Why We Lie and What to Do About It

by Susan Campbell

Despite the fact that most of us lie sometimes, I’m pretty sure most people value honest communication. We want to be able to trust the people closest to us, and we want to live in a trustworthy world. So, how do we get from where we are now to where we’d like to be? In this blog, I’ll describe how individuals and groups can develop their capacity for seeing, hearing, and speaking the truth, for discerning truth from falsehood, and for arriving at shared reality. I’ll describe some of the “new human capacities” that I think humans need to develop in order to cope well with the multiple intersecting crises and inconvenient truths facing humanity today.

Getting Comfortable with Discomfort

Most lies are motived by the fear that if we tell the truth, the consequences will be something we think we can’t handle. This could be a feeling we think might be too much for us. Or it could be an inconvenient truth in our world, or a problem in our life, that seems daunting, impossible, or just too much work. What does it really mean when we imagine such consequences, when we fear we can’t handle something? Is it failure that we can’t handle? Is it not being in control of an outcome? Is it something like rejection, or abandonment, or being judged?

Let’s step back and look at these sorts of fears:

If I avoid situations where I might fail, or not get what I want, or where I might be judged, I also fail to develop myself into a person who can handle these things. I keep myself small. I am choosing a protective, defensivestance in relationship to life rather than a truly engaged, authentic life.

At some point in everyone’s life, we choose which road to take—the security and control- oriented life or a life of development and discovery. To survive and thrive in today’s world of exponential change and existential threat, we’ll have to commit ourselves to a life of facing inconvenient truths head-on--adapting to non-stop change and continually stepping out of the familiar and into the unknown. When we’re authentically engaged in life, we can’t really hide from the discomforts of being alive in turbulent times. The party’s over. We have exceeded the carrying capacity of the earth’s resources. We live in a multi-cultural world, where we have to deal with people who are “not like us.” Change is happening exponentially in everything from technological advancement to environmental destruction. If we can accept our current reality, rather than wasting valuable time and energy wishing this wasn’t so, all the energy that we waste complaining, resisting, or assigning blame can now be used for finding healthy, balanced ways to solve complex, systemic problems without becoming overwhelmed.

It’s natural to want to protect ourselves sometimes, and to shy away from the stress and effort it takes to face challenges that might turn out to be above our pay-grade. Even interpersonal problems can seem like this sometimes. (That’s why we have divorce!)

So, how do we balance the need to turn away from painful realities or imagined painful outcomes without going completely into denial? How do we adopt the habit of stretching our comfort zone without becoming compulsive about it?

Triggers, Trauma, and Trigger Work

There are many possible answers to the question of how to get from here to there. For me, the insights that come from a sophisticated understanding of emotional triggers offer some very useful insights. The triggers I’m talking about arise out of personal developmental trauma and collective trauma. Trauma makes it hard to face realities that appear overwhelming or might become overwhelming—too much for our nervous systems to cope with. Trauma can make ordinary life challenges—like the necessity of dealing with interpersonal differences (including differing races, gender identities, sub-culture identities, religious identities, sexual preferences, and lifestyle preference)—seem more dangerous than they really are. Trauma can make us feel all alone—even when we are surrounded by people who love us. And it can give us such a strong “need to belong” or “need for significance” that we make decisions that are actually harmful to our well-being. When old traumas get triggered in these ways, we say that our “amygdala got hijacked,” meaning that the primitive survival alarm system in the brain’s amygdala area is behaving in a way that tricks our minds into believing that our life (or something we depend on for survival) is in danger. So then, we blow up, shut down, freeze, or run away—not great strategies when dealing with real-life problems. But these are the only options a triggered brain can see.

As we know from our own experience (if you’ve ever jumped to a conclusion that later turned out to be false), our minds often do not tell us the truth. Instead the mind (the judging, controlling, protective aspect of mind) makes up plausible-seeming stories to explain or help us justify why we believe as we do or why we are so upset.

You Can Only Be As Honest As You Are Self-aware

The biggest “truth” we all need to come to terms with is the truth about ourselves. And this is where the mind (i.e. the ego-mind) really fails us. We can only be as honest as we are self-aware. And I might add, our ability to make good decisions also depends on self-awareness—awareness of our blind spots and habitual personality habits, as well as our typical trigger reactions.

In this next section, I want to discuss how to grow yourself into a bigger, more resourceful and aware, person who has a pretty good chance of knowing and speaking truth most of the time. I’ll go into understanding and working with your own and others’ emotional triggers.

How Triggering Works

Once we recognize and accept how much of our human creative energy is tied up in the types of fears mentioned above (fears that come from unfortunate past conditioning, unfinished emotional business, and shock trauma—both personal and collective), that’s the first step in healing those fears. In most cases, such fears can be attributed to faulty learning—I call it “learning the wrong thing.” These fears are the product of collective trauma (like war, racism, and faulty collective values like consumerism and fame), childhood conditioning (like learning to not make waves or not show weakness), developmental trauma (like neglect, over-control, and abuse) or later life trauma (like loss and betrayal). Any sort of past trauma will create in the adult nervous system a propensity to go instantly into an automatic survival reaction like fight, flight, or freeze. The brain’s survival alarm system (which we inherited from our early mammalian ancestors) will react extremely fast, before there’s time to think or assess danger because it originally developed to protect our ancestors from life-threatening predators like the saber-toothed tiger. Nowadays, we don’t have to fear that a tiger might jump out from behind the next bush, but we still have this part of our brain scanning for danger and often jumping to the conclusion that we are not safe. Today the type of threats our brain scans for are mostly the types of things that are painful to our egos rather than threats to our physical survival--things like disagreement, disapproval, criticism, rejection, abandonment (feeling alone), being ignored, and being controlled. When we think or imagine such things might be happening, our nervous systems reacts with the same fight-flight-freeze-type reactions as our early ancestors. When this happens, we call it getting “triggered.” When we’re triggered, we’re reacting from the primitive part of the brain that sees very few options (fight, flight, freeze, fold, fawn). And even these options are not chosen. They happen automatically. So, we’re not playing with a full deck. Our primitive brain (and we all have this primitive part) will often detect threat when none exists.

What Good is Information if It’s Not Valid Information?

Our higher brain--the cerebral cortex—that can assess actual danger, think critically, cooperate, problem solve, see things from more than one viewpoint, and empathize—that part of our brain is offline when we’re triggered. Conclusions, decisions and actions that come from the lower, survival-oriented brain will be based on conditioned fears and defensive habits that were installed a long time ago to protect our nervous systems from overwhelm—rather than being based on current reality. When we understand how the triggered brain works, and how when your mind is in this state, it is not feeding you accurate data, this gives you tremendous personal power. You can learn to catch the early warning signs that you are getting triggered—things like raised voice, muffled voice, tight chest, shallow breathing, fearful thoughts that tell you you’re not being heard or respected, blaming thoughts, and so on. You can learn to spot these early warning signs that your amygdala is in overdrive, and do something to calm your nervous system (conscious breathing, feeling your feet on the ground, reminding yourself that you are safe, that sort of thing). Only when you are calm and your cerebral cortex is back in charge, do you have the capacity for an honest, trustworthy response. Remember you can only be a honest as you are self-aware, and when you’re triggered, self-reflection is not available to you. You’ll need to be calmly under the guidance of your higher brain before your sense-making apparatus can function well.

Inoculation Against Manipulation

Understanding the triggering process can also keep you from letting your amygdala get hijacked by bad actors (manipulators, sociopaths, narcissists) who might want to throw your mind into fear or confusion so they can manipulate or control you. Learning about triggering is a necessary survival skill in today’s world. It’s a prerequisite for truth-telling and for discerning truth from falsehood. To make good decisions, we need to have our higher brain online—or notice when it’s not, and know how to quickly get un-triggered. We need to know the difference between reality and un-reality and get back into contact with reality.

Inoculation Against Self-deception

Speaking honestly and discerning falsehood goes hand in hand with becoming good at noticing your actual present situation: who just said what; the actual words you just heard and the voice tone; the feelings and sensations in your body right now. And notice the thoughts that play in your mind if any of those events caused discomfort—noticing these (as clues to what you might be fearing or wanting) without believing everything you think. To know and speak truth, you’ll need to have enough self-awareness to spot your habitual filters (aka perceptual biases). For example, you could have filters that have you imagining someone is not to be trusted if they don’t use good grammar, or if they dress in a way that seems odd to you….or filters that cause you to think you know something you can’t really know or that you know how something will turn out. Generally, this sort of sort of “knowledge” comes from your need to feel in control, control in the sense that thinking you know (vs. being uncertain) gives you a feeling of being on top of the situation. People develop these sorts of control patterns as a way to feel safe in an uncertain or unfriendly world. Our control patterns are the ways our mind tries to keep us from getting into situations where we are vulnerable to getting triggered. Sometimes these control patterns originated in childhood as a way to protect us from the impact of real abuse or neglect. We probably don’t need these protections so much now that we’re big. But the first step in discerning whether a defense mechanism is helpful is to notice that we have it.

Pain Phobia

I often think to myself (particularly if I am consulting with a fairly large, successful corporation): “With all this dysfunctional communication going on, it’s amazing how well they do!” The same could be said for the human race in general. I am often amazed by our capacity to muddle through.

But I’m still wishing for us to aim higher than this. One of the big cultural dysfunctions of our time is what I call “pain phobia.”  Most of us humans—no matter where we grew up or how privileged we are—have not learned that emotional pain is an important and necessary part of being human. No one likes or wants pain. That’s natural. But we avoid it like the plague, and this avoidance messes with our sense-making:

-We go into denial instead of facing an important issue in our lives,

-We don’t see the handwriting on the wall that tells us “something’s not right” so we can course correct,

-We avoid dealing with people who “make us feel” uncomfortable,

-We fail to develop into better versions of ourselves, choosing instead to live within a fairly narrow comfort zone.

Where Does Pain Phobia Come from and What Can We Do About It?

During our early years, as infants and children, we were little and dependent in a world dominated by big people. We depended on these big people--on their love and their skill--for our very lives. In these early stages, our only way to signal our needs (needs to be fed, held, or comforted) was by making sounds and moving our bodies, and when that didn’t work, we cried. Some of our cries were successful, and some weren’t. But pretty often, even if a parent did try to console you, their own nervous system would get so dysregulated that, instead of your learning that emotional pain (fear, hunger, feeling lack of safety) is temporary and an upset nervous system can be calmed, soothed, and regulated, you got the message that your crying just made this big person uncomfortable. And this made you feel even more unsafe. You learned it’s not safe to feel or show upset, as in, “If I express upset/distress/pain, I make matters worse. The big people don’t like it and me. Feeling pain means there’s something wrong with me.”

If you were one of the lucky babies who got held when you cried by an adult with a calm, spacious nervous system, you probably learned that you could go from crying in frustration to feeling calm and safe in a matter of minutes. And in fairness to the average well-educated parent, many parents do hold their child using soothing tones and gestures, but many tend to run out of spaciousness if the child does not calm down within minutes. They try to be patient, but being responsible for an inconsolable infant will wear on most adults’ nervous systems. Their discomfort will be felt by the child, giving the child the message, “Your pain/tears/upset is making mommy feel bad.”  Thus, even children who are not traumatized learn to avoid feeling and expressing emotional pain. Lying and hiding our true feelings, even from ourselves, is the result. So, we grow up handicapped in terms of our ability to perceive and know the truth of our own experience, and to respond to cues that signal the need for change.

This faulty learning can be healed. We can get back into right relationship with emotional pain. The most effective, reliable, path I know for doing this is by learning to use your adult trigger reactions and trauma responses as the doorway into what needs healing.

The Five Steps of Trigger Work

We can learn what I call the “five steps of trigger work” and continue working these steps until we have overcome our pain phobia and all the other faulty lessons we have picked up over the years. These five steps are:

1.     Accept that you have emotional sensitivities left over from early neglect, abuse, over-control, or from accidents or unsafe conditions that were traumatic; understanding that getting triggered is normal, and that there are good ways to work with trigger reactions, where you……

2.     Learn to spot the early warning signs that tell you that your nervous system is overwhelmed or unable to cope—signs like shutting down, blaming, or over-explaining. (These “reactive behaviors” and “reactive feelings” occur when your present situation re-stimulates old repressed memories of past times when you did not feel safe because your real developmental or safety needs were not sufficiently met.)

3.      Learn how to calm yourself and ask for reassurances of safety (co-regulation) when you’re triggered, or, if that’s not available, learn to calm and soothe yourself so you can get back to feeling safe (self-regulation).

4.     Use any anxiety-provoking or triggering event as a doorway to healing and development by “being with” the felt-experience of discomfort/pain/hurt/fear/anxiety/distress from a calm, witnessing, compassionate space within yourself. You can learn this practice called “Compassionate Self-Inquiry” from the guided script in my book, From Triggered to Tranquil — available at Amazon.

5.     Learn how to repair relationship ruptures (when your trigger reaction has caused temporary damage or mistrust) by using one of the scripts provided in that same book.

Trigger work is a form of interpersonal yoga—a practice you take on voluntarily that involves intentional discomfort in order to expand your capacity to experience life to the fullest. When you expand your ability to “experience what is,” the first truth skill in my book, Getting Real, you’re actually expanding your ability to discern and speak the truth. Your need to avoid unpleasant realities dissolves as you learn that emotional pain won’t kill you, it only hurts for a little while, and trigger reactions are nature’s way of showing us what still needs healing—in ourselves, our families, and society. (Getting Real is available at: Amazon).

Healing Collective Trauma: The Whole-making Process

We probably can’t do much to heal society’s collective wounds until more of us have individually experienced what I like to call the “whole-making” process—the process of uncovering, reclaiming, and integrating the parts of ourselves that we have rejected or abandoned. Whole-making involves experiencing ourselves as a whole system where all our parts communicate with and support one another. It’s the process of making the unconscious conscious. Some call it shadow work. We can learn to embody this process through individual trigger work or by working in a process-oriented group that is designed to uncover our lost parts in communion with others. As we come to know this process and trust its workings in our inner and communal lives, we come to embody whole-making as a way of living—a way of continually encountering uncomfortable aspects of ourselves, our fellow humans, and the systems we have created in our own image. Our “image” of what is it to be human expands, and we become ambassadors for the healing powers that Nature has given us.

Part of this whole-making process involves viewing all of humanity and nature as one interdependent whole. As we come to view our fellow humans this way, we come to understand that it is in everyone’s best interest to help create systems where everyone feels safe. If you don’t feel safe in my presence, I am not safe. Fear begets fear.

A big part of trigger work involves developing self-compassion—the kind of tenderness for oneself that we would offer to a much-loved hurting child. In my 58 years as a psychotherapist and relationship coach, I have found that everyone, no matter how damaged, seems to possess within their psyche a potential that could be called “the good mother archetype.” This is a part of the self that has the capacity for empathy and compassion for the parts of the self, and by  extension, the parts of humanity, that are hurting. The compassionate self-inquiry practice I describe in From Triggered to Tranquil is designed to activate this potential and help it develop.

“We Have a Problem” vs. “You’re the Problem”

A more compassionate world is a safer world. And we’re more able to speak and discern the truth when we feel safe (vs. feeling triggered). But in today’s contentious, polarized social climate, this seems like a pipe dream. As a whole, we’re behaving in ways that create less social safety rather than more. But if you know anything about how to successfully resolve conflicts, you know that the parties involved need to define the conflict as “our problem” rather than “your problem”—taking a third-eye position, as in “We have a problem and our problem is we’re so polarized we don’t know when to trust one another,” rather than “You are the problem. You’re not trustworthy.”

It’s true that many people are not trustworthy, but if a problem like this shows up in my life, it’s my responsibility to face it and deal with it in a good way. So, the fact that many people are not trustworthy becomes everyone’s problem. The sooner we get this, the faster we’ll be able to take some form of realistic collective action. I inserted the word realistic in there because I believe that habits like projecting blame on “the others” is an immature and lazy mode of dealing with problems—whether we’re talking about marital problems or problems of governance. I’ve done a lot of marriage counseling in my career, and I see how tempting it is to “want your partner to change so that you can feel better”—i.e. to see them as the problem because you cannot comfortably cope with your differences. Here again, we confront the old comfort zone problem—our natural, but not very helpful resistance to change. This resistance is another example of our mutual problem, our collective problem. I think resistance to change may be a natural part of the human condition, so we may as well embrace it and learn to work with it. And in any system, some parts (the parts that are more fearful or insecure) will have more resistance than other parts. (Some will be more conservative, slower to adopt new things, and some will embrace change more quickly.) This difference is part of what I like to call “the yin-yang energy dance.” But speaking about humanity as a whole, it’s a dance we have yet to learn.

In an earlier section of this blog, I spoke about getting above the level of the problem—in order to see things in relationship to one another and not as discreet, isolated elements. I referred to this notion as we considered trigger work as a process of integrating our lost or rejected parts. And I mention it again, now, as we consider humanity as a whole system—where all our parts are inextricably related whether we like it or not.

I suggest we learn to like it. And I offer trigger work, aka whole-making, as the template for learning to embody the journey toward seeing, sensing, and knowing in our bones that we are all in relationship, all trying to learn the steps to a new dance—a dance where we include emotional discomfort and our resistances against it, as part of the dance.