Harriet Lerner - The Dance of Deception: Difference between revisions
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As Harriet Lerner sees it privacy shifts into secrecy when an act of deliberate concealment or hiding has a significant impact on a relationship process. Secrecy is deliberate concealment that makes a difference. | As Harriet Lerner sees it privacy shifts into secrecy when an act of deliberate concealment or hiding has a significant impact on a relationship process. Secrecy is deliberate concealment that makes a difference. | ||
Breast example: not telling a neighbor is being private, not telling your husband is secretive. | Breast example: not telling a neighbor is being private, not telling your husband is secretive. | ||
Why should she tell him? Secrecy protects oneself to being open to the full range of another ones reactions and responses to the real self (purpose of secrecy). But it compounds the painful feelings its meant to deflect. At the very least it blocks possibility. If you can't bring your feelings out the open there is no potential for healing and resolution, for self acceptance and deeper intimacy. With secrecy there is no chance of receiving comfort, understanding and wisdom. Looking it into the eye, cutting it down to size, neutralizing it and drain it of its destructive power. Keeping secrets involves self-deception because we are only aware of the positive functions it serves. We usually keep secrets with the intention to preserve, not fracture, what's precious to us. We keep a secret for a reason but we don't know the emotional cause until after we tell it. | |||
Privacy too may involve concealment that makes a difference. In fact we may invoke the concept of privacy to justify concealment and to pretend that it makes no difference. In the name of privacy we withhold from each other our honest experience. We fail to know each other and be known. We fail individually and collectively to scrutinize the personal or private in ways that would challenge us to seek new truths and revise the old ones. Under patriarchy, which is all that we've known, privacy is for women both necessary and dangerous. Privacy is necessary not only because it's a human need but because speaking out and being out can play some of us emotionally and physically at risk. Privacy is dangerous because the failure to share whats most private and personal isolates us, shames us and keeps us trapped in narrow and false myths about female experience. Feminism taught us that when we share what is most shameful and private we learn that it is most universal and shared. The communality of female experience allows us to challenge old lies and create the space for truth. | |||
Revision as of 18:43, 3 February 2017
On Deception and Truth-Telling -> part of everyday life in all species throughout nature
Pretending and Truth-Telling are not always opposites. Pretending for example my be an indirect move towards truth. In pretending love or courage for example we may discover that it really does exist or that we can enhance our capacity for it. Sometimes pretending is a form of experimentation or imitation that widens our experience and our sense of possibility. It reflects a wish to find ourselves in order to be ourselves.
Aim of this book: Examine how all of us engage with deception and approach truth-telling. A subject that is at the heart of who we are in the world. And what kind of world this is.
What is the right thing?
Book: "The right to lie" Dr. Robert Walk 1970 -> examples of lies that in their view strengthen intimate relationships eg fertility. These lies are born out of necessity and kindness and serve the loving bond.
People justify lying when they think it serves a protective or greater good. But cultural norms have changed.
When it comes to interpreting the motivation of others we can never know the whole story. People might think of their lies as noble lies, as protecting someone etc
How do we know when deception is right, harmless, justified or good for someone in our lives? We differ in our responses to the many way in which people deliberately distort or conceal the truth or how they reveal it. All our experiences and circumstances shape our philosophy of what is and is not the truth and when and how to tell it.
He deserving the facts / He should be protected from the truth / I don't really wanna know if he is sleeping around
Example: Telling a person on a plane when asked if married telling her that she lives with a woman.
Responses of friends (all gay and committed to fight homophobia) differ a lot: 1) honest and brave, if all were like her it would be the greatest weapon against homophobia, she creates the world she wants to live in 2) no telling strangers: need for privacy, she does it for shock value 3) it's not honesty but failure to protect herself, it's crazy 4) no approval, it doesn't do any good, people have to like you first before I open up, just telling them is not strategic
-> Honesty (Whom, What, When and How to tell) is a complex business
In the name of privacy (45min)
Example: Uneasiness about large breasts. Keeping them in shape while sex. Not telling husband.
One view: It's keeping a secret from husband / Other view: It's a private thing
"Privacy is a human right. My right to privacy includes my right to control access to a certain amount of emotional and physical space that I take to be mine. I require periods of time each day when I'm not spoken to, looked at or focused on. I don't seek privacy in order to fool others or to engage in acts of deception rather I seek privacy primarily to protect my integrity and ultimate separateness as a human being. Thus I publically defend my right to privacy and in contrast I don't ever recall using the phrase my right to secrecy. ... Also my right to privacy includes the right to protect my body and any decisions concerning it from unwanted control by others."
Alita Brill, book on privacy, reminds us that privacy relies on the acceptance by others. Vulnerable groups (poor, homeless, elderly, gays, sick, disabled, children, women...) are in most need of privacy and are in most danger of having their privacy invaded. Disempowered groups can't count on having privacy unless those in power (that is not of their kind) will grant it to them. For example the most crucial decisions about what should and should not be private in the lives of women is ultimately decided in legal and political arenas that include few if any women as decision makers. Because I regard privacy my right I'm neither secretive nor guarded about requesting or defending it. In contrast I guard not only my secrets and also the fact that I'm keeping them.
Philosopher Sissela Bok in her book Secrets: On the Ethics of Concealment and Revelation refines the distinction between privacy and secrecy. Secrecy always involves the intention to hide or conceal information from another person just as lying always involves the intention to convince another of what we ourselves do not believe to be true.
As Harriet Lerner sees it privacy shifts into secrecy when an act of deliberate concealment or hiding has a significant impact on a relationship process. Secrecy is deliberate concealment that makes a difference. Breast example: not telling a neighbor is being private, not telling your husband is secretive.
Why should she tell him? Secrecy protects oneself to being open to the full range of another ones reactions and responses to the real self (purpose of secrecy). But it compounds the painful feelings its meant to deflect. At the very least it blocks possibility. If you can't bring your feelings out the open there is no potential for healing and resolution, for self acceptance and deeper intimacy. With secrecy there is no chance of receiving comfort, understanding and wisdom. Looking it into the eye, cutting it down to size, neutralizing it and drain it of its destructive power. Keeping secrets involves self-deception because we are only aware of the positive functions it serves. We usually keep secrets with the intention to preserve, not fracture, what's precious to us. We keep a secret for a reason but we don't know the emotional cause until after we tell it.
Privacy too may involve concealment that makes a difference. In fact we may invoke the concept of privacy to justify concealment and to pretend that it makes no difference. In the name of privacy we withhold from each other our honest experience. We fail to know each other and be known. We fail individually and collectively to scrutinize the personal or private in ways that would challenge us to seek new truths and revise the old ones. Under patriarchy, which is all that we've known, privacy is for women both necessary and dangerous. Privacy is necessary not only because it's a human need but because speaking out and being out can play some of us emotionally and physically at risk. Privacy is dangerous because the failure to share whats most private and personal isolates us, shames us and keeps us trapped in narrow and false myths about female experience. Feminism taught us that when we share what is most shameful and private we learn that it is most universal and shared. The communality of female experience allows us to challenge old lies and create the space for truth.