Tag: truth

“The liar lives in fear of losing control. She cannot even
desire a relationship without manipulation, since to be vulnerable to
another person means for her the loss of control. The liar has many friends, and leads an existence of great loneliness.”

But the pathology of lying, she argues, doesn’t merely alienate us
from others — it engenders the greatest loneliness of all, by cutting us
off from ourselves:

“The liar often suffers from amnesia. Amnesia is the silence of the unconscious.

To lie habitually, as a way of life, is to lose contact with the
unconscious. It is like taking sleeping pills, which confer sleep but
blot out dreaming. The unconscious wants truth. It ceases to speak to
those who want something else more than truth.”

Adrienne Rich “Women and Honor: Some Notes on Lying” On Lies, Secrets, and Silence

In lying to others we end up lying to ourselves. We deny the importance of an event, or a person, and thus deprive ourselves of a part of our lives. Or we use one piece of the past or present to screen out another. Thus we lose faith even in our own lives.

An honourable human relationship—that is, one in which two people have the right to use the word “love”—is a process, delicate, violent, often terrifying to both persons involved, a process of refining the truths they can tell each other.

It is important to do this because it breaks down human self-delusion and isolation.

It is important to do this because in so doing we do justice to our own complexity.

It is important to do this because we can count on so few people to go that hard way with us.

It isn’t that to have an honourable relationship with you, I have to understand everything, or tell you everything at once, or that I can know, beforehand, everything I need to tell you.

It means that most of the time I am eager, longing for the possibility of telling you. That these possibilities may seem frightening, but not destructive, to me. That I feel strong enough to hear your tentative and groping words. That we both know we are trying, all the time, to extend the possibilities of truth between us.

The possibility of life between us.

Adrienne Rich, “Women and Honor: Some Notes on Lying,” On Lies, Secrets and Silence