Jan 24 2011
TRUTH & FEAR
Kim Murphy, MS, Registered Mental Health Counselor Intern
Why do we as human beings lie to ourselves? Fear. We fear the truth and its consequences, so we deny our feelings. This kind of behavior can sometimes have its origins in childhood experiences. If we were not given a healthy feeling of self worth and a sense of belonging; if we didn’t have a safe place to process and consider our feelings, we learned to deny the truth about what was happening around us and our feelings about it. Eventually we became able to close ourselves off from our feelings altogether. Denial is a powerful, powerful thing. As a child, you may have learned to deny your feelings as a way to insulate yourself from the painful circumstances that surrounded you. This kind of self defense may have served as a way to protect you when others didn’t. Now that you’re an adult, you may not even be aware that you’re lying to yourself when things go wrong.
You could be telling yourself a lie that prevents you from accessing the greatest joy of your life in an attempt to avoid pain or disappointment: “I’ll never be able to do it right. I just shouldn’t have kids. Look at how my parents screwed me up.” Or, you may be feeling the pain of an unacceptable situation, without having any understanding of fact that you could be the one to extricate yourself from it: “I just wish she would stop cheating on me. I know what she’s been up to. Everything would be okay, if she’d just stop seeing other people behind my back.” By learning to be more honest with ourselves, we could avoid a lot of pain and suffering.
