Lies have short legs – it’s better not to lie

There is a direct relationship between the amount of lies someone tells and their quality of life. The more lies, the less quality of life.

Hello friends!

In my childhood imagination it was funny to imagine the lie (an idea) having a short leg. My mother always said this sentence and I don’t remember exactly when I understood the meaning. If the lie has a short leg, it’s because it won’t get very far, that is, sooner or later people will discover the lie.

In today’s text, I’d like to talk about why it’s better not to lie. It is not an empty and hypocritical moralism. It is a necessity if you have the goal of being happier and more peaceful.

we all lie

One of House’s most well-known phrases is “everybody lies”. As a doctor, specialist in diagnostics, he starts from this principle that lying is universal and it makes no difference whether it is a lie or an omission. If this conception of a TV series character is correct (is it?), we should look for reasons why we lie.

Soon we can think of two: the lie may bring immediate benefits and the lie brings facilities.

The immediate benefits of lying are easy to find. The child who pretends to have a stomachache to avoid going to school, or the partner who pretends to have a headache to avoid intercourse. The politician who says one thing in elections and does another after being elected, or the lie that he won’t be able to do this or that with his friends.

Some lies are more subtle than others. They seem like justifiable excuses or justifications, but deep down they are lies. Any mentally sane person knows when he lies and feels at least a little of what we call a “worst conscience”.

The second reason is that lying brings facilities. In other words, the lie in many cases seems easier to face than the truth.

The truth of finding yourself

The foundation of a psychotherapy is the encounter with oneself. That is why we find, since Freud, the requirement that speech, in the consulting room, be true. In the analysis of a dream, a faulty act or a symptom, the subject who wants to improve the reason why he feels bad must be true. You must be free to speak your own truth.

An example facilitates understanding: let’s say a patient says she wants to radically change her life. In saying this, she puts a number of roadblocks in the way. “Because of this factor, that other and this and that, I cannot radically change my life”. If, for example, the analyst’s interpretation were in the direction of how these impediments are just excuses, the patient could then accept the truth that deep down he does not want to change and that the only person responsible for being the way he is is himself. Or else keep lying to yourself and putting new obstacles…

It is in this sense that I say that lying brings facilities. It’s easy to blame others or circumstances and put yourself in a victim position. Whatever the case, the lie, in addition to being able to bring an immediate benefit, makes it easier to hide the truth from you.

Long term consequences

I imagine that almost everyone knows the story of the boy who loved to lie. One day, at the beach, he started by pretending he was drowning. Everyone helped him and he laughed saying that they had been tricked. The scene was repeated a few times, until he actually drowned and no one was paying attention to him anymore.

From this tragic story, we can visualize that lying can have a terrible consequence, which is isolation and lack of credibility. If you subscribe to a magazine and discover that there has been an error in a publication, that’s fine. Everyone can make mistakes. Now if you start to notice that several published news are misleading, in the long run you will tend not to subscribe to the magazine anymore, as it will have lost all its credibility.

Subjectively and not only for companies, credibility is fundamental. A person who is caught all the time wrapped in lies is ultimately setting the stage for others to turn away from him.

But for me, beyond these negative consequences, the worst of lying is on the inside.

Why is it better not to lie?

Let’s say you make up a story for someone, for whatever reason. You’ll have to keep the lying version in your head and you’ll have to keep all the details so you don’t get caught in the lie. In order not to get caught, you create great uneasiness: you trade your peace for an uncomfortable feeling of the possibility of trouble if the truth is discovered. It’s like the drug dealer who has to keep looking through the hole in the window to see if the police aren’t coming.

And since the lie has a short leg, sooner or later the lie will be discovered and all the discomfort caused psychically will have been in vain. Evidently there are cases in which the lie is not cleared. However, it must be noted that who lied knows he is lying.

A clinical case illustrates the fact:

Jack Kornfield, the American psychologist who had a long training in meditation in Thailand, says that one of his patients came looking for a better quality of life and as soon as he started mindfulness practices he was faced with the lie he was carrying. He had embezzled more than a million dollars from the firm he worked for, without being discovered, and now, according to him, he had no more chance of being caught. However, he knew what he had done and his guilty conscience was suffocating him.

Conclusion

There is a direct relationship between the amount of lies someone tells and their quality of life. The more lies, the less quality of life, since even if it is not discovered, the person himself has to live with the lack of peace of carrying a cognitive dissonance. Therefore, all psychotherapies to a greater or lesser extent work for patients to find and assume their own truth.

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