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These l...
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are usually taught to males by other males and...
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Estrangement from feelings makes it easier for men to lie because they are often in a trance state, utilizing survival strategies of asserting manhood that they learned as boys.
This inability to connect with others carries with it an inability to assume responsibility for causing pain.
Lying, as one form of acting out, is a way they articulate ongoing rage at the failure of love’s promise.
Patriarchal masculinity requires of boys and men not only that they see themselves as more powerful and superior to women but that they do whatever it takes to maintain their controlling position. This is one of the reasons men, more so than women, use lying as a means of gaining power in relationships.
Psychoanalyst Carl Jung insightfully emphasized the truism that “where the will to power is paramount love will be lacking.”
Talk to any group of women about their relationships with men, no matter their race or class, and you will hear stories about the will to power, about the way men use lying, and that includes withholding information, as a way to control and subordinate.
most men use psychological terrorism as a way to subordinate women.
This is a socially acceptable form of coercion.
And lying is one of the most powerful weapons ...
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When men lie to women, presenting a false self, the terrible price they pay to maintain “power over” us is the loss of their capacity to give and receive love. Trust is the foundation of intimacy. When ...
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“Loving justice between a man and a woman does not stand a chance when other men’s manhood matters more. When a man has decided to love manhood more than justice, there are predictable consequences in all his relationships with women. . . . Learning to live as a man of conscience means deciding that your loyalty to the people whom you love is always more important than whatever lingering loyalty you may sometimes feel to other men’s judgment on your manhood.”
This is one of the primary themes in Lerner’s The Dance of Deception. With shrewd insight she calls women to account for our participation in structures of pretense and lies—particularly within family life.
Open, honest, truth-telling individuals value privacy.
Keeping secrets is usually about power, about hiding and concealing information.
While privacy strengthens all our bonds, secrecy weakens and damages connection.
Lerner points out that we do not usually “know the emotional costs of keeping a secret” until the
truth is disclosed. Usually, secrecy involves lying. And lying is always the setting for potential be...
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In today’s world we are taught to fear the truth, to believe it always hurts. We are encouraged to see honest people as naive, as potential losers.
Commitment to knowing love can protect us by keeping us wedded to a life of truth, willing to share ourselves openly and fully in both private and public life.
To know love we have to tell the truth to ourselves and to others. Creating a false self to mask fears and insecurities has become so common that many of us forget who we are and what we feel underneath the pretense.
Lies and secrets burden us and cause stress.
When an individual has always lied, he has no awareness that truth telling
can take away this heavy burden. To know this he must...
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The wounded child inside many males is a boy who, when he first spoke his truths, was silenced by paternal sadism, by a patriarchal world that did not want him to claim his true feelings.
When men and women punish each other for truth telling we reinforce the notion that lies are better.
To be loving we willingly hear each other’s truth and, most important, we affirm the value of truth telling. Lies may make people feel better, but they do not help them to know love.
Commitment is inherent in any genuinely loving relationship. Anyone who is truly concerned for the spiritual growth of another knows, consciously or instinctively, that he or she can significantly foster that growth only through a relationship of constancy.
COMMITMENT TO TRUTH telling lays the groundwork for the openness and honesty that is the heartbeat of love.
We are not born knowing how to love anyone, either ourselves or somebody else. However, we are born able to respond to care. As we grow we can give and receive attention, affection, and joy. Whether we learn how to love ourselves and others will depend on the presence of a loving environment.
Self-love cannot flourish in isolation. It is no easy task to be self-loving.
Using a working definition of love that tells us it is the action we take on behalf of our own or another’s spiritual growth provides us with a beginning blueprint for working on the issue of self-love.
When we see love as a combination of trust, commitment, care, respect, knowledge, and responsibility, we can work on developing these qualities or, if they are already a part of who we are, we can learn to extend them to ourselves.
While it is important for us to understand the origins of fragile self-esteem, it is also possible to bypass this stage (identifying when and where we received negative socialization) and still create a foundation for building self-love.
“the practice of living consciously, self-acceptance, self-responsibility, self-assertiveness, living purposefully and the practice of personal integrity.”
Affirmations work for anyone striving for self-acceptance.
“I’m breaking with old patterns and moving forward with my life.”
Affirmations helped restore my emotional equilibrium.
self-responsibility as the willingness
“to take responsibility for my actions and the attainment of my goals . . . for my life and well-being.”
Taking responsibility means that in the face of barriers we still have the capacity to invent our lives, to shape our destinies in ways that maximize our well-being.
“self-assertiveness,”
“the willingness to stand up for myself, to be who I am openly, to treat myself with respect in all human encounters.”
Many of us learned that passivity lessened the possibility of attack.
Sexist socialization teaches females that self-assertiveness is a threat to femininity.
gossip has been a social interaction wherein women have felt comfortable stating what they really think and
feel.
This division between a false self invented to please others and a more authentic self need not exist when we cultivate positive self-esteem.
Anyone who suffers from low self-esteem can learn by his example. If we succeed without confronting and changing shaky foundations of low self-esteem rooted in contempt and hatred, we will falter along the way.
