Honesty, Integrity, and Moral Insult
Is It Possible to Love, Accept, and Work With People That Constantly Lie?
Both Angel and I developed early on in life an aversion to lies and deceit.
And we also developed our coping mechanisms for when confronted with the same.
For both of us this has consisted of either entirely avoiding people who exhibit deceit actively and consistently, cutting them out of our lives completely. Or else kind of closing up and shutting down in those situations.
These mechanisms have served us.
But they are wounded defence mechanisms.
And now we are faced with a situation where we want to be able to face lies and deceit with a healed alternative response.
This isn’t about allowing lies and deceit — we honour the values we have developed around honesty and integrity.
But it is about us not feeling defeated when faced with it — we want to know how to respond in ways that don’t require what is essentially running away or hiding, and which (especially in the later) leave us feeling completely drained energetically.
We don’t want to experience lies as a threat.
