The Dance of Deception

Harriet Lerner

• Publisher: HarperCollins e-books
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9780061852749
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Interpersonal Relations in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

When The Dance of Deception was published, Lerner discovered that women were not eager to identify with the subject. "Well, I don't do deception" was a common resonse.

We all "do deception", often with the intention to protect ourselves and the relationships we depend on. The Dance of Deception unravels the ways (and whys) that women show the false and hide the real -- even to our own selves. We see how relationships are affected by lying and faking, by silence and pretending and by brave -- but misguided -- efforts to tell the truth.

Truth-telling is at the heart of what is most central in women's lives. It is at the foundation of authenticity and creativity, intimacy and joy. Yet in the name of "honesty", we can bludgeon each other. We can approach a difficult issue with such a poor sense of timing and tact that we can actually shut down the lines of communication rather than widening the path of truth-telling.

Sometimes Lerner's advice takes a surprising turn -- for example, when she asks us to engage in a bold act of pretending in order to discover something "more real"; or when she tells us not to parachute down on our family to bring up a "hot issue" without laying the necessary groundwork first.

Whether the subject is affairs, family secrets, sexual faking or the challenge of "being oneself", Lerner helps us to discover, speak and live our own truths.

1

Tony and the Martians

When I was twelve, I told a lie that grew to epic proportions. I told my friend Marla, who lived across the street from me in Brooklyn, that I had been contacted by a man named Tony who came from another planet. Since first grade, Marla and I had been on-again, off-again best friends.

I told Marla that Tony told me to find a date. Since no one had asked me out yet (and I believed that no one ever would), Marla had to fix me up with a blind date because Tony said that something bad might happen to me otherwise. Marla, who could accomplish almost anything she set her mind to, went about this project with her usual vigor and enthusiasm. The blind date came and went. Tony did not.

A few minor characters from the same planet were added to the drama, as the personality and presence of Tony grew and became part of my deepening friendship with Marla. Tony emerged as a good-hearted, playful fellow who told me funny things that I could tell only Marla—and that she could tell no one. At a time when my other girlfriends were dropping one best friend for another, my special status with Marla was secure. Tony stabilized our friendship and strengthened our sense of camaraderie and commitment. And I was in charge—an active director and orchestrator of the threesome: Tony and Marla and me.

I don’t remember how often Tony visited or how long he stayed around, but I think it was at least a year before I let him drift out of our lives. Years later, when Marla and I were both graduate students in Berkeley, California, I tearfully told her I had made Tony up. Until then, we had both walled off the Tony business, not bothering to reflect on it or even to remember. Marla protected me and our friendship by choosing not to subject this interplanetary drama to close scrutiny. After all, anything is possible. When we finally talked about it, Marla was lighthearted and forgiving, as I hoped she would be with our long history of friendship binding us together.

 

In the early 1970s I entered psychoanalysis during my post-doctoral training program in clinical psychology and confessed my “Tony story.” I half-jokingly voiced my concern that my analyst would downgrade my diagnosis to something either very bad or very sick. My uneasiness was hardly surprising. Although lying is commonplace in both personal and public—especially political—life, the label of “liar” is a profound condemnation in our culture, bringing to mind pathology and sin. I know parents who punish their children more severely for lying to them than for any other behavior. I have heard otherwise calm parents scream at their children, “Don’t you ever lie to me again!” So heavy are the negative associations of intention and character that it is difficult to think lovingly, or even objectively, about the role that lying plays in the lives of children and adults.

My analyst (coincidentally also named Tony) was, as always, empathic and nonjudgmental. In psychoanalysis—as in the rest of life—insight and self-understanding do not flourish in an atmosphere of self-depreciation or blame. He and I explored Tony in the context of my distant relationship with my father and my related desperation about getting the “blind date” that I first used Tony for with Marla.

Many years later, after the birth of my second son in 1979, I faced a personal crisis, a health scare, that pushed me to learn more about my mother’s diagnosis of advanced endometrial cancer when I was twelve. While talking to my parents at this time, I recognized that I had brought Tony into the picture when my mother, then forty-eight, had been given one year to live. Although I was unaware on a conscious level of her diagnosis and prognosis, I am certain that my unconscious knew everything.

As I reconstructed that year, multiple lies emerged, beginning with my mother’s harrowing experience with a medical system that did not provide her with facts. After a long period of misdiagnosed vaginal bleeding, my mother hemorrhaged and was hospitalized for an emergency D&C. This procedure led to the unexpected diagnosis of a hitherto unknown invasive cancer. Her physician (who may himself have been reacting to the long period of misdiagnosis and neglect) told my father the facts—but swore him to secrecy. After the initial procedure, my mother was packing her bags to return home when she was told that an additional stay in the hospital was necessary for a second surgery to “stretch her uterus.” With this improbable, mystifying explanation, her doctor performed a complete hysterectomy without her knowledge or permission. She awoke from the surgery, confused and disoriented, and suffering from inexplicable, intense pain.

My mother did not confront her doctor until immediately before her discharge from the hospital, when he referred her for radiation treatment. She demanded to know her diagnosis. He did not answer, but instead took her hand and told her to enjoy life and to try to have enjoyable sex in the year to come. He didn’t mention cancer and she didn’t push it. A part of her, too, must not have wanted to hear the word spoken out loud. With a referral for prolonged radiation treatment, however, my mother knew the name of her problem even though the medical establishment did not voice it.

In the year that followed, the word “cancer” was never spoken in my family. My mother’s health was not even discussed. Inexplicably, she did not die, as predicted, and so we have had the opportunity to talk as adults about that traumatic year after her diagnosis. Our conversations have allowed me to appreciate more deeply how helplessly out of control I must have felt when I brought Tony down from another planet.

My mother, the emotional center of the family, seemed to be dying. Susan, my only sibling, had started college at Barnard and would soon be looking for an apartment in the city. She was getting launched, leaving me for her own grown-up life. My mother had quietly made plans for her brother and sister-in-law, then living in a different part of Brooklyn, to take me in after her death because she did not think that my father could care for me by himself. I was on the edge of losing everyone. Into this precarious world, threatening to pull apart at the seams, I brought Tony.

 

During the year after my mother’s diagnosis, my most important relationships had a lie at their center. In my family, the lie was perpetuated through silence. There was a survival issue in my family that no one was talking about. Only once did I give voice to reality, to truth, in an incident that I myself do not remember. My mother tells me that some time after she had finished her radiation treatment and had recovered her energy and spirits, she came down with a bad cold and took to bed—a singularly rare occurrence for her. I stormed into the bedroom and screamed at her for lying down. “Get up!” I commanded with the full force of early adolescent rage. “You’d better not die—do you hear me?—or I’ll never forgive you!” My mother recalls this outburst—over as suddenly as it began—as our family’s only direct expression of feeling, our only articulation of danger.

Apart from this isolated outburst, I blanketed myself in denial, screening out my mother’s illness and my questions about how I would be cared for if she died. Reading back through my diary—my one place to tell the truth—I do not find a word during that year about my mother being sick or about my being afraid. I numbed my consciousness, both language and feeling. But because the unconscious seeks truth, I acted out all over the place—in trouble at school and a mess at home.

With Marla, my best friend, the lie was told in words, not in silence. I constructed, elaborated, and kept alive a narrative, immersing myself so fully in the drama that I did not experience myself as standing outside it. Only much later did I piece together enough context to make sense of my behavior, to think more objectively of its meaning.

Perhaps I wanted to be caught. One evening I found myself in my sister Susan’s bedroom, spontaneously telling her that I had become friends with a man from another planet. If Susan had taken this revelation seriously, a confrontation about Tony might have pushed us all toward addressing the deeper issue. But for better or worse, Susan merely listened to my story, perhaps never giving it a second thought.

Thinking about Context

If my behavior with Marla was viewed out of context, an observer might say, “She lied because that’s how she is. She is a liar, out for herself, that sort of child.” Or a psychological interpretation might be based on a particular notion about human behavior: “Because she is insecure, she needs to manipulate and control—that’s why she lies.”

In the absence of context, we tend to view particular behaviors as fixed “traits” or as “personality characteristics” that exist within us, rather than as part of a dance happening between and among us. My creation of Tony, for example, could be viewed as evidence of my manipulative, controlling, and deceptive intentions—words that fit with our culture’s general description of how women have wielded power. Of course, these were my intentions—to manipulate, control, and deceive, just as my intentions were to love, to connect, strengthen, protect, and survive.

 

Context allows us to put lying—or any other behavior—into perspective. By broadening our view, we are challenged to take a more complex reality into account, to ask questions (rather than provide answers) about where lies begin.

Did the lie begin, in my case, with a frightened adolescent girl who desperately wanted to avoid any further threat of loss by holding on to her best friend by whatever magic possible?

Did it begin with my parents, unable to address, even with each other, a terrifying illness, then handed down as a death sentence? Or did it begin with their parents, Russian Jewish immigrants who could not begin to speak about the massive losses and separations they had endured?

Did the lie begin under the hand of patriarchy, with the male-dominated medical system withholding facts from my mother, mystifying and falsifying her experience, denying her deepest instincts, protecting her from essential knowledge “for her own sake,” creating for her a situation of unutterable loneliness? Did truth-telling become less possible still when the doctor told my father to keep my mother’s condition a secret, for which she did not easily forgive him? And what of my mother’s unspoken plan to transfer me to a relative’s home upon her death? Was patriarchy (its consequences then hidden, unspoken, denied) at the heart of a mother’s felt knowledge or belief that it might be unwise to leave an adolescent daughter alone with an emotionally isolated father?

 

I was in my thirties before I connected Tony to my mother’s diagnosis of cancer, a connection which cast a new perspective on my behavior of twenty years earlier—as did the facts about my mother’s hospital experience then, and the culturally enforced silence surrounding any diagnosis of cancer at that time. Deception is larger than the particular individual responsible for it, larger even than a family. We can never know for sure where a lie begins, with whom it originates, or the many factors that sustain it. We can, however, move toward an increasingly accurate and complex understanding of ourselves as we widen our view of a lie, secret, or silence—or any deceptive behavior, for that matter.

This story about Tony illustrates the importance of context, and how empathy and understanding increase with the bigger picture of family, culture, and the addition of more facts. Further, this story illustrates that our most dramatic and colorful lies—the ones we can decide either to keep secret or to confess—are not necessarily at the center of our emotional life and not where we need to focus our primary attention. My lie to Marla was symptomatic of the paralyzing silence in my family surrounding my mother’s illness. My family’s silence was symptomatic of a culture which placed cancer, as well as other painful subjects, in the realm of the unspeakable. It is the unspoken, all that we cannot name and productively address, that gets us into trouble; lying is merely one expression of that trouble.

In truth, I did not experience myself as a “liar.” Or, more accurately, I knew I was lying to Marla about Tony but I told myself I was pretending. We were, perhaps, all pretending—the doctors who withheld information from my mother (for her own sake), my parents who withheld information from us children (for our sake), and the children, myself included, who didn’t persist in asking questions (for the family’s sake). We were a family like any other, with strengths and vulnerabilities, doing our best to stay afloat in the face of massive anxiety about my mother’s—and our own—survival.

2

Deception and Truth-Telling

Whether our motives are unconscious or intentional, pristine or nefarious, deception is a part of everyday existence. It wears countless faces in daily life and takes on an endless array of forms and functions. Our language itself speaks to the multiplicity of ways that we depart from truth-telling and engage in deceit:

We say, she fibbed, fabricated, exaggerated, minimized, withheld.

We say, she told a white lie, a partial truth, a falsehood, a tall tale.

We say, she embroidered her story, she pulled the wool over our eyes.

We say, she keeps secrets (and also, she can’t keep a secret).

We say, she covered up, covered over, concealed, misled, misinformed, twisted, distorted, falsified, misrepresented the facts.

We say, she is false, elusive, evasive, wily, indirect, tricky, treacherous, manipulative, untrustworthy, unfaithful, sneaky, scheming, calculating, conniving, corrupt.

We say, she is deceitful, deceptive, duplicitous, dishonest.

We say, she is a hypocrite, a cheat, a charlatan, a callous liar, a fraud.

We say, she presented a clever ruse, a bogus deal, an artifice, a pretense, a fiction, a sham, a hoax.

We say, she is phony, artificial, affected.

We say, she is pretending, charading, posturing, faking, holding back, being an imposter, putting up a good front, hiding behind a facade.

We say, she did not own up, come clean, or level with me.

We say, she gaslighted me, messed with my mind, mystified my reality, betrayed and double-crossed me.

We say, she is two-faced; she speaks out of both sides of her mouth.

We say, she speaks falsely.

We say, she cannot face reality; she cannot face the truth; she engages in self-deception.

We say, how brave she was to reveal nothing, how clever to throw them off track.

We say, she acted with discretion.

We say, she lied out of necessity; she lied for the greater good.

We say, she lied with honor.

Our language provides us with incredibly rich possibilities for describing our departures from truth-telling. Different words and phrases evoke varied images of deception, connoting a range of implications about intention and motivation, and the seriousness of harm done. We may have learned to associate some of these words more with women, some more with men. In either case, we have more words to describe the nuances of how we deceive each other than to describe how we love.

Deception is not a “woman’s problem” or even a uniquely human phenomenon, for that matter. From viruses to large mammals—from disease-causing microbes to baboons and chimps—deception is continually at play: an African beetle kills a few ants and attaches their carcasses to its body in order to enter an ant colony to feast undetected; a chimp misdirects her group away from a food source, covers up her own movements so that the location of the food can’t be traced, and returns later to dine by herself. Many baboons and chimps, when threatened, make themselves appear larger. Deception has played a major role in the evolution of human life. It is interesting to think about the fact that deception and “con games” are a way of life in all species and throughout nature. Organisms that do not improve their ability to deceive—and to detect deception—are less apt to survive.

Do only humans engage in calculated deception? Not according to the finest animal trainers, who attribute a capacity for moral understanding to a number of species other than our own. Trainers, notes Vicki Hear...