Lies: The Truth About the Self-Deception That Limits Your Life

2

Liz’s Introduction

I HAVE BEEN A PSYCHOLOGIST for more than thirty years and have had the privilege to be partner and witness to nearly two thousand people in the earnest effort to grow and change. And now, along with my friend and colleague, I have finished a book that purports to pass on whatever wisdom I have garnered. It was hard to type the word wisdom. There are still times, after all these years, when I hear an inner voice say, Who are you to be putting yourself in this position with another human being?

Perhaps this sounds like self-criticism—and sometimes it is—but I need and value this voice. It is my true belief that when I work with a client we are co-explorers in the process. I err if I come off sounding or suggesting in any way that I am a superior human being. Shame on me if I imply that I know you better than you know yourself.

What I do have are a set of skills and years of professional experience. Some of these skills are inherent to me and my personality structure. Some I have learned in school and training, and some have been honed in my work with clients. One of my skills is the ability to see patterns and identify themes. I have practiced the skill of listening; by this time, I’m quite good at it. I have developed the courage to speak the truth, as I know it—sometimes the hard truth. Most of the time, I am good at assessing the readiness of a client to take in observations, and I can portion out and shape my feedback so it has a better chance of being heard and well received. I believe that my clients know I care about them and that I have their best interests at heart.

All that said, none of this means that I have everything figured out. I have my own life—my trials, my demons, my failures, and my successes. I know that my own psychological work is not finished. All the topics we have covered in this book are works in progress for me too. I have not crossed the finish line, spiked the ball, and done the victory dance. But I do know what concerns people. And I do know that much of the pain we experience in our lives comes from various forms of self-deception. We lie to ourselves. Yes, we do. We lie. Much of this self-deception is unconscious, and it is my belief that we do so in an earnest attempt at self-protection. But earnest as our strategies may be, finding the truth underneath these lies gives us a chance to live a more integrated life, a life of integrity that’s essential for any kind of true happiness.

Over these many years, the themes of self-deception presented in this book continue to emerge and resonate with clients and friends. I offer them up in the belief and hope that they may be helpful to you as well.

3

Hide and Seek

BRIDGET: PEOPLE LIE. THEY CAN be little lies (you’re late for work because of traffic) or big lies (I love you and would never cheat). But whether big or little, often or occasional, you usually know when you tell someone a lie. Lies we tell ourselves are not as obvious. It can, in fact, take years to recognize a lie that has influenced a lifetime.

Why do we lie to ourselves, and why is it that we don’t always know that we are lying? We live with ourselves 24/7, so you’d think we’d know the truth about ourselves. But often the truth is the last thing we want to know. Truth can hurt our pride, it can challenge beliefs about who we think we are, and it might even require us to take an action we don’t want to take. So when a truth pops up and threatens to reveal things about us that we don’t want to know, we avoid it. We hurry up and bury it, cover it over, and come up with a different, more acceptable truth. Damage to self-image and the threat of having to change are powerful reasons for self-deception. No wonder people become so skilled at it.

So what’s so bad about self-deception? After all, it protects us from painful feelings and difficult actions. We need the defense of lying to smooth things over and reduce anxiety. Yes, sometimes—temporarily. Self-deception serves the purpose of protection when we are not strong enough or desperate enough to be honest. But when self-deception becomes a way of life, it leads to trouble. Pervasive lying can become the usual (or only) way of operating. After a while, you don’t know who you are. You may even believe that you are the public persona you have invented with no insight into the real, private you. You go to bed a politician and wake up a politician—unless the real you breaks through and insists on being heard.

Remember the South Carolina Governor who left his idealized self on the Appalachian Trail and joined his lover in Argentina? I don’t know how that story ends, but I do know that consistent lying about who you are leads to feelings of alienation and confusion. Lacking self-knowledge, you tend to believe what others tell you about yourself—even more than you trust your own judgment. If the world rewards you for being a fabulous parent or partner, or a stalwart soldier, or a fearless preacher, you have difficulty believing different, conflicting inner truths: you’re not so crazy about your kids a lot of the time, or you’re sorry you married your partner, or you wish you had chosen a different career. You may act out the silenced truth by having an affair or sabotaging the people you love through passive-aggressive actions.

Then, there are some truths that have nothing to do with other people that you try to keep from yourself. You’re not as smart or as talented or generous or adventurous as you have been telling yourself. Ouch. Maybe you should see a therapist. Hopeful, you make your first visit, sit on the couch, open your mouth, and guess what, you begin to lie. You lie, not about how badly you feel or how difficult life is, but about what is really going on inside you. You have been lying for so long that you only know what you present as the truth. Like detectives, you and the therapist sift through mounds of words, and after enough ducking and weaving conversations, a truth will out. Most often in a few words because hidden truths tend to present in unvarnished words.

Here are the words of one of my clients: I hate my wife.

Stunned when the words came out of his mouth, Dan tried to take them back and couldn’t. He met Barbara when he was a young man and didn’t know what to do with his life. She was sure of herself—and sure that Dan should marry her and no other women were interested in him.

The core lie of Dan’s adult life, that he loved his wife, led to many other lies. His idealized version of himself was faithful family man, good father, dependable provider, and participant in the community. He and Barbara were seen as one of those perfect couples that others envy. But lately, while driving, Dan was having suicidal thoughts: Why not drive into that wall? Dan was lying to himself about how bored he was, how much he lusted after other women, how much he resented his critical wife and his daughter who mimicked her mother’s critical attitude. The day he said, I hate my wife, his house of cards came down. For an intense while, his home life was chaotic, but he also experienced immense relief in being able to speak the truth to himself. He chose to remain with Barbara, but when she was abusive, he told her so. And when his daughter was rude, he told her so. He carved out time to do some of the things he really wanted to do. For her part, Barbara was tired of being married to a weak man, and she was tired of his depression. It did not become a love match, but both lives improved when honest Dan stopped being a victim.

How can you learn to stop lying to yourself? Discomfort is a helpful clue. As you’re complaining about your boss, you have a twinge of unease. In the moment, you may not be able to answer or even think about the question, am I telling the truth? But you do notice that twinge. Often, discomfort registers in the body: a raised voice, aggressive hand gestures, a leaning forward posture. Or the obverse: humble body posture, prayer hands, delighted smile. Revisit that moment of unease. Give it time, focusing on the place inside you where you feel things; it’s not the same for everyone. Maybe it’s your gut, maybe your heart or throat or the fingers you tap or the foot you shake. Let the truth surface from within, and then put words to it. My boss is a dope, but what I was really doing was feeling superior. I do that quite a bit. Or, I’m jealous of my boss. She is smarter and more successful than I am. If your rant about your boss is something that happens often, that too is worth noting. Repetition is another clue that signals self-deception is at play.

The good thing about quitting the game of hide-and-seek—hiding the truth and seeking a lie—is that it leads to greater acceptance of the self. Here I am. I may not like everything about myself. I may or may not make changes. But I want my inside and my outside to be a closer match.

LIZ: After reading your essay, I started thinking about how we come to hold the idealized standards that make it so hard for us to be honest with ourselves. I know when my children were little, I tried to teach them all sorts of things: how to treat other people, it’s important to tell the truth, it’s not okay to hit, don’t take what doesn’t belong to you, etc. I’m not really criticizing myself for that, but I am more aware of how these statements represent ideal human behavior. We might strive to be honest and good, but our basic human nature can definitely get in the way. In the effort to teach our children to be good people (i.e. to civilize them), we somehow imply that these idealized standards are possible to meet. That, in and of itself, can lead to a whole bunch of self-deception.

BRIDGET: Undoubtedly, kids learn to disguise unacceptable feelings. A child learns that not only is slapping a sibling forbidden but also forbidden is the feeling of hate. In order to be a good boy or girl, you must hide that feeling from your parents and also from yourself. Acting in the exact opposite to the way you feel, cuddling and cooing the new baby gets you praise and acceptance. You generalize this to all negative feelings, shoving them down instead of recognizing them and learning not to act upon them because it is wrong to hurt others. Most parents don’t have a lot of time, and it takes time to teach a child that you don’t accept a bad action, but you accept having the feeling that prompted it. One way to get across the idea that no one is perfect is to model it. When your own behavior is not up to snuff, you can acknowledge that. Mommy is cranky today, and I apologize. It isn’t easy to be good all the time, is it?

LIZ: I like how you focus on all the possible clues that we are not in an honest relationship with ourselves—things like body discomfort. Another good clue is when you encounter someone who really gets under your skin and bugs you in that particularly vexing way. If you have a response like that, it’s often helpful to wonder what it is about yourself that you’ve been too uncomfortable to see.

BRIDGET: What a clue this is and one that lots of us don’t want to touch. That person we are deriding for a particular trait is so like us. He or she may not look like us—or share our values and interests—but the temper or the mean spirit or the stinginess is just what we don’t like in ourselves. So many instances of dislike are because someone is mirroring us.

LIZ: Yeah, ouch. It truly is an act of bravery to be honest with yourself, isn’t it?

The Lie: I don’t lie.

The Truth: That discomfort you feel is you lying. Be comfortable in your own skin. Don’t lie to yourself.

4

The Wolf in Sheepish Clothing

LIZ: I COULDN’T BEGIN TO count the number of times the word guilty comes up in my office. I don’t think a day goes by when a client does not tell me that he or she feels guilty about something or another. My clients are, almost without exception, good and decent people. They are not criminals entering a plea to a judge. Yet so many of them are walking around feeling guilty.

So what is up with that? Since the definition of guilt entails the culpability of some specified wrongdoing, I often begin by asking a client what he or she did that was bad or wrong. The answer I usually get is something like, Well, when I think about it, I really didn’t do anything bad or wrong. I just feel guilty.

Hmmm. There’s a feeling, for sure, one that the client has identified as guilt, but the feeling does not, in fact, meet the criteria for guilt. So maybe it’s actually a different feeling. I have come to believe that 99 percent of the time when we say we feel guilty about something, we are actually feeling something else. The logical next question is to wonder what else it is you might be feeling.

Consider that guilt might be the wolf in sheep’s clothing. That is, it seems that we are somehow more comfortable with feeling guilty than we are with, say, feeling angry. There is, in fact, something rather ennobling about feeling guilty. It’s like beating one’s breast in a mea culpa. See how bad I feel! I know when I feel guilty, there is something that feels sort of saintly about it to me—a sense that I am a person who really knows the difference between right and wrong and is willing to suffer, to boot. And if I am feeling guilty, it sort of seems like I am doing something, and that can take the place of actually doing anything in reality.

Example: My client Emily (not her real name) told me about a coworker who was constantly coming up to her and her office mates, chatting and engaging in friendly and very frequent interaction. Here’s a condensed version of our dialogue:

EMILY: I feel really guilty when I have to move over to that desk around the corner to get some work done.

LIZ: You feel guilty. So you must believe you’ve done something bad or wrong. And what would that be?

EMILY: Not so much bad or wrong. It’s just that she’s so nice, and I like her, and I don’t want to hurt her feelings.

LIZ: So maybe guilt is not exactly what you feel. What else might it be?

EMILY: I don’t know. I just know I have to get this work done, and I can’t when she constantly hangs around.

LIZ: