Just recently in a small country village in England called Hyde, Greater Manchester, the local doctor, Harold Shipman has reportedly murdered some 150 of his elderly woman patients. Dr Shipman who is described as a "quiet man who lived modestly with his wife and kids", had been lethally injecting his patients for many years without discovery or any apparent reason. Now people are in total disbelief as they discover the two sides to this "warm and caring doctor".

While none of us hopefully will ever be like Dr Shipman, we nevertheless may be aware that we have 'two sides' to ourselves and depending on our circumstances, we will find ourselves living out one of those sides. Who we are in public could be very different to the person we are in private. That is not unusual. Most of us have a hidden life, where we keep our secrets away from the gaze of others. Usually this doesn't create too much havoc for us, except when they are in conflict with our relationships, our roles and values.

Over some eight years I conducted a 'hypothetical' with adolescent boys using two characters called "slacko" and "the professor". In the hypothetical the students were given a research assignment of 1000 words to be handed in the next day. They were then to write down without fear of censorship, what "slacko" the lazy and uncooperative 'character' thought about this assignment. You can imagine the responses. Anger, abusive language, and lots of swearing were used to express 'slacko's attitude.

Then the 'hypothetical' had "the professor" respond to the research assignemnt. The same boys who had expressed the vehemence of 'slacko' began to write down the 'other side', this time of the professor. The 'professor' came out as courteous, keen, cooperative, well mannered, conscientious and committed to the task. Totally opposite to slacko. The students were then asked to think about which 'side' of their character had the most influence over their lives. They all discovered they really had 'two sides' to their personality and both could be very influential in affecting their lives.

I learnt from these hypotheticals that the 'two sides' existed in every student and were expressed with remarkable and often uncanny similarities, regardless of the identity of the student. It was as if I was meeting the same character in every student. The 'personality' of Slacko and the Professor never changed and everybody expressed them almost identically.