TRANSCRIPT
Speaker: Why do people lie? Somebody recently asked me this question in a most heartfelt way, and the first response that came to my mind, it just popped out of me, was because it works. I think for a lot of people, lying really works. And what is lying? Fundamentally, the easy answer, of course, is lying is not telling the truth. But I think even deeper than that, I think what lying is, is people creating an alternative reality and expressing it as if it were truth. So basically, making up their own reality and, in a lot of cases, trying to get other people to believe this reality and often trying to get their own selves to believe this reality.
And part of what I think is a strange phenomenon with our species, the human species, is that we do have the ability often to define our own reality. And that reality can be very contrary to reality in the world, reality with a capital R. The reality that we define, what we call truth, often really isn’t truth. And I think it’s very normal. So why do people lie? Because it works. Because it makes them more comfortable. It allows them to avoid pain. It allows them to avoid getting in trouble sometimes.
Hmm. A lot of people do all sorts of things that go against other people, violate other people’s rights, violate social norms, violate religious norms. And when they lie, when they say they didn’t do it, when they change what happened, when they change the story of reality, they can often get away with their bad behavior. So people lie to cover their bad behavior. But what about covering good behavior? So this is a real key, I think, that opens a whole different door into the question of why do people lie.
Well, the door that I’m going to open is from the perspective of the little child in the toxic family. The little child in the very disturbed, the emotionally troubled, the violating family. The family with bad boundaries. The family with parents who are screwed up, even mildly screwed up. Sometimes parents who are abusive in different ways. Parents who are pathological. Parents who themselves lie.
Well, what happens in these families is the parents create the society for the child. The parents create the rules for the child. The parents create the reality with a lowercase R for the child. They create what is considered truth for the child. And what about when the child’s innate love of truth and reality, truth with a capital T and reality with a capital R, are stronger than this? Are more powerful than the parents’ lies? This is such a common phenomenon where the child is actually healthier, naturally, spontaneously healthier, more honest, more real, more true than his parents, more true than her family system.
What happens then? The parents try to crush the child, push the child down, push down the child’s truth, push down the child’s reality. And sometimes, in order for the child to keep truth alive within him or herself, to keep reality alive, to keep his or her connection with reality alive, the child has to lie. The child has to pretend that he’s actually not living in connection with his reality. Otherwise, the parents are gonna kill him. In some ways, I speak about that from experience. For me, being real and being honest in many ways was something that was not allowed. And so what I did is I kept it private.
And when pushed, “What do you think, Daniel? What’s your point of view?” I had to fake it. I actually had to lie about how real I was on the inside. I had to lie about my real relationship. I had to hold it private. I had to hold it quiet. I had to live in camouflage. Camouflage, in a way, being a form of lying. Animals do it all throughout the animal kingdom. So many different animals, you can see the leopard with its spots. It’s a form of camouflage. They actually lie to their prey. They go out in the tall grass, and they hide in the tall grass.
There’s another thing, though. A lot of children also have to lie about how sick their parents are. They have to lie about the horrible things that are going on in their family home. They have to lie about the abuses that they’re going through. They have to lie in order to protect their parents. They have to lie in order to protect their parents from their parents. They have to lie in order to protect their parents from the outside world, from teachers or their friends. They don’t want people to know how horrible their parents are. Terrible things can happen to the child him or herself if people find out what’s really going on. And if the child is honest to the parents about how bad they are, the parents will often just crush him worse.
The child doesn’t have power. So by nature of being less powerful, sometimes even being powerless, the child has to lie. Also, often, so often little children have to lie to their own selves about how horrible their parents are, how badly their parents are treating him or her, how screwed up the parents are. Because it’s so painful to see the truth. It’s so much easier, in a way, to dissociate, to push it away, to pretend everything’s good. Children want to believe their parents are perfect. They want to believe they’re being loved. In fact, they need to believe it. They need to believe that their parents are good people, are honest people. They need to believe their parents did the best fake they could.
They can’t believe that their parents are awful people, that their parents are screwed up, that their parents were too immature to ever realistically hope to be able to do a good job as parents. So these children grow up lying to protect their parents, to protect that primary culture of the family system. And as they grow older and older, this lying becomes a part of them. This lying becomes a survival tactic. And in many cases, for children as they become adults, it becomes a very functional survival tactic in the world. Because the things that they’re lying about are things that most children are lying about. Most family systems are so profoundly screwed up in different ways, and it becomes normal.
The whole culture, our culture, other cultures all around the world, are based on overlapping lies within family systems. So children who are too honest about what’s going on in their families, they can experience societal rejection as children or as adults. If they speak out too much about the lives of their family system, so in a way, lying is part of being normal, lying about these things.
Now, some people take this to extremes. Some people go even further, and I think often it’s people who come from the most screwed-up family systems because they have to lie in really extreme ways. And until they’ve been able to actually take a cold hard look at the families they came from, how screwed up their parents are, how screwed up they themselves became as the result of living in this family system, until they do that, until they grieve, until they go through the horrible pain of feeling what they went through as a child, all the things that are still buried inside them, until they do this, they’re just gonna go on being more comfortable lying.
Lying is something that keeps them comfortable. And often in relationships with couples, I see this as an adult. I see this, what I saw it as a couples therapist. Couples, the husband, the wife, whatever kind of partnership they had, they lie to each other, and this makes the relationship work. So many partnerships of all different types are based on mutual overlapping lies. In a way, it’s a kind of a delusion. And I think that’s really true about people. People with overlapping delusions, people with overlapping lies to their own selves, they tend to get along well. They actually share common values.
But when doesn’t lying work? Lying doesn’t work when one person is lying less than the other one or one person is lying more than the other one. Then suddenly it’s not overlapping so much. Then there’s conflict. Then there’s friction. That’s when people say, “Partner lie so much. Why do my friends lie so much? Why does my child lie so much? Why does my mother lie so much?” It’s because they’re seeing reality in different ways. Often one is seeing reality better.
So to take a step back, what is the cure for lying? The cure for lying, from what I’ve seen, is the relationship.
With one’s own inner self, to look within and to say what is the truth. Because from what I’ve seen, primarily in my relationship with myself, but I’ve seen it in other people too, human beings, we each have the capacity to know truth somehow. Truth is in our blood. Truth is in our veins. We’re born with truth, and it’s always in us. Our spirit, the truth inside of us, it’s there. It’s real. It is reality. It knows the reality. Our bodies know reality. Our bodies are a reality. We are all subject to reality. The outside world is full of reality.
So all we have to do is, for starters, to look within, to look without, to look around us, and to start to connect with reality, with a capital R. Just start to look at what happened to us as children, to start to feel the feelings that we’ve buried. The burying of our feelings being a form of lying. Well, undoing that is bringing them up, looking at the truth, feeling the truth, reintegrating the truth into our bodies, letting our spirit come out, not blocking it anymore because it was too dangerous to have. But letting our spirit come out, let our voice come out, and to look at what does our voice say.
To learn from our spirit within us, to learn how to reconnect with reality, and also to learn how to face the consequences of being honest. Being honest in all sorts of ways has painful consequences. Society often doesn’t like honesty. Partnerships often don’t like honesty. Unhealthy friendships don’t like honesty. Parents, troubled parents in denial, often don’t like honesty. Honesty can cause all sorts of problems.
But if we want to be honest, if we want to live true, if we want to be who we really are, being honest, from what I’ve experienced, is the way to go. It’s painful, but most importantly, being honest with ourselves and then using discretion in this troubled, confused, dishonest world about how honest we can really be.
A perfect example for me is making these videos. Being honest, what a sacrifice for me. Not fun a lot of times. Making these videos, not easy. Negative consequences for me: fear, anxiety, what’s gonna happen to me as the result of being honest. It’s so much easier to just go through my life pretending, lying in a way, just pretending I’m a normal person living a normal life. A lot easier to make more money with lying. Big sacrifice by being more honest, being more true, being more out. Can’t take it back once the cat’s out of the bag. That’s what I’ve found about being honest, about breaking lying, about breaking camouflage.
But for me too, I’ve done it piecemeal, slowly, more and more. Still getting more and more publicly honest, still becoming more honest with myself, still resolving more of my traumas. The traumas that are keeping my lies, my own self-lies, out of consciousness. Well, the more I’m honest with myself, the more I heal my traumas, the more I become real, the more I become true, the less I want to lie, the less I need to lie.
And also what I find is the more honest I am, especially the more honest I am with myself, but also the more honest I am with others, the more useful I can be. And also the more I just simply love my life.