Do you remember the song by Rihanna and Eminem? Here is part of the lyrics....

I can't tell you what it really is

I can only tell you what it feels like

And right now there's a steel knife, in my windpipe I can't breathe, but I still fight, while I can fight

As long as the wrong feels right, it's like I'm in flight

 

The symptoms sound so graphic. Is this the effect of being on the receiving end of lying? "Steel knife in my windpipe, can't breathe". That is, of course if we are aware that we are being lied to. It's not always evident to most.

In the TV series, Lie To Me, starring Tim Roth, the show was inspired by the work of Paul Ekman, the world's foremost expert on facial expressions and a professor emeritus of psychology at the University of California San Francisco. Ekman spoke about his discovery of micro-expressions - expressions of emotions which are displayed very briefly, only 1/5 of a second or even faster.

So how can anyone, apart from experts in this field, detect if your friend or colleague is lying to you in your face? We usually give the benefit of the doubt that the person in front of us having a conversation, is not trying to deceive us. Lying is a form of communication in which two parties are involved: the deceiver and the deceived. These micro-expressions leak what the person expressing them is really feeling. If the other person is smiling to you, but you notice a micro-expression of contempt, you may want to dig a little deeper at what is actually going on beneath the surface.

So why do we lie? What is the psychology behind it? Some research sustains that lies are told for one of two reasons: either the deceptive person believes they stand to gain more from lying than from telling the truth or the deceptive person is incapable of the awareness what the truth is. Leonard Saxe, Ph.D., a polygraph expert and professor of psychology at Brandeis University, says, "lying has long been a part of everyday life. We couldn't get through the day without being deceptive". Saxe points out that it's always better to tell the truth, although, in reality society encourages and even rewards deception. Show up late for an early morning meeting at work and its best not to admit that you overslept; "saying that you were stuck in traffic", punishes you far less.

From my clinical practice experience as a psychotherapist, I believe we also lie to avoid being shamed and showing up as not having integrity, although, when caught out, end up losing us more integrity. I was facilitating a therapy group of prisoners when Mike, an inmate, explained his difficulty in his kitchen duties since he is illiterate and cannot read any recipes. His peers tried to help him by drawing the ingredients. However, this help did not prevent him from having a cooking disaster. The staff disbelieved his mistake was genuine. Mike added that because he has lied to them in the past, nothing he ever says now is credible to them. As I explored his lying as a creative adjustment to his environment as a child, he explained how his father would beat him if he did not live up to his expectations. This also involved public shaming like spitting on him in front of his friends. By time, he learnt to shield himself by pleading his innocence with lies. However, now, his lying was working against him since he felt even more shame when his lies became exposed and was called childish. He lied to save himself from shame but then became shamed even more for his lies.

It turns out that lying is something that most of us are very crafty at doing. Being deceitful is woven into our fabric, to the extent that we can truthfully say that to lie is human. In the Bible, Adam and Eve ate from the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, kicking in God's automatic death penalty. Why did they lie? They could easily have said, "ooops yes, I did wrong" and been honest about it. Instead, Adam blamed Eve, and Eve blamed the snake. Which is something we do till this present day. We transfer blame onto others, through lying or deflecting the truth.

"It wasn't me" sings Shaggy, even though he was caught red-handed. In light of such lyrics, does a "righteous lie" really exist? Friends of mine were raving about the film Life is Beautiful (La Vita e Bella) by Italian director Roberto Benigni. I was left fuming. Granted that the star protected his innocent son from the horrors of the Holocaust atrocities. Had I been instead the child, I could never trust what was real or not in life. Same as when I discovered that Santa never delivered presents. How could I trust that parents haven't lied about everything else they told me?

We have spared patients from telling them the reality of their terminal illness to ease their pain. Are these untruths justified? The closest answer to this came from a dilemma I had when seeing couples in a counselling setting. Does the unfaithful partner tell the spouse about the cheating episode? In supervision, I asked this question several times. The only answer that satisfied me was this, "it all depends if the receiver of the damaging news is mature enough of handling/carrying the emotions that goes along with hearing it". No straight enough answer!

And what about "Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbour", which was drummed into our brains sitting at doctrine lessons? Wikipedia says this: Today, most cultures retain a distinction between lying in general (which is discouraged under most, but not all, circumstances) versus perjury (which is always unlawful under criminal law and liable to punishment). Similarly, historically in Jewish tradition, a distinction was made between lying in general and bearing false witness (perjury) specifically.

I remember an old story about gossip. St Philip Neri assigned a penance to a woman for her sin of spreading gossip. The 16th century saint instructed her to take a feather pillow to the top of the church bell-tower, rip it open and scatter the feathers to the four winds. But Philip Neri then told her to come down from the bell-tower and collect all the feathers that had been dispersed throughout the town. Of course, she couldn't do it. When we detract from others in our speech, our malicious words are scattered around, and cannot be gathered back.

So, let's say you are the one who has lied, spread gossip, hidden your guilty misdemeanours, fooled a nation? How do you sleep at night? I have often wondered about how people could carry a guilty conscious. It's tempting to envisage that the world would become a healthier place when eradicated of the deceptions that seem to interfere with our attempts at genuine communication or intimacy. On the flip side, perhaps our social lives would breakdown under the weight of persistent honesty, with revealed truths destroying our ability to connect with others. The dilemma of lying is clearly a problem, but would we want to stop all our lies? Let's be honest.

If I had to explain this entire article to a six-year-old, I would remind the child about the story of Pinocchio. Tongue in cheek, what would happen if, like Pinocchio, the person lying to us, happens to have the nose grow and grow as the lie is progressing. Now, can you imagine that? We would be glued to our television sets during every news broadcast and political debate! Geppetto carved his desire for a child onto a piece of wood which took life as his son. Pinocchio became ashamed when he realised that he was not a real boy like the others and felt "something is wrong with me". He began to lie in order to hide his shame from the world but his growing nose was a constant reminder of his roots - that he was made from wood and not a real human boy. The Good Fairy helped him accept himself as he is, and love others too, until, becoming genuine made him fully human and a real boy.

Maybe that is what I augur everyone, including myself - to become mature, genuine and responsible human beings, not needing to lie anymore.