I don’t have a problem lying to other people, but I really don’t like lying to myself. This is another post about truth and lies. Here is my post from yesterday, in which I explored what lying meant to me and why I did not have a problem doing it in certain situations.
There was a post on Ask A Manager from a person who saw their manager having sex in his car with another director of the company (the two were peers and not in each other’s chain of reports). The letter writer (LW) mentioned that they were taking a picture in the parking lot and only later realized they got the tryst in the background. To make matters worse, they knew and adored their boss’s wife, and knew the couple had children.
They didn’t want to do anything about it; they just wanted to know how to forget what they saw. There were a lot of suggestions, and many of them centered on basically gaslighting oneself.
“Tell yourself that you don’t know the state of your manager’s marriage.” “He might be in an open marriage.” “There are more people in open relationships than you know!”
That’s all true. There are more people in open relationships than most people know. However, it’s still not a good idea to shag with your partner at work, even if it’s all out in the open (as it were).
The people in my immediate family are terrible at remembering anything. My brother truly doesn’t remember discussions we had weeks ago. My father, even before his dementia, was tight-lipped about talking about anything in the past. As for my mother, well, let’s just say that she had rose-colored glasses about herself lasered into her eyes. Yes, it’s a mixed metaphor. Deal with it.
She could not bear to think about anything negative around herself, so if a memory showed her in a bad light or made her remember something unpleasant, she deep-sixed it(well, mostly). I realized when I was in my late twenties that I could not count on anything she said. She would outright deny saying hurtful things to me, and it took me another decade to realize that she was telling the truth as she saw it.
She was not lying about not remembering what she had said to me, but it didn’t make it any better for me. I became the unofficial keeper of the family stories, which was not the position I wanted. I had to do it, though, because her denial of reality was wreaking havoc on my sanity.
Here’s the thing. Before my medical crisis, I had the best memory in my family by a country mile. This was both a good tihng and a bad thing, but it was definitely a thing. I spent a lot of energy remembering things that I didn’t want forgotten because I knew no one else would remember them.
Because of this, I am uncomfortable with telling myself things that aren’t true. I know that in the aformeentioned example, the things that the commenters suggested the LW say to themselves could be true. But probably weren’t. If it works for them, that’s great!
It would not work for me. I would spend too much time trying to convince myself it’s true without ever believing it. See, because I know that the possibility of it being true is minimal. Most likely, the manager was having an old-fashioned affair without the knowledge of his wife. That’s the much more likely possibility. And I would waste too much time trying to convince myself that it wasn’t true, and I would hate that I coludn’t do it.
Because even if he were in an open relationship (the manager), it would be incredibly poor judgement on his part to let it slip at work. Even if he doesn’t have any power over his affair partner or vice-versa, it’s not cool to let that shit spill over into his work.
I would have a hard time not losing respect for my boss. And even if I destroyed all the evidence, never spoke about it with anyone, and tried my best to forget I ever say anything, I would not be able to. And the more I tried to convince myself that I had not seen what I had seen, the worse I would feel.
Instead, I would have to acknowledge that I had seen whatever I saw in the car. I would have to admit to myself that it changed my feelings about my boss and made me lose respect for him. Only after I was able to be truthful with myself would I then be able to figure out what I wanted to do about it.
I spent so much of my life trying to deny my feelings and that reality was what it was. I stuffed it all down, consistently, and now, I have a hard time actually feeling my feelings. When I do, it’s rage a lot of the time–which feels very unsafe. I was told as a very little child that my anger was not acceptable. It was dangerous, harmful, and an affront to my parents.
My father was the only one allowed to have any negative emotions in my family. When he wasn’t home, though, then my mother filled in with abundance. She poured all her negative emotions into me, expecting my fragile exterior not to crack and spill.
This is still my role in her life. She has ‘jokingly’ called me her therapist and admitted that she has used me in that way since I was little. The last time she was here (nearly four years ago), she apologized for doing it. And for bringing up her problems with my father.
My heart shattered a little bit as I said flatly, “But you’re still going to do it.” She laughed somewhat shamefully and admitted that she would. She rattled off a bunch of rationalizations for why this was ok, but I could see in her eyes that she knew it wasn’t.
And, yes, she kept doing it. She still keeps doing it. It’s the whole purpose of her calling me once every third week or so. She asks about my life in a perfunctory way, asks no follow-up questions, and then plunges into her woes for the week/month.
Most of the time, I just listen and make sympathetic noises. I am good at that because I have been doing it all my life. I don’t want to get into that in this post, but needless to say, it’s not something I like doing.
At this point in my life, though, I’m resigned. My mother is not going to change. I won’t say she can’t, but I will say she has no motivation to do so. Why should she when she can just keep doing what she’s been doing all my life?
Because of all this, I need to be true to myself. Even if I lie to other people, I won’t do it to myself.