Why We Lie: The Source of our Disasters. Dorothy Rowe

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СКАЧАТЬ is a tool tuned, in varying degrees, to the reality of brain and world.’⁵

      However, the three-dimensional world we see is composed of guesses that can be shown to be wrong. Our sense of being a person is composed of guesses about who we are, what our world is like, what our past was and what our future will be. All of these guesses are interconnected. Our reason for telling a white lie is connected directly to how we experience our sense of being a person. If our decision to tell a white lie is shown to be a mistake, the ideas that are an essential part of our sense of being a person tumble down like a row of dominoes.

      For instance, you might decide to say to a friend who is showing off a new dress, ‘You look lovely in that dress.’ You predict that your friend will respond with a happy smile and a thank you, but she does not. She senses that you do not like the dress, and says, ‘You’re lying. You don’t like it at all.’

      You might protest and try to reassure her, but inside you feel the dangerous instability of mounting anxiety. If your existence as person depends on good relationships, the fear of rejection begins to loom large. If your existence depends on clarity, order and control, the fear of chaos comes upon you. To save yourself, you might resort to further lies, and perhaps with these you manage to extricate yourself from a difficult situation. Your anxiety subsides. You are safe – provided, of course, you remember what were the lies you told. Successful lying requires a good memory.

      All this from a simple social interaction. What happens when you discover that you have made a serious error of judgement?

      Suppose, for instance, that you have mapped out your future, which will be with one special person. Then you discover that you had got it all wrong. Your loved one had tragically died, or run off with someone else, or simply had a change of heart. In this situation we all feel that we are literally falling apart. It is a very strange experience. Our body is not falling apart but inside where ‘I’ resides crumbles like a wooden house caught in a hurricane. What is actually falling apart is some of the ideas which make up your sense of ‘I’. These are the guesses that you created about your life, your loved one and your future. If you understand that, you know that these terrible feelings will pass, and that after a period of uncertainty you will become whole again. If you do not understand this, you are overwhelmed by the greatest terror.

      The original cover of Bob Dylan’s perhaps most famous album The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan shows twenty-three-year-old Dylan and his seventeen-year-old girlfriend Suze Rotolo walking down a snow-covered street in New York. It was nearly fifty years before Suze could bring herself to write her account of her three-year romance with Dylan and her breakdown that followed. She told her interviewer Richard Williams that, ‘It was the hardest thing to write about. I was young and vulnerable and insecure. There were pressures from all around and I couldn’t find my place any more. I didn’t feel I had anybody I could turn to. That makes you really fall apart. And that’s how I felt.’⁶

      Describing the events that led to their break-up was difficult, but what she put into that six-word sentence ‘That makes you really fall apart’ can go beyond the capacity of language to describe. What Suze said sounds like a cliché but it is not. It refers to a life-changing and self-changing experience. Her sense of being a person fell apart, and then had to rebuild itself in a way different from what it had been before.

      Had she been older, better defended and secure in herself, a romance, or rather an affair with Dylan would not have been such a profound experience. Ending it might have been unpleasant and sad, but she would have been able to tell herself that she had survived similar events in the past, and she would survive this one. However, she was very young and inexperienced. The ‘pressures from all around’ included the attitudes of Dylan’s friends who condemned her for trying to maintain her career as an artist instead of devoting herself fully to Dylan. If her career was floundering and she was no longer loved by Dylan, she no longer fitted into any part of society and belonged there. ‘Home’, said Robert Frost, ‘is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.’ Suze had no home. Her mother and her sister disliked Dylan (imagine the ‘I told you so’s) and so there was no one she could turn to. In similar circumstances each of us would find ourselves falling apart. Most of us would not know what was happening to us, and we would be terrified.

      The fear of being annihilated as a person is far worse than the fear of death. We can tell ourselves that when we die we shall go to heaven, or become a spirit, or return as another person. People will erect memorials to us, they will talk about us, remember us. But, if we are annihilated as a person, there will be nothing, no heaven, no spirit, no return, and no one will remember us because it will be as if we have never existed. We have disappeared like a wisp of smoke in the wind. We will do anything to stop this happening. This is why we lie. Every lie we tell, no matter how small and unimportant, is a defence of our sense of being a person.

      We will lie over the most stupid things; tell lies that are patently, outrageously lies; build lie upon lie until they form a great, sticky web of lies. We will lie when telling the truth would lead to a better outcome; we will lie when we do not know why we are lying; we will lie to people who do not matter to us, and to people who do; we will lie to people who know that we are lying; persistently, unthinkingly, we will lie to ourselves. And all for one reason. To preserve our sense of being a person.

      So much do they fear the destruction of their sense of being a person that many psychologists have avoided trying to understand just what it is that they fear. They deal with the problem of understanding what the sense of self is by hiding it in a mist of romantic fantasies, as happens in transpersonal psychology; or they talk about it in such obscure ways that no humble inquirer after the truth would dare to ask a question (ask a Freudian analyst a question and the reply is likely to be, ‘Why do you want to know?’); or they believe that the sense of being a person is not something that a proper psychologist would study because proper psychology is objective and scientific. This last position is based on the popular principle that, if you don’t talk about something, it doesn’t exist.

      Psychologists might pretend that the sense of being a person does not exist, but they cannot pretend that emotions do not exist. It is not possible to understand what emotions are without understanding what the sense of being a person is. Since this understanding is missing from much of psychology, an enormous amount of rubbish is written about emotions. Theories about emotions seem to fall into two categories. There are the ‘emotions are like the climate’ theories, and the pseudo-scientific theories that talk about ‘the emotional brain’. Both kinds of theories make us helpless. According to the climate theories, emotions roll over us like unstoppable summer storms. According to the emotional brain theories, we are mere puppets at the mercy of the most ancient parts of our brain. Lurking in our amygdala are the emotions of fear and anger, ready to burst forth at any time. More complex emotions require a functioning cortex, but, even in that part of the brain where reason is considered to reside, emotions can override the intellect. These theories do not give us a means of understanding why, say, we are able to deal calmly with a situation involving our brother, and yet fly into a rage in another very similar situation which involves our sister. Nor do these theories help us understand why, say, we feel guilty over something that was clearly not our fault, but are untroubled by another situation where we have failed to fulfil our obligations. To understand these differences we need to know why we interpreted two of these situations as threats to the integrity of our sense of being a person, and the other two situations as being unthreatening.

      If all psychologists recognized that every moment of their life they are creating meanings, and that out of these meanings come their sense of self, they would readily see that emotions are meanings, and that all these meanings relate to their sense of being a person. Emotions are rarely expressed initially in words, though they can later be put into sentences. All these sentences have just one subject – ‘I’. ‘I am angry’, ‘I am happy’, СКАЧАТЬ