Life As Performance Art 62

I promised one of my supervisors that I would blog about therapeutic lies, given that I mentioned the term yesterday during our meeting in a local coffee shop. It happened that the two big comfy chairs were both empty and available. I call those chairs the Thrones. So, as we were taking the Thrones, I joked that this way we can feel as if we rule this domain. A therapeutic lie. My supervisor expressed slight skepticism on the value of the concept of therapeutic lies, since of course, it does sound rather contradictory. Ask the writers of the DSM. It's full of them. I did do a quick consultation with Uncle Google, and it turns out there is almost a full search page about therapeutic lying to dementia sufferers. That kind of goes without saying, I suppose. And I have also had some very delusional clients, like the fellow who believes he is a brain surgeon. I did feel some annoyance, and even said something about this, to the Handydart driver who referred to my client as Doctor Birkenstock (not his real name). When I told my supervisor (a different supervisor) about it later on, he suggested that maybe we could cut a little slack in that kind of situation, given how utterly stuck our client is in his delusional state. I tend to think of therapeutic lying as something that is okay as long as we are only doing it to ourselves and so long as we stay aware that that is exactly what we are doing, we are lying to ourselves, and this is not just to make us feel better, but to activate our imaginations and actually have a little fun with reality as we know it. I'm sure that a lot of you who ride the buses as often as I do have sometimes seen these rather daft young women putting on their make up. Some people find this very annoying, and I also think it's kind of tacky, but really I want to say one of two things to the dumb girls: either that it isn't working, or you look fine already, why ruin it. The whole makeup and cosmetic industry is a splendid example of therapeutic lying for profit. And girls and women, being brainwashed about their physical appearance from early life and into full adulthood, are very effectively taught and conditioned into believing that they are ugly, or at least too flawed and imperfect, and so they have to put stupid expensive paint and powder on their faces, otherwise nobody is going to love them. This is not a seat on the bus, it is my private dressing room, and then I will appear on a catwalk, later a red carpet and we will all be sipping champagne from tall crystal flutes and the whole world is going to worship me as a goddess. And don't get me started about young male gym rats and their muscle fixations. I can appreciate the need to get through the day, and that if we are constantly focussed on the bitter and ugly truth of our lives, we could well be so stranded in our wallows of depression that we are not going to get anything done. So we tell each other, and ourselves, sweet little lies to help us get through the day and make it through the night. And sometimes our suspension of disbelief doesn't know where to end, and we end up believing our dear little lies. I think this is also true with any narrative. For example, the CBC is inflicting on the rest of Canadians its usual pet lies de jour. Right now we are all supposed to be adoring the raptors (a dumb basketball team), shedding sentimental tears for the soldiers who gave their lives for our freedom (not my narrative about the war) at Juneau Beach in France, 1944, while also fist-pumping for the Indigenous women and agreeing that they have been all victims of genocide (and in all likelihood this is true). But when someone seizes the narrative, and makes their truth the only all-encompassing reality, then in another sense we are collectively falling for the therapeutic lie. The same thing happened last year when our public broadcaster tried to get us all damp and barmy about Gord Downie and his band the Tragically Hip. Life is infinitely more complex and messy than the neat formulas that we try to squeeze our narratives into, but this we often end up having to do in order to cope and make sense of the information overload we are forever having to negotiate. By excluding other realities and perspectives, the official narratives take on the nature of propaganda and, by extension, lies. And these lies we wind up repeating to ourselves and to one another, because we have to make it through another day. We have to make it through the night. This is insidious, as it is also dangerous, every bit as it becomes dangerous to be one of those people who know the other narratives and try to to speak them, even if they might appear to contradict the officially sanctioned wisdom. We are forever telling lies. This is how we cope. This also protects us from having to pause and think and ask ourselves exactly what is it from which we are trying to protect ourselves, and why your average human appears to have such a chronic and lethal allergic reaction to the truth.