Summer, sun and vacation. Time to be yourself. A little more true, genuine. A little more naked. If it wasn’t for the life lie. The mask * you never take or cast off. The gape between dream and reality.
In an article in the magazine “Amos” a woman in therapy realized she lived in a life-lie.
”This means that I lived in a reality which didn’t make me happy, but a reality I chose to keep firmly to, because it felt safe.”
But I wonder silently; how did she get help in dealing with this? Only the talk-way?
We have different destinies but many of us have something in common – the self-deception.
The life-lie is something we resort to because we can’t stand the truth.
“A boy living with parents who don’t manage to take care of him can’t say: ‘I live in a hell.’ Even if that’s exactly what he does. Because there is no escape from this situation. Instead he has to create a picture of the reality so he can stand it. Therefore he thinks: ’It’s me it’s something wrong with.’ This isn’t nice, but it’s a solution.”
But what was a way to handle an unbearable situation or a method in meeting the inevitable challenges in life at first is transformed by time to its opposite.
With time, sooner or less, people start to wonder over what life they are living and maybe even if they are living a true, genuine life. Often it has started as agony, diffuse or even unconscious. Somewhere you start to have presentiments (in the best cases I would add), but the head doesn’t want to know. One can start to dream intensely (literally?).
The life lie makes something with us. It steals life. But longing (unconscious, as a diffuse drive, emotion) to live genuinely, authentically will sooner or later catch us up. It can be a tragedy if these come late in life, or even very late. I read about false dementia in people having to deal with truths late in life, brain-tests (scanning?) shows there is nothing organically wrong with them.
A man, Mustafa Can, says that it has been an tremendous relief to pierce or perforate the myth. The truth makes it easier to live. But the way to that point wasn’t easy? He and his parents came as immigrants to Sweden 30 years ago from Kurdistan. Until his mother died the family myth was that they should return to Kurdistan. So they never really settled here in Sweden. Tried to combat the feeling that this was their country and new home. But when his mother died and they took her dead body to Kurdistan to bury her there, he realized that they should never return to Kurdistan, only maybe when they were dead. A life-crisis for him? And he wrote a book over this, as a way in processing?
At the same time he thinks that it’s good he knows how it is to live with a life-lie. The strong dream’s backside is that it’s holding the reality away from us. In the worse cases, and in too many cases, until things are too late.
Mustafa Can says that the mechanisms in the life-lie of the individual and a dictatorship are the same.
“Both are totalitarian. Both want to eliminate all that challenges the vision. Both refuse to acknowledge the facts about what life contains.”
Are these sorts of dreams lacking in contact with the reality? But one HAS seen (even if one wasn’t consciously aware?), the life-lie needs knowledge, but one didn’t like what one saw; that one shouldn’t return, that the choice(s) one has/have done was wrong - or right (one can deny such things too? Not being satisfied with what one has, dreaming and longing for something that isn’t in reach?), and one should be more careful with what one had etc.. Therefore one keep ones eyes closed, keep ones ears shut and is hoping everything shall be okay.
The drama “The Wild Duck” by Henrik Ibsen is referred to, in which the family-father Hjalmar Ekdahl realizes that his life and marriage is built on a lie. The truth-speaker Gregers Werle mercilessly reveals everything to him. One could believe that what Werle did should suite today’s people educated in settlements much better than that time’s? Isn’t it what we have learned: Talk about it and come to terms! Came to think of Bergman's "Scenes from a marriage" (from 1973/74 already!).
But on the opening night recently for "The Wild Duck" here in Stockholm one could hear whisperings from the stalls:
"Oh no! Stop! Can’t he stop?”
The life with the lie felt so much better. Can’t everything remain as it was?
But I don’t believe in help a la Dr Phil…
And of course the more we have invested in this lie the more difficult to deal with the truth. Think if all our choices in the life-lie’s name has been in vain, even downright wrong? The more the life-lie starts to falter the greater the efforts to “keep it on its legs.”
A life-lie can many times be about things that were never realized, things one didn’t do. But how come? Yes, because one has put something into ones head that this was no idea and that it didn’t matter. Even if one wanted and thought it mattered - and even mattered a lot.
Many don’t want to get the life-lies nearer, realize how and what one has done and is doing. One is afraid of that realizing them would mean that the life would become turned up-side-down. That one has to change job, divorce, move. But that’s not sure; it doesn’t have to lead to any of these things.
One should probably stop, take a break now and then and ask oneself:
“Do I want this? Why am I doing this?”
They also wrote about different life-lies:
- About the family: our micro cosmos, a closed system where we are allotted different roles. If we start to play another role better suiting who we are and have developed to with time, then this threatens the other’s masks. That’s the reason why the power of the family-lie is so strong.
- About oneself: for instance the belief that I am untalented, unworthy, bad. The lie that one is untalented can help one not to risk becoming disappointed or confronted with ones own power. And the confrontation with ones good sides can probably be extremely painful too? Realizing what one has missed during time? So you can stay in the belief you aren’t worthy too, to avoid the pain in realizing the truth.
- About what makes life worth living - the lie as a life-style: self-deceptions can also be collective. About having a nice home, a glamorous job, and yearly journeys to exotic places. Things that are so common so we don’t event think of them and don’t’ question them. Even if time and relations is actually what we want.
- About the relation: We love each over everything else, more than anything else. Sometimes we don’t dare to acknowledge that the relation has died, but create a silent agreement about our life together. For instance constantly swearing each other love…
They also write that life-lies represses everything that doesn’t fit and is drawn to circumstances selling quick solutions – commercially, ideologically or spiritually. One is easily drawn into sects or even cults? One has to watch this. And say no to milieus having room only for one view.
See Miller on “Deception Kills Love.” And Ingmar Bergman and Käbi Laretei on masks.
* The Nordiska Museum in Stockholm has an exhibition now on masks, on their home site it stands about masks:
“A mask can frighten away evil spirits and provide protection against cuts and blows or the gaze of other people. A mask can hide your true identity or create a new one.
Throughout the ages, masks have been used in every imaginable context, from lavish court festivities to rural yuletide pranks and whenever facial protection is needed. The masks most commonly seen today are the Santa masks that come out on Christmas Eve and the horror masks worn at Halloween. Forty or so masks dating from the 17th century until the present day are on show."
Addition May 31: At the Swedish site of Nordiska muséet it stands about masks:
”’Masken hemlighåller identiteter och uppsåt.
Sociala förväntningar sätts ur spel.
Ordningar rubbas - nya möjligheter skapas.
Vad som helst kan hända.
Just därför har människor tillverkat och
burit masker i årtusenden.’
Masker har använts i alla tider och i olika sammanhang: vid hovens fester, vid julupptåg på landsbygden eller som skydd. De vanligaste nutida maskerna är julaftonens tomtemask och skräckmasker vid Halloween.
En mask kan skrämma bort onda makter, skydda mot hugg och slag eller mot andras blickar. En mask kan dölja vem man är eller skapa en annan identitet.
Ett 40-tal masker ur Nordiska museets samlingar visas. Det är skyddsmasker, fångmasker, maskeradmasker, dödsmasker och traditionsmasker gjorda av bland annat näver, koppar, järn, gips, plast och tyg. En mask är gjord av en damstrumpa med hål för ögon och mun och en maskeradmask tros ha använts av Gustav III. Den är av vinröd sammet och täckt av guldbroderier. Maskerna är från olika epoker - de tidigaste är från 1600-talet och den senaste från idag.
En mask
... kan skrämma bort onda makter.
... kan skydda mot hugg och slag eller mot andras blickar.
... kan dölja vem man är eller skapa en annan identitet.
... kan ingjuta mod att testa nya gränser.
... kan göra en person modigare och farligare än annars.
... kan ge känslan av att slippa ansvara för sina handlingar.
... kan vara ett straff.
... kan bevara minnet av en död person.”
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