I've been thinking about when telling the truth is the wrong thing to do.
Hi, I’m Rick Thyne and I’m grateful that you found your way to these pages. Perhaps in these conversations we’ll find our way to more of the common good that is - for me - our best hope for a future in which all of us thrive. If you've found this column and would like to get my latest column delivered, free, to your inbox every two weeks, you can subscribe at the bottom of this page.
Despite the difference in our ages – she was ninety-five and I was in my early seventies when this conversation took place – we’d been close friends for thirty years, and would continue our friendship until she died at nearly one-hundred-one. On this particular day, I confided in her that I was trying, really trying, to be an honest person. I just want to tell the truth, I said, and quoted President Lincoln for support: No one has a good enough memory to be a successful liar.
She shook her head and waved her hand, as if swatting away an irritating fly.
What nonsense, she said. Every thoughtful adult knows there are times when it’s necessary to lie. I’ve spent the decade since she said this trying to figure out how to distinguish lies from the truth, and how to determine when telling the truth is the wrong thing to do.
In sorting out lies from the truth, it’s probably wise to begin with lies we’ve been telling ourselves and lies we’ve been telling others. These are lies that protect us from uncomfortable truths about ourselves, which we might call Cowardly Lies. (OK, yes, I cannot tell a lie; I stole this title from Bert Lahr’s character in The Wizard of Oz, The Cowardly Lion.)
Many of us have scrubbed and distorted our childhood memories in order to hold on to beliefs that may not be true, such as I had a great childhood (Really? No family secrets or lies? No emotional or spiritual bruises that have lasted into your adulthood?) or My parents did the best they could (to which my late colleague Roger used to respond, No they didn’t; they could have done much better, which is why most of us, as parents, have given up substantial bits of how our parents treated us).
Virtually every couple who comes for marital therapy begins with, We have a problem with communication. For ten minutes they articulate very clearly how each of them sees the situation, usually focusing on the other person’s deficits. When I point out they’ve just communicated very clearly, they sit in silence until I suggest we try together to find out what’s really going on, like how each of them is disappointed that their partner doesn’t meet the expectations they brought to marriage; or how they feel like their partner doesn’t actually like them, let alone love them anymore; or how their trust in one another has disintegrated.
I think that most of the time we lie because we lack the courage to face what we’d discover if we let the truth sink in. We want our dishonesty to protect us from being held accountable for what we've actually done and to escape the consequences we deserve. Many of us were raised with the Biblical promise, You will know the truth, and the truth will set you free. But we’ve learned the hard way that before the truth sets you free, at some point along the way it will probably kick the shit out of you.
Cowardly Lies are the ones we tell ourselves, to avoid and protect and evade hard truths. But these are different from Necessary Lies my old friend was talking about.
I find that I tell these lies quite often in my practice as a therapist because the person in front of me is too fragile to process what is obviously true. When someone with a deep personal wound asks me if I think they’re deeply wounded, I don’t hesitate to lie. The healing process from such wounds requires a long and complex therapeutic conversation that can be cut short by too much truth too soon. I’m particularly sensitive to these moments now because of a mistake I made several years ago, not by lying but by telling the truth.
A woman in her mid-thirties came for an initial therapy session because she was having trouble trusting her husband of ten years. They were both successful professionals with a happy eight-year-old daughter, a cluster of close friends, and all the appearances of a good life. She’d been adopted from Korea by an Iowa couple when she was nine years old; her mother could no longer afford to support her, so she sent her to live with this wonderfully amiable Midwestern couple whom the young girl quickly adored. She did well in school, went to a first-rate college, got a graduate degree and married a really solid man. But the longer they were married, the more obvious it became to both of them that she didn’t feel safe with him, couldn’t trust his love for her, and kept trying to find things about him that might justify her worry. She finally believed him when he insisted he wasn’t having an affair; she acknowledged that he was an attentive husband and father; he made enough money that, if she chose to, it was OK with him if she quit working. Still . . .
There’s something he’s not telling me, she insisted; he just won’t come clean with me.
This is where I suggested a truth so obvious to me that I couldn’t imagine she hadn’t considered it long before. My honest comment would prove to be a serious mistake.
Do you think maybe this lack of trust has something to do with your mother giving you up and sending you ten thousand miles away, when you were a little girl not much older than your daughter is now?
Her body stiffened. She sat up straight and pressed her lips together. She clasped her hands and laid them in her lap.
When the session ended, we made an appointment for the following week and she cordially said, See you then. Two days later she called to cancel that appointment. She never came back.
To this day, I’m certain I was correct about her fear of abandonment; what I told her was what I believed, and believe still, was the therapeutic truth. But it was too much truth, too soon. For all of her polish and poise, I missed the fragility beneath these appearances, the terrified little girl still hiding out beneath the surface of this sophisticated women. When I mentioned her abandonment, it was like touching that girl not with kid gloves but with a hammer to her heart.
I find that such Necessary Lies are important even with our close friends. Do you think I talk too much when we’re together with our pals? Or, I feel like I’m handling my drinking better, don’t you? It’s not that I’m afraid they won’t like me if I respond with what I believe is the truth: You seem to have this chronic need to dominate the conversation. Or, I’d say two cocktails and a bottle of wine for dinner speak for themselves. It’s that I know they’re dealing with deeper problems, like social insecurity or marital stress or fear of growing old. I’d rather wait for the opportunity to talk privately about these more fundamental issues than get hung up in a useless debate about what is too much talking and what is too much drinking. I finesse my way through these awkward moments because I think it’s the wrong time to tell the truth.
As a husband, father and grandfather, as a friend, as a therapist, I’m consistently trying now to distinguish between the truth of what I think and feel, and the truth I should actually articulate. I try to keep my eye on this moving target: how much of what I believe is the truth enhances rather than threatens the well-being of whomever I’m speaking with? Whatever the truth is, it is less important than the love in the relationship. It's true that the truth will set you free, but sometimes love buys us the time to accept the liberating truth.
I spent dozens of hours sitting beside my ancient friend's hospital bed in the months before she died. We talked about truth and lies, about death and God, about life’s traumatic losses and moments of wonder and ecstasy, about her unabashed sensuality and her lively spirituality (Keep your eyes on the candle’s flame, Rick). I basked in her hundred-year-old wisdom, and laughed out loud at her vivid descriptions of betting on the horses at Santa Anita or standing joyously beside a spinning roulette wheel in Las Vegas, her stack of chips on red.
Despite her earlier warning about not always telling the truth, when it came to sharing herself with me, she never told a lie.