When I was a little tyke of only four, I was a big ol’ liar. A blatant, OshKosh-B’gosh-overall-wearing, bald-faced liar. Whenever any adult at my play school asked my name, I told them it was Laura.
Even at the tender age of four I knew my name was “unique.” Every time I introduced myself I’d have to listen to a chorus of people saying things like
“Oh what a different name.”
“Wait, how do you pronounce that?”
“Whoa, weird name.”
I was over being “different” after a few weeks of this. So I picked a beautiful, common late-eighties name, Laura, and started telling everyone who asked that that was what I was called. It was a lie. I knew the truth, picked a name that didn’t correspond with said truth, and opted to tell people that nontruth.
That is lying. Knowingly choosing to deceive someone. Lying to people usually isn’t nice or worth it. When the truth comes out, the person who was lied to often feels betrayed and hurt, unless the lie is about a surprise party or present or something . . . those are okay. But as I was saying, lying is a choice, and it usually makes everything worse. When I lied about my name, I embarrassed every other parent who went up to my mom asking if she “belonged to Laura.” And it could have been even worse than that. What if I got hurt or there was an emergency and the parent volunteer was frantically looking through the play school directory for Laura’s emergency contact because little baby Jolenta wanted to lie that day? You catch my drift—don’t lie. It’s not worth it unless you are lying about giving someone you love a cool-ass surprise.
Why am I ranting about lying? Because self-help books love to call their devoted readers liars. The most blatant example of this came in season four, when we lived by Rachel Hollis’s book Girl, Wash Your Face.
Hollis grew up the youngest of four kids in a white, working-class, insular, evangelical Christian community. She describes her childhood as both sheltered and traumatic, and she was desperate to escape. So, at the age of seventeen, she graduated from high school early and launched a new life for herself in Hollywood. Within her first two years there, she landed a job with Miramax, rubbed elbows with wildly famous people, and began dating the man who would eventually become her husband.
Now, Rachel Hollis is the founder of her own event-planning company, the creator of a hugely successful blog, and the author of several books. In Girl, Wash Your Face, Hollis insists that her trajectory can be replicated if we simply choose to be happier and stop lying to ourselves. And she insists that if we’re unhappy, it’s our own fault.
To illustrate her point, she lists, chapter by chapter, the twenty biggest lies she used to tell herself—and the ways those lies kept her from being her happiest self. Along with those lies, she lists the steps she took to rewrite a happier script for herself—steps that she insists we can all take on our journeys to greater joy.
The lies she lists include the following:
This list is full of self-destructive sentiments; I’ll give it that. Holding on to these negative beliefs will definitely detract from anyone’s quality of life. And these mean things should not be believed or adhered to if you want to enjoy life and not hate yourself.
But here’s the thing. These are categorically not lies we’ve made up to tell others or ourselves. This isn’t like randomly choosing to start telling people your name is Laura when really it’s Jolenta. It’s not our fault these false and denigrating beliefs have seeped into our brains and inserted themselves as hard-and-fast rules—we didn’t arbitrarily choose these lies that hold us back from enjoying ourselves and our lives. Picking up self-limiting beliefs isn’t the same as strolling through a meadow and plucking any passing flower that catches your eye. I think it’s a bit more complicated than that.
These lies are instilled by society. Our cultural value systems are often invented by advertising, large corporations, and consumerism—and they implant these self-doubts and false truths in our heads. And they’ve done this for one simple reason, if you ask me: to prey on our insecurities and get us to buy more things to fix all the problems they say we have.
You didn’t create these lies that rotate through your head denigrating you every day. These lies were presented as truth by the powers that be. You are not stupid for buying into them and perpetuating them. I truly don’t believe any book should blame you for being influenced by lies instilled in you by others. How dare any book have the balls to give us a hard time for buying into the lies constructed by others and presented to us as truths? That’s literally victim blaming. Telling people they are responsible for the social inequities and biases that hold them back in life is just another way of keeping oppressed people down and in no way promotes self-care or living life to the fullest. It’s also pretty lazy advice. From what I can see, Hollis found what worked for her and then generalized that advice, saying it could help anyone from any walk of life. And obstacles that she’ll probably never encounter as a white, straight, conventionally attractive woman are written off as “self-limited thinking.”
This insidious message pops up in many other books, too. I touched on this when I was talking about The Miracle Morning, a book that insists the best way to start your journey to self-betterment is to admit you’re a mediocre person. When Kristen and I were living by Mark Manson’s bestselling book The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck, the first step we had to take toward giving zero fucks was to take responsibility for everything that’s occurred in our lives, regardless of whose fault it was initially.
According to Manson, we don’t always control what happens to us, but we can always control how we interpret what happens to us, as well as how we respond. It’s that simple! The more we choose to accept responsibility in our lives, the more ownership we’re supposed to feel.
Fuuuuuuck this notion. Not only is blaming yourself for the actions and beliefs of others superdepressing, but Kristen and I have also found it to be quite self-destructive.
We came head-to-head with this blamey self-help theme when we lived by The Four Agreements by Don Miguel Ruiz. In the book Ruiz lays out four rules or “agreements” to live by. These agreements help us see the self-limiting beliefs that hold us back from joy and push us toward freedom, true happiness, and love.
The second agreement that Ruiz recommends we all live by is this: Don’t take anything personally. He says what others do is not because of you, it’s because of them. Because of this, it should not be important to you if other people think you’re the most magical sparkle pony in the world or the smelliest of all the garbage people. How people react to you isn’t your problem either. If you living your life makes someone say, “You’re hurting me!” that’s on them, because they’re letting themselves be hurt by you.
Although I take things personally, like all the time, when I first read this I was on board. Taking things personally does feel bad, and I don’t like feeling bad. And often it really just is miscommunication. But then I started looking at what taking things personally gets done—it changes laws, it changes lives. Protests and movements come from groups of people taking injustice personally. It felt like more advice that existed to oppress the already disenfranchised.
The thing I hated most about this step was watching how it hurt Kristen. She hated this advice more than anything else we’ve encountered while living by a book. Kristen is the amazing, joyful, inspirational, seemingly perfect person she is because she’s worked really hard to understand that any pain inflicted on her during her childhood was not her fault. This step was asking her to undo all of this hard work and blame herself for being a helpless child, one who was never asking for the abuse that came her way.
What a cruel task to advise in the name of wellness.
I think we take things personally because they are, in fact, personal. Even when they aren’t intended to be, who cares? Damage has been done whether the perpetrator meant to inflict it or not. I’m sick of feeling ashamed for this whole “it’s only business” lie—everyone has feelings, and everyone takes things personally sometimes. What if the time we spent punishing ourselves for feeling feelings were put to a better use? Perhaps that energy could be spent on personal healing or considering the feelings of others. Personally, I’d rather try to learn from my pain and maybe prevent others from feeling similar ills than blame myself for the random acts that have hurt me throughout my life.
The whole time we were living by The Four Agreements I kept thinking about that PE teacher I had in high school who tortured me by ridiculing my body and manhandling me—that felt awfully personal, it definitely personally affected me, and I have every right to take it however I want. In fact, it’s freeing to say how much I took it personally instead of telling myself I’m dumb for being bothered when a person in a position of power took his garbage out on a powerless kid.
Any advice that tells you it’s your fault you were fed lies about your worth and lovability is bad advice. And for people like Kristen, who have busted their asses to move past trauma and abuse at the hands of family members and authority figures, this advice can be retraumatizing.
As Kristen wrote in her verdict when we lived by The Four Agreements, “It’s insane to expect . . . people to open all [their old] wounds back up and then say, ‘Hey, it’s not the abuser’s fault! He didn’t know any better!’”
You’re never to blame for things beyond your control that hurt you or put self-deprecating beliefs in your head without your consent. The societal inequities, racism, body shaming, sexist beauty standards, and other roadblocks put in place to maintain social and economic structures are to blame. Most of these lies have been around in some form or another for generations. So no advice book should ever tell its readers to shoulder the responsibility for these boring old lies.
Instead of blaming ourselves for the deception of others, I wish more books helped us explore how to get to the root of the self-limiting stories we tell that hold us back. Maybe then we can find the actual root of that lie, get mad at it, and pull it out like the gross weed that it is.
But also, please don’t lie.
Dear Kristen and Jolenta,
I just want to point out that authors like Rachel Hollis come from an Evangelical Christian background, and in Evangelical Christianity, it’s vital that we acknowledge our own sins, wrongdoings, and yes, lies. Doing so is the first step to being a better person. Repentance is central to the faith.
—EC
Dear EC,
We’re absolutely not opposed to repentance. We all do things wrong—with other people’s feelings and with our own responsibilities. Why, just yesterday I got short-tempered with my husband—not because he’d actually done something offensive, but because I was hungry and grouchy. And of course, afterward, I apologized—because when we behave badly we absolutely should repent. For more of our thoughts on this, please see our chapter “Offer Gracious Apologies.”
That being said, Jolenta and I also believe there’s a difference between being repentant when we’ve done something wrong and using “I’m a big fat liar” as the jumping-off point for improving our lives. It’s blamey. It’s judgey. And depending on how we look at things, it’s very likely not true.
Too many self-help authors—both Christian and not Christian—do this. And when they do, it’s hard to feel as though they’re not negging us—in other words, breaking us down, only so that they can build us back up—and then selling us a boatload of expensive online classes, life coaching, and conferences afterward. In the case of authors who call on their religion in the process, it can also feel blasphemous, disingenuous, and predatory toward those of the same faith.
Of course, it’s possible that some of these authors genuinely do see themselves as liars, and absolutely believe they must admit their lies in order to enter the kingdom of heaven. If that’s the case, fine. We don’t want to take their religion away. And, EC, we don’t want to take yours away either. But Jolenta and I aren’t part of the same faith community. And we won’t be going around calling ourselves liars anytime soon.
—Kristen