Sweet Lies About Life

Post-Traumatic Relationship Syndrome
ProQuest Information and Learning Company

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Traumatic Stressors challenge one's knowledge of the self and/or world. Maimed or shattered beliefs create a state of psychological crisis until new paradigms can be adopted, for these are the basis of our psychological stability. Trauma can destroy our functional illusions of individual invulnerability. There are four core assumptions fundamental to our belief in such invulnerability:

1. The world is benevolent or at least benign;
2. Life is meaningful;
3. We have control over our lives; and
4. Positive self-worth.

The experience of trauma makes one acutely aware that these assumptions are not true and thus one's ability to act as if these basic assumptions about the world are valid; is lost. One can no longer believe that people are basically good and that good things happen to good people or that by engaging in the "right" behaviours, one can create positive outcomes and avoid negative outcomes.

Trauma impairs beliefs about the meaningfulness of life because one cannot make sense of an unpredictable, uncontrollable, and unjust world. Lack of control yields a sense of vulnerability because this person-outcome contingency is broken. The traumatized state reinforces this belief as one's physical and psychological stability has been eroded - one has literally lost control of one's normal modus operandi. A worthy self is deserving of positive outcomes, but trauma proves this too can be an unrealistic expectation. In trauma, fairness, justice, security and stability seem to be arbitrarily and universally removed. Thus, the defence mechanisms which enable one to maintain psychological stability break down, and as Freud (1949) so accurately pointed out, these mechanisms are critical to keeping intolerable levels of anxiety at bay. Without the so-called sweet lies about life - the distortion of reality that these defence mechanisms provide- we cannot maintain psychological equilibrium.

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I have control over my life. The world is benign. Good things happen to good people. If I'm good, if I do everything right, nothing bad will happen to me.

It sounds so silly, written out like that. So naive, so hopeful, so absurd. Like attempting to ward off the evil eye with a talisman. Or knocking on wood and believing the nymph is actually listening.

And yet. It's what we are taught. And, if we're lucky enough to avoid abuse or tragedy or neglect, we grow up able to continue believing in it. I've always said that I've been incredibly lucky - to which my husband tends to reply that I've made a lot of my luck. Both of those statements are true, but the odd thing is, we both deep down believe that I deserve my luck. Because I'm hardworking, and smart, and kind, and generally a good person. (And white. And upper middle class. And straight. And able-bodied. And . . .)

My therapist said this is known as the Just World fallacy - it's useful when you're a child because it socializes and civilizes you; it's less useful when you're confronted with something utterly undeserved and unfair. If you've internalized the Just World fallacy, if you start from the assumption that the universe rewards moral actions and punishes immoral ones, it implies that if you have been terribly betrayed by someone you loved, you must have done something to deserve it. You nagged. You weren't supportive enough. The sex wasn't good enough. You didn't lose that baby weight. You didn't listen. You weren't appreciative. Whatever.

It's the emotional reason we want to blame the victim - at some fundamental, unconscious level, we want the victim to have deserved what they got. Because that means, if we avoid doing anything wrong, we can avoid a similar fate.

Again, written out, it's absurd. And even dangerous (think Trayvon Martin). And yet. We so want to feel in control of our lives. And even if we're not religious - perhaps especially if we don't have a formal religious dogma to provide a structure to our world - it is so tempting to default to the belief in karma. As my mom has pointed out, we often question why bad things happen to good people - but we rarely ask why good things happen to good people.

Recently, my husband and I were driving two cars to the same location, about three hours away. I had the girls, he had the cats. We left within ten minutes of each other. I was stopped twice - TWICE - and both times let go with a warning. Who gets out of a speed trap - the road went from 50 MPH to 30 MPH and the police car was parked just after the sign - with a warning? Who then gets stopped two hours later - because she's driving down the middle of an unpainted road at one in the morning with out-of-state plates - and doesn't get her license run (which would've turned up the earlier warning)? (Let it be noted that I've been stopped a total of two times before in my entire life - and both times was ticketed.)

Meanwhile, by virtue of leaving slightly later and then running an errand, my husband got caught in terrible traffic, making his three hour trip into a five hour ordeal.

I was ridiculously pleased with these facts. Ridiculously. See? the irrational, emotional part of my brain kept saying. You didn't deserve a ticket, after all you've been through. But him stuck in traffic? Ha! Yes! That's karma! (Not that this is nearly sufficient, but I'll take what I can get.)

And my emotional world righted itself just a tiny bit.

Until. Three days later, my overnight bag was stolen. And I lost it. I mean, I completely lost it. I was hanging off the car bumper (so the girls wouldn't see me), howling silently while tears streamed down my face. And I wasn't bawling because I had lost my eight-year-old laptop (which was all backed up, anyways), or my CVS makeup, or my basic and eminently replaceable dressy black heels. I lost it because IT WASN'T FAIR. I DIDN'T DESERVE THIS.

(I never would've guessed that having my bag stolen would be a trigger - but it was, and in some ways a far more intense one than, say, driving past the restaurant where Drew went out to dinner with one of the other women.)

But when my bag turned up, two days later, totally intact - I took it in stride. Because, at some emotional level, I believed that's what I deserved.

Something about this combination of events, along with this reading, forced me to reconfront the absurdity of the sweet lies about life. I can recognize and bemoan this fallacy in others; I didn't want to recognize it in myself.

So, what's the trick? How to soldier on in a world that isn't morally fair, after all?

Not by defaulting to the alternative fallacy that everything happens for a reason. Not by assuming the opposite, that the world is inherently cruel and people are inherently evil. Rather, I think the trick is to recognize at an emotional as well as intellectual level that the universe is indifferent - and that's ok. Because that means that, if and when something terribly painful and unfair happens - it didn't happen because we deserved it.

And instead of sitting smugly in our happy little life, we can also now recognize at a gut level that, when something terribly painful and unfair happens to someone else - it didn't happen because they deserved it, either.