For a week, the amount of virtues in the old house would have supplied the neighborhood. A person fond of prying into the secrets of others is not fit to be trusted. Our emotions are complicated. Sometimes we do not even have the words to express accurately the way we are feeling. This inability to always translate our thoughts into words can be very hard for kids, especially for boys. An example of confusing emotions would be when someone is feeling both sad and angry. It would be hard to come up with words to explain the emotion. Even adults, like Ben Crawford, can revert to this childlike feeling, and that is seen when he is out for his morning job, and finds Tom Murphy, his son and a boy he cares for, laying on the ground in a pool of his own blood and lifeless. Someone gave Tom Murphy a sound blow, and sent him to feed fishes. We see and hear shock, anger, sadness, and fear all at once expressed in ben’s face and his tortured scream. Murder is wide-mouthed and will not let God rest till he grants revenge. We never choose to assign motives to the actions of men, when there is any possibility of our being mistaken. He who kills a man has all his sins to answer for as well as his own, because he gave him not the time to repent of them that Heaven designed to allow him. One model of understanding complicated and even competing emotions is to think about our emotions in four categories: mad, sad, worry, and happy. When mad, we are typically being blocked by something that has been placed in our way. Ben Crawford is mad that someone killed his son. The police blocked his way by ruining his reputation and wrongly accusing him of murder. However, worry for the safety family and the community is why Ben Crawford wants to find who the killer is. Worry is seated in Ben’s desire to control the unknown.

People are typically unable to control the past or the future, but those who remain firmly rooted in the present can manage their circumstances more effectively. Detective Cornell’s emotions initially cloud her judgment, and this focuses her mind and heart on the future, the past, and no on the present. She gained greater control over Ben Crawford through lies and deceit. If Ben Crawford had been more aware of his complicated emotions, he would have seen that people were using his empathy, love, and compassion against him as a method of ruining his life. Although Secrets and Lies is just a fictional miniseries, these characters are complicated, real, and relevant to our lives. Good people can be bad. Bad people can do evil things, but also have great intentions. Detective Cornell does some bad stuff because it is her job to make a crime fit the accused. Criminal law is a lot like Geometry, all that an investigator has to is come up with statements and reasons to prove someone is guilty, even if they are not. Reporters and police murder men’s reputations; and that is a worse sort of killing than the one of Tom Murphy. They make it impossible for him to live, stress him out every day, and even rip his family about because the media and police department are a business, and investigations are costly, so focusing on someone who looks guilty or that you can convince the people is guilty keep the business of selling newspapers and investigating crimes going.

Values—enduring beliefs about what matters most in life—can send people with strikingly similar backgrounds down divergent paths in life. The greater the importance a person places on a particular value, the more it will shape attitudes and therefore influence action. Even those whose values mostly mirror one another’s can go different ways and become at odds with one another over a single distortion in the reflection, one glaring dissimilarity in personal priorities. Despite their parallels, their differences make a villain of Ben Crawford, and a hero of him, yet a remaining shared value brings them together in the end. In no case, perhaps, is the decision of a human being impartial, or totally uninfluenced by sinister and selfish motives. These two different viewpoints of Ben Crawford, as a villain and a hero are guided by similar sets of values: Both are ambitious and have a great sense of adventure, both value protecting others, but one wants to conceal the truth. However, Ben remains a good person, although his intentions towards the end of the miniseries change. The psychological values can reveal much about the two different aspects of Ben’s personality, his judgment, and his ability to tolerate distress, and the external influences they encounter along the way. All these factors may play major roles in the personal development and transition of Ben Crawford, such as his respective decision to make a very difficult decision about the murder of his son.  Our motives are always pretty badly mixed.