, or third parties. This all makes sense to me and if I did not say anything that seems wrong to you, or miss anything you considered important, then I think you communicated clearly. Is asking about the bounds of your confidentiality covered by that confidentiality? If so I have no further questions about it now."

She was tempted to ask now all the questions that she might later want to have asked, but she suspects that of being partially driven by an impulse to stall. Most of them would be unlikely to come up.

"Yes! I think you've both got it."

"And while it's a bit grim, 'let's talk about whether to kill each other before just going ahead and doing it' is a great example of the sort of tough-but-crucial communication we can foster in relationship therapy." [*]

See, most people are too avoidant to discuss their incompatible goals. It takes a lot of guts to look your loved one in the eye and have the hard conversations.

"Alfirin, you asked if asking about the bounds of confidentiality is also covered by confidentiality. Does that mean, are you allowed to pose hypothetical questions about confidentiality to me without me then repeating what questions you asked? And the answer to that is yes. In fact, I encourage you to do that. Whenever you're not sure, please pop up to the meta level and ask, and I will do my very best to avoid punishing you for that. I want to be legible to you so you can make informed decisions about what to show me."

"I think we might now have covered confidentiality. Is there anything else to talk about there? If not, may I return to the previous conversation about who you are to each other, and begin asking a lot of nosy questions about that, which, again, you can choose not to answer?"

----

[*] Talking in therapy about wanting to kill your partner is not just for arch-mages and paladins! See the story by Earth-based couples therapist Ellyn Bader starting at the bottom of page 4 of this document.

Covering the basics of who they are to each other before focusing on who expects to kill whom and why seems like a reasonable prioritization, given that nobody's expecting any imminent killing.

"Go ahead."

"Thank you."

Ramona consults her notes to remember what she wanted to ask.

"So as I understand it, you met because of the war, the Crusade that's still ongoing sixteen years later. You both had important roles to play in the war even back then and you worked closely together."

"You connected romantically, it didn't work out, and Alfirin left for several years. When she returned, you figured out how to reconnect purely as colleagues."

"And Iomedae, you're thinking ahead to what will happen when the war ends, and you have concerns about Alfirin's plans."

"Is that all correct? Alfirin, is there anything about that you want to amend?"

"And for both of you, which part of it feels the most... sticky, unresolved, like there's something there to address?"

"I have concerns about Alfirin's plans but I think I'm very plainly not owed a - resolution to my concerns, there. I think Alfirin knows what I am worried about, and why, and if she had anything reassuring to say she probably would have said it, and our being allies, or having been lovers, does not mean that I ought to get any further input into her choices. I might try to stop her or I might try to bargain with her but past a point, it seems - condescending - to try to persuade her, when I have no real reason to think that I'm right by her own lights. 

I assume Shelyn thinks we should talk about our feelings about each other. My worry is that it is useful to maintain some ambiguity about our feelings about each other and it seems very rude to make Alfirin sit through talking about my feelings about her. It seems likely to make having a functional professional relationship more difficult. I always imagined we'd talk after the war if Alfirin didn't immediately vanish after the war and never have anything to do with me again, which I ...think is what happened in the other timeline. And which is very much her right."

"That is what happened," she confirms half-automatically. "I do not expect we will be able to maintain ambiguity about how each of us feels about the other throughout this process and expect that some damage to our professional relationship will occur, but it seems that if possible it would be best to put that off until later in the war when that matters less...

At the moment I find myself somewhat preoccupied by the expectation that Iomedae, or her people, will try to destroy me. Not immediately, but in eight years, or eight hundred."

Ramona notes without comment that therapy with this pair will be very dull if they are planning to avoid talking about feelings until much later in the war, but there's no reason to confront that just yet. She can let them settle in and get comfortable with her by asking factual questions first.

"What is the typical lifespan of your people, that you're planning ahead for eight hundred years? Or does this have something to do with the immortality that Iomedae mentioned?"

"For reference, we call ourselves human on this planet as well, but eighty is a pretty typical lifespan for us, and we know no methods of immortality, evil or otherwise."

"Eighty is long but not unprecedentedly so for a human without a health-enhancing belt. There are a number of ways to live or otherwise persist longer than that on our planet. Many are Evil. Some are not. The people who seek out immortality are disproportionately evil because most people who are not evil are content to die and go to their next life; Iomedae is correct that I am not so content, and that I would be willing to use an evil method to become immortal if that had advantages over nonevil methods."

"And I am planning to become a god, which is importantly different from immortality in some respects but similar in that I intend to be taking actions in the world in eight hundred years. In the other timeline I was approximately successful, though of course with the benefit of an entire timeline to reference I expect I will be able to do it better this time, assuming I survive and we win the war."

"My goodness, you both have big plans. How typical is this, on your world? Of a million people, how many become immortal, and how many become gods?"

"Living immortals are... fewer than one in ten million people, I think, though there could be many more than that who are hiding their nature. If you count the undead it's maybe ten or twenty out of a million, though many of those are involuntary. Gods are much rarer than either. In almost all cases expecting to become a god is incredible hubris."

"We are all of us commanded to surpass the gods."

"It's a religious precept that almost nobody else takes as seriously as Iomedae does... Among people trying to become gods it's...about one a month makes one success per twenty thousand? Which I would still call hubris, in anyone else."

"Hubris in anyone else. But not for Iomedae?"

Ramona wants to see if they can show any feeling about each other, one way or another, and she thought she noticed Alfirin looking proud of Iomedae's badassery.

"No. Not for her. She's known she was going to go for it if we won the war for decades, she has a church more than halfway established already, she had Arazni's mentorship... she has Aroden's support, obviously, and has been winning the support of many of the other gods. She's deliberate about it and careful about it and - well, now we know that she succeeds in the other timeline, but I didn't doubt she would before we learned that."

"It sounds like you're very impressed with Iomedae's competence. She's been earning your respect through many years of hard and meticulous work. What did you like about her in the early days, when you first met, when she hadn't accomplished all of this yet?"

Aaaaaugh.

"She was - trying to figure everything out for herself. After Aroden chose her, she spent years trying to determine whether He was worthy of her service... most people who are chosen by a god do not do that. She hosted philosophy debates for her fellow paladins, and looked for reasons that things were Good or Evil or Lawful beyond common wisdom. And she was trying to win. I know that sounds kind of ridiculous, like I'm implying that nobody else in the whole Crusade was actually trying to win the war, but..."

"No, that makes sense to me. Some people seem much more alive and aware than others, they're paying attention, they're less confused, they see more clearly, and they act effectively. And you were attracted to that."

It's a statement, not a question, but Ramona leaves a long pause, such that Alfirin could, in theory, object.