Prompt by The Learning Network to combat WordPress.
Today’s Topic:
How comfortable am I with lying?
How comfortable am I with lying?
I hate, loath, lies. I have so many quotes stored in my head about lying. Things from the Russian proverb, “I would rather be slapped with the truth than kissed with a lie,” to advice from famous people like Mark Twain, “If you tell the truth, you don’ t have to remember anything,” to little inspirational picture quotes from Facebook with powerful words from anonymous authors, “Tell a lie once and all your truths become questionable.”
I do not like lies, and I do my best to be honest, which sometimes needs to be tempered with diplomacy because words can hurt more than any physical, worldly weapon.
However, since there is always a flip side… I competed in impromptu speaking for my FBLA group in high school for a year. I am good and being able to come up with things off the top of my head. If I had to, I could, successfully, lie to people.
I suppose my biggest example of that is, “Yeah, I’m fine.” For a while lying about my emotions was so second nature that it was like breathing for me. I didn’t even realize I was lying half the time.
I was really, really good at it, and it is one of the reasons so few people knew I was suicidal during college. I don’t think anyone, not even my mom, realized the depth at which I was hurting because of how good I got at covering up the truth.
I am proud to say that this is no longer the case. I am happy that I am no longer comfortable with lying, and that though I am sure I could still do it if I wanted to, and still have people believe the things I say, that I choose not to.
I value the people in my life enough to tell them the truth. If I want them to be honest with me, I need to show that I respect them enough to be honest with them.
Are there certain circumstances when I am comfortable telling a lie, and others when I am not?
Going back to the whole “lying about my emotions” thing… I feel that is really the only area that I have seriously lied about in my adult life, because we all know that as kids we lied about the cookie jar… I’m pretty sure that’s not what this prompt is talking about though.
When I was younger, when the divorce first happened, when answering the “Are you ok?” question, I didn’t think of it as lying even though it was. I was just brushing an extremely inconvenient and painful question away so I could get on with my life.
No. I wasn’t fine. Why couldn’t everyone leave me alone? What was I doing to give it away? How could I fix this issue so people would stop worrying about me?
In my head it was ok to lie. I was doing it to spare everyone else. I was doing it to put distance between the world and myself. Distance that I felt I needed. I wasn’t ready to talk about anything that was going on, and every time that question was asked it felt like acid inside my body, making me blindingly aware of just how “not ok” I was.
I have a different mentality now, but as an injured teenage girl I felt justified and that my responses were ok. What I was doing wasn’t wrong. It was what I had to answer to survive my own internal battle. No one else could help me, so I lied, hoping that it was what they wanted to hear, that my answer would satisfy them and I would be left alone to try to figure everything out.
I’m not defending my actions. Well… I guess in a way I am. I think of it more as trying to explain a past wrong. It’s not what I would do now, but I have grown and changed, and while I am still the same person, having the wisdom I do now means that the choices I made then are not the choices I would make today.
At the moment there are no circumstances where I would be ok with lying.
When was the last time I told a lie?
I honestly don’t remember but it was most likely to Zane and most likely about being ok when I really wasn’t. It’s still a knee jerk reaction sometimes, and there are still times where it doesn’t register in my brain that I have actually answered the question.
We’re getting better about it though since I have a sensitivity to the questions, “Are you ok?” and “Are you upset?”.
Instead of asking, “Are you ok?” We’re trying to move to asking, “How do you feel?”
It makes me stop and analyze my internal landscape. What am I feeling? Most of the time it is not upset or sad. A lot of the time it’s a mix of pretty complex emotions and without the time to reflect I am not able to understand my reactions or communicate effectively. My emotions can be so intense, so forceful and sudden, like landslides and volcanoes within myself.
Asking me to be detached from that, to actually look and see what it is that I am experiencing helps me to better communicate. “How do you feel?” requires a more involved answer which takes time and thought rather than the age old, single word answer to the dreaded, “Are you ok?” line.
Does my body language reveal when I am lying?
No. But it can reveal when I am uncomfortable with the truth I am about to say. If it is something I am worried about, something I feel may cause discord between someone and myself, or if I am having trouble finding the words I want to use, my body will express my inner discord.
It can be hard to breath because my chest will get tight, constricting with the desire to hold back and not hurt someone with my words. My muscles will tense sometimes, toes curling as I try to physically pull away because I don’t want to say what so desperately wants to spill from my lips. I want, sometimes need, to say what’s on my mind but my body is fighting that urge, putting so much effort into restraining the words, trying to keep them trapped within myself.
There is conflict. I need to be honest, but I need to not hurt the other person and sometimes I can’t see the way to do both at the same time. That conflict can be physically painful for me.
In those instances the best thing for people to do is to give me time. It’s not that I don’t want to communicate. It’s not that I’m looking for a lie. It’s that I don’t know the words to use to keep going with the conversation. I need time. I need understanding and patience.
How good do I think I am at spotting when someone else is lying? What clues do I use?
Intuition. I don’t know how I know when people are lying, I just do. It’s a feeling. There’s something in the way they speak, a difference in their tone. The way their eyes move. The way they breathe just a little shallower, and then deeper as their body relaxes.
There’s just something about lies that I’m sensitive to. Not saying that I’ve never been lied to, but eventually I always pick up on it, and the longer it takes for me to figure out, the more napalm that’s dropped on that particular bridge.
Instead of lying to me tell me that you don’t want to talk about whatever it is. You’re not ready at the moment. You need more time to figure it out. “We’ll talk later.”
Or tell me that it’s not my business. Or tell me the truth, especially if it involves me directly so I can make smart choices about the situation.
Maybe this is me being a slightly over developed J on the INFJ scale, but I no longer have a tolerance for lies, and I think a lot of that has to do with the fact that almost all of my emotional pain has stemmed from being lied to, by others as well as myself.
The truth may suck, a lot. But I would rather have a the pain of ripping a band aid off than the agony of having to heal through infection, or in the worst situations amputate part of my soul when we realize the relationship has been infected for so long that it can’t be salvaged.
