pica_pica

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 truthtelling 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 cant 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 faade.
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 honour.

Our language provides us with incredibly rich possibilities for describing our departures from truth telling. Different words and phrases evoke varied images of deception, connotating 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.


The above excerpt is from yet another book kicking around here. I think I bought it back in 1998 in a desperate attempt to understand her infidelity. Leah pointed it out in my stack of books the other day, whats that about?
As I lay in bed last night starting to read it, the above section hit me really hard for obvious reasons, and I realize that I dont think I ever did read it.

Its called The Dance of Deception pretending and truth-telling in womens lives
by Harriet Lerner.

I think now is probably a good time for me to try (re-?) reading it.