Personal Experience of Morita Therapy (1):Lies

sunshine

Lies

by Taisha B., age 27     
  
  When I was a child I was popular and respected but I was also a liar. Looking back, I don't think my lies were different from the lies other kids told, except maybe in quantity. I told I-didn't-do-it kinds of lies to protect myself from punishment and I told tall tales but I always kept in view what the truth was. My lies went no deeper than my words.

Things changed when I was 12. I was still liked and respected but I wasn't any longer in the center of things and that was when, and why, my lies changed. When I was 12 my lies became like a costume meant to make me appear more like other kids than I really was. I told detailed stories about dates I never had with boys who didn't even exist. The truth was, I had no interest in boys when I was 12 and 13. Other girls were even getting pregnant but I had no interest. That was a difference in me I wanted to hide.

Sometimes I still told tall tales like I told when I was a child. For example, I once said I was the cousin of a TV star. Some girls told me I looked like that star, something I'd been told by other people before. Before, when people mentioned the resemblance, I just said, "Really? Thank you." But this one time, when these pretty, popular girls in my Spanish class said it, I said, "She's my cousin." I don't know why I said that. The words just slipped out and the girls did not seem impressed. They said, "She's your cousin? Prove it." And from that time, for a long time, they'd ask me every Spanish class to show them the picture I'd told them I'd bring for proof. I said it was a picture taken at a family Christmas dinner when the TV star and I sat beside each other. Every time I said I forgot the picture, the girls' disbelief grew. So then I said, "My mother won't let me take that picture out of the album she pasted it in and she won't let me bring the album to school." That explanation did me no better so the next day I made it bigger. I brought up the subject of the picture myself before anyone else could mention it. I said, "I got in big trouble with my mom for asking to bring that picture to school. She said I should never tell people my cousin is my cousin. To tell people is to be bragging. I never thought of it that way. I didn't mean to be showing off. I'm sorry."

Whatever outrageous lies I spoke when I was 12 and 13, I never lost sight of the truth.

Eventually, I got interested in boys and I developed some abilities that gave me pleasure and pride and real things to talk about. To my own surprise, I became an honest person. In high school and college, my lies were the kind of tactful evasions that most of us tell when we're old enough to understand that we don't have to say out loud every truth we know.

I lived comfortably as an honest person until I was 22. That was one year after I graduated from college and already I was missing having deadlines to learn things by. Without the deadlines school had given me, I was learning nothing and setting my own deadlines didn't help because when I didn't meet them, I'd just say, "Oh well," and push them back a few weeks more. My brain was rotting. For that reason, I decided to register for an adult education journalism class. I didn't want to become a journalist but I thought the class would force me to learn at least a little about a number of things (so I'd have something to write about) and it would give me deadlines. Don't journalists always have deadlines?

In the journalism class was a woman not much older than I was who had it in mind that her writing was out of the ordinary and should be published. I was intimidated by her when she said how fine a writer she was and when she mentioned the names of editors who encouraged her. I was ashamed of the stupid beginner's exercises I wrote for our assignments. I didn't want this woman to read them. But before the teacher chose my work for class discussion, she chose the woman's and her work was not at all what she'd led me to expect.

A woman who could barely compose a sentence sincerely thought she was a publishable writer!

To me, this kind of lie was new. In the lies familiar to me, the liar always knew the truth but, if her lie was good enough and she told it well, her audience was fooled. But now here was a lie in which the audience knew the truth and only the liar was left a fool. I was immediately scared by this possibility.

Once my eyes were open to this type of lie, I saw one chilling example of it after another.

1) A woman at my office kept saying how self-sacrificing she was. She'd do anything, any time for anyone if it would make their life even just a little easier and she didn't expect gratitude for any of it, she said, and she never asked a thing in return. But she couldn't help feeling a tad resentful from time to time when absolutely none of the people she'd gone way out of her way for was ever willing to lift a finger for her, even when her need was clear. She was strong but she was only human, she said.

The woman saying these words was one of the most exploiting, self-centered people I'd ever met. She wouldn't even get her lunch out of the staff room refrigerator a few yards away from her desk. "Since you're going that way, would you mind...?" she'd ask. And her husband was the one who prepared her lunch and her neighbor took her kid home from school and entertained him free of charge until after my colleague got home from work and had a couple hours to rest and shower. But you could tell this woman, my colleague, really believed her selfless image of herself. At night, she wrote letters of forgiveness to the people she thought neglected and exploited her. She learned this "forgiveness exercise" from a magazine that said it was healing and good for the immune system.

2) The host of a radio advice program said the reason she was so good was that she always listened to people very well but it didn't take long to realize that the one thing she didn't do was listen. My roommates were the ones who introduced me to that radio program. They listened to it together for comic entertainment. The host would say to whoever called her for advice, "I hear you. I hear how angry [or sad or frustrated, etc.] you are." and she would give swift, practical, neat advice but that advice usually came too swiftly, before she knew nearly enough, and it was too neat, oversimplifying the whole messy complexity the caller was trying to convey to the point where it was useless, or it missed the mark altogether. My roommates would laugh and laugh each time the host said, "I hear you" and each time she said how well she listened. They were delighted by a psychologist who rarely listened to anything except flattery and herself. But to me the woman wasn't the least bit funny. Her self-deception increased my fear.

3) An embarrassingly narcissistic "inspirational speaker" giving a lecture at a book store criticized others in his field by name and one after another for their petty competitions and overblown egos.

4) An aspiring actor I saw interviewed on TV said it was his magnetic personality that allowed him to jump over the heads of more boring actors who were just as aspiring and better trained. And because of his fun, magnetic personality that could liven up any crowd, people were always begging him to come and make their party a real party. Once someone even paid him to come to her birthday party because at first he'd said he was too busy to make it. He said this and I was thinking, "This has got to be one of the most offensive human beings ever born." He was so obnoxious I couldn't stand to watch more than a couple minutes of his interview.

I thought these things: Human nature is human nature. If so many people are blind to big, striking flaws in their character, there is every reason to believe that I am just as blind to just as big and striking flaws in my character. To other people, I must appear self-deluded. People are probably laughing at me behind my back the way my roommates laugh at the psychologist who doesn't listen. Or maybe people are trying to avoid me the way I switched channels to avoid hearing any more of the obnoxious actor who thought he had an irresistible personality.

Because I couldn't imagine what lie I was telling myself and I didn't want to appear a fool, I started acting cautious with people. My reasoning was: If I can't know me, no one's going to know me. My imagination started getting out of hand at this point. I started to think that strangers might be staring at me on the train or on the street and that they could be seeing something monstrous about me that I couldn't see. That made me tense every time I went out. I also started reading books about people who had multiple personality disorder. That was the scariest possibility of all--the idea that you could be running around acting in a whole different way that would shame you if you knew but you don't know. I compared myself to the MPD people whose stories I read, seeing what we had in common. My friends noticed a change in me. Because I'd gotten remote, which I hadn't been before, they thought I was depressed and they wondered why.

When I was 24, I thought I might be getting badly mentally ill. Everyone knows that mental illnesses often start when people are in their twenties. I went to a psychiatrist. He said I didn't have schizophrenia but I had a paranoid personality disorder. He gave me medicine that made me lethargic and flattened me out in a way that's hard to put in words. All my feelings flattened down or up into one dull plane. After six months, I stopped the medicine and quit the psychiatrist.

The next year, I read about social anxiety disorder, which was getting to be a fad disease. I thought I might have it so I went to a cognitive-behavioral psychologist who specialized in treating that disease, which she called SAD, but she said I wasn't truly SAD and her method wouldn't be right for me.

After that, I spent a lot of time trying to diagnose myself properly so I could get the right kind of help. I read a lot of stuff on the Internet and in psychology books. There were a lot of diagnoses to choose from but none of them was a good fit. I tried therapy again. The psychologist I went to was nice but I didn't get much out of what we were doing. She seemed to be working with the aim of building up my self-confidence but confidence building somehow missed what was troubling me. I was afraid of becoming too confident because, from what I could see, we humans tell ourselves lies in the areas of our greatest confidence. The actor who thought his magnetic personality attracted, never guessed that it repelled. My colleague who thought selfless generosity was her number one quality, was conspicuously selfish. A woman chose a whole career--giving advice to people--on the basis of what she thought was her strength--listening--but she was too full of herself to listen. The therapist kept asking me what I imagined my lies might be. From the examples of other people, I suspected that they might involve the very aspects of my character that I considered my strengths but I couldn't get past that point, not even with the help of the therapist. I kept looking at what I thought were my strengths. I kept trying to turn those strengths around, making them their opposites, and checking my behavior out for signs of those opposites. I stayed in therapy for about six months, just like with the psychiatrist. I quit when the psychologist asked my permission to present my case at some professional meeting, to get some input from her colleagues. I said immediately no. I was horrified by the prospect of someone who was not me "presenting" me and of people I never met talking about me behind my back.

I found Morita Therapy on the Internet and it interested me because it talked about an "authentic self." That was what I wanted to find, my authentic self. Well, I thought, one more try. Why not?One of the first things different about Morita Therapy was the therapist stopped me from focusing on my diagnosis. I was telling her about the paranoid personality disorder and my fear that I had tendencies towards multiple personality disorder and my discovery that, although I had some symptoms of SAD, I was not SAD, etc., etc. The therapist asked me what difference it would make to me what name we gave my symptoms. Would I behave any differently or would I feel more or less hopeful or would I be able to resolve my problems better if we gave my symptoms one name as opposed to another? I hadn't thought about that before. I tended to think that the name really didn't matter, that we could call my illness "ice cream" or "lady bug" and it would still be the same illness. "But doesn't it matter to you?" I asked the therapist. "Don't you have to know exactly what illness you're treating so you can give the right treatment?" I remembered the psychiatrist selecting medicines on the basis of his diagnosis and the first psychologist rejecting me from her treatment because I didn't have the right diagnosis and the next psychologist wanting to present me to her colleagues so she could get clearer about what was wrong with me. The Morita therapist said she already knew from me what was troubling me so she didn't need to give my troubles a name and she said my therapy wouldn't be a standardized treatment she pulled off the shelf to match a particular diagnosis; we would evolve the therapy together as I lived my life.

Over the course of weeks, the therapist posed questions that got me thinking in different ways. Taking my example of the obnoxious actor, she asked me whether I thought everyone he ever met regarded him the same way I did. My first answer was, Yes, how could anyone not be repulsed by him?

Oh, said the therapist, do you think everyone responds the same way to everything? Does everyone find the same jokes funny? Does everyone find the same clothes beautiful? Does everyone choose the same career or the same kind of animal to have as a pet?

No, I realized. No. It's hard to find agreement. One of my roommates, who I like very much, is going to marry a man I don't like at all. She loves him. Impossible as it is for me to fathom, it could be that there are people in the world who find that aspiring actor fun to be with. He did say that a woman paid him to come to her birthday party. "There's no accounting for tastes."

So with this question and others, the therapist gradually got me to loosen up my thinking. Things are not either this way or the opposite of this way. People don't see things the same way. It's not always that one person knows the truth and the other person is fooled. In many cases, there is no one truth. No one fits neatly into a diagnosis. We all have symptoms and qualities of many diagnoses. It is likely that not everyone sees me in the same way. It is likely that other people see me in ways that I don't see myself because they are looking at me in a different context and from a different perspective. It is also likely that I know myself in ways no one will ever know me because I am the only one who has my context, my history and my inside view.

The therapist also got me thinking about the nature of lies themselves. She asked me to consider the kinds of lies I told when I was a kid. What purpose did they serve? Well, one set of lies was simply intended to spare me from suffering the consequences of bad things that I did, like breaking something belonging to my parents or hitting my sister and brother. The tall tales were something else. They were meant to give me importance and interest in the eyes of others. I told stories I wished were true. They presented me the way I wanted to be. The therapist took my attention then to the radio psychologist who said she listened when she didn't, the inspirational speaker who saw overblown egos and petty competition with colleagues as counterproductive although he himself provided an example of the worst of both, my selfish colleague who considered herself selfless and the woman in my journalism class who couldn't compose a sentence but thought she was ready for the New York Times. What if I applied what I knew about my own lying as a child to the lies these people told about themselves?

That was a good question for me to consider. I realized that these people, too, might be saying what they wish were true about themselves. The psychologist really valued listening. The inspirational speaker saw being at peace with oneself and collaborating with and appreciating colleagues as productive. My colleague saw doing things for others as admirable. What if we look at what I'd considered lies a different way, the Morita therapist suggested. What if we see the people I considered self-deceivers as people who, for some reason, didn't work hard enough to actualize their desires. Instead of becoming the kinds of people they admired and wanted to be, they settled for just saying who they wanted to be. She said she liked my metaphor of lies being a costume you could put on to try to appear who you wanted to be. The desire our words represent is not a lie, it is honest. But what needs to follow the desire is work. If I want to be a person who listens carefully to others then I have to practice every day listening carefully to others. If I want to be a person who contributes to the well-being of others I have to do things each day to further the well-being of others. If I want to be an excellent journalist, I have to write and write and write and do my best to implement criticism I get from my teachers. What do I want, the therapist asked me. What kind of person do I want to be? What do I want to accomplish? Desires are not lies. We can trust them. We can trust them enough to invest our effort towards realizing them.

In therapy, I started looking at what I knew to be facts. My desires were facts. So were all my feelings. If I was sad, that was a fact. If I was hot, that was a fact. I practiced living as my authentic self by paying attention to the things about me that were indisputably true. When I woke up in the morning, before I even got out of bed, the therapist asked me to pay attention to the ways in which I wanted to move. Did I want to stretch? Did I want to wiggle my fingers and toes? Did I want to spring out of bed or curl up slowly or roll over to the edge of the bed...? She told me to let my body move in the ways it wanted to move. And she told me to pay attention to my appetite. When was I hungry and what did I want to eat? Food of what temperature? In what quantity? Of what textures and colors? When was I thirsty? What interests me? Morita Therapy begins with what is true. During bed rest, the person experiences her thoughts, emotions and physical sensations as they are. During the light work stage of the therapy, she follows her interests. I took this approach, step by step building from what I knew.

Facts can't be changed. When it is 100 degrees, it is 100 degrees. The next day a storm may sweep through and lower the temperature and humidity but for today we can't change the fact that it is hot. When I was 12 and 13 and I had no interest in boys, I couldn't change my lack of interest into interest. When I was 14, an interest started to come on its own. I understand now that the inspirational speaker couldn't control his feelings of rivalry with other people in his field. Where he went wrong was not fully acknowledging those feelings. If he'd seen his feelings for what they were, he could have made sure that they didn't stand in the way of his doing the kind of work he wanted to do.

In Morita-based therapy, I kept a journal noting facts I observed about myself and the world and noting work I did each day towards becoming the kind of person I wanted to be and achieving what I wanted to achieve. Not only am I living more authentically and fully now, I am also becoming less judgmental of others.

Last month, a new person was hired where I work. We were getting to know each other and he said he worried about sleep apnea. He saw a TV commercial for a hospital sleep disorders program and it showed a woman suffering from sleep apnea. It talked about how many people had this disorder and about all the bad things that could happen to them. My new colleague and friend lived alone so he worried that his breathing while he slept could be irregular and no one would know about it. "What if I think I had enough sleep but I really didn't?" he said. "I could make mistakes at work or get into an accident in my car because I'm tired. This is a new job. I don't want to mess up." He also worried that he could die during the night because his breathing stopped too long. He was thinking of calling the sleep disorder program on the commercial just to have himself checked out.

I started to laugh because this sleep apnea story was sounding familiar and then I explained my laughter by telling this man about my fears of self-deception. This was the first time I ever confided these fears to someone other than a therapist. I never wanted to tell anyone because my fears made me sound so crazy, I thought anyone in their right mind would slam the door in my face. But here I was telling a new friend everything without any hesitation at all. I didn't worry about what he would think of me. I was telling my story for the purpose of helping him.

When a person is scared of something you do him no good whatsoever to minimize his fear. Fear is one of those facts that can't be changed. You might think other people's fears make no sense: if a person doesn't feel tired and does his work well and drives safely, why would he think he might be secretly tired and likely to make mistakes at work and get into accidents? But if you start by accepting the fear the person has--even when the person is you--and seeing what it has to teach and where it leads if you follow it, you can help.[/size:49408f20c0]