The Rational Basis® of Happiness Podcast

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The Selfish Path to Romance - download chapter one for free at Dr kenner.com or at amazon.com.
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Here's a question on lying. Did you ever lie as a kid? Or maybe you're still lying? Now, think of what it does to you inside your own mind when you lie. And think of what it does to you, when you get away with a lie. Is that good or bad? Here's a question online from a listener. . .

I lie, Dr. Kenner, I lie for reasons other than personal gain or approval, I was never much of one for telling white lies or lifting the spirits with a lie. Actually, a lot of it I do just to test people. I make up stories about adventures I've never had and things like that. I add shocking things. It's not in my rational self interest. And it puts me in some pretty silly situations. I've recently stopped inventing lies, but I've kept maintaining them. I cannot tell my friends the truth. And I doubt they will care. What do I do?

Okay, you have put yourself in, you've made quite a mess of things. So let's look at what you can first do. And the first thing you can do is to introspect, you want to fully understand yourself as fully as you can. And you could even go and get some professional help for for this. The question that comes to my mind is, why do you need to test people? Why do you enjoy shocking them? What is it that you know about yourself, that causes you to want to live this false life? And you can ask yourself a series of questions. Looking even at the source of your lying, you could say, When did I start lying? What's my earliest memory of lying? Whom did I lie? To what reason? What did I gain? And why did I continue doing this? When did I think about stopping? So you want to ask yourself some really good questions so that the most important person to you yourself, you are much more knowledgeable about yourself, that's the person you want to know better. And then you want to identify what it is about lying that's making you so stressed out and even generating that your question to me?

Well, with the lying, as you're already discovering, you make reality, your enemy, you fake reality. And people talk about a web of lies, it's impossible to keep up lies. Because if I said, Oh, I went to a dance the other night, and I'm thinking in my head, where is was that dance? Well, I think I'll tell them it was at the boiler room. No, no, no, maybe I'll tell them it was at this restaurant. No, maybe it'll be at the bar. And I forget which story did I tell you? And maybe I told someone else a different story. So you have to have this double, triple, quadruple entry system in your own mind. And you're likely to get caught, and those close to the closer that people are to you, the more they know you're lying. They know who you are. So what does that mean? Does that mean you can never get close to a person because you can be discovered? Well, it is a way to keep people at arm's length doesn't mean that you need to befriend people who don't care, or maybe they have the same contempt and cynicism towards the truth. And who cares? They're lying to you, you're lying to them. And it doesn't matter. Well, what's the fun of lying then Right? And lying isn't fun.

Actually, if you think about what you've done to yourself, you're sentencing yourself to a living hell by lying. Anybody who's had an affair and their marriage, or a relationship and they like the partner that they're with, and they're trying to have their cake and eat it too. Who knows what it's like to live a double life. So what do you do now? Where do you go? Well, first, if if you're being accurate with me, you want to congratulate yourself from starting for starting to come clean. Will people around you trust you know, and probably not for a long time because trust has to be earned. However, the most important person in your life is you. And if you can train, retrain your mind to tell the truth. You will be earning trust in yourself and you will be building better premises about yourself and other people and the value of value valuing your own mind. So I want to mention two quotes. I have two quotes here that I think are very relevant. The idea of lying so again, anyone listening in who has ever lied, or maybe you're caught in lies, it's not serving you. It is not selfish to lie. It's self destructive. You are destroying self esteem. You're destroying your relationships with people, you're destroying your connection. Fundamentally, your connection with reality. So here is a quote from . . .

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Hey, I gotta interrupt this because we've got to pay some bills. 30 seconds. That's it. A very quick break and then Ellen will be back.

Romance. Oh, I wish guys knew more about what we want from a relationship. Boy, I wish I knew more about what I want. Where's that ad I saw? Here it is The Selfish Path to Romance - a serious romance guidebook. Download chapter one for free at selfishromance.com and buy it at amazon.com. Hmm, The Selfish Path to Romance. That IS interesting.
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This is a quote from Ayn Rand. Self esteem is reliance on one's power to think it cannot be replaced by one's power to deceive. The self confidence of a scientist and the self confidence of a con man are not interchangeable states and do not come from the same psychological universe. The success of a man who deals with reality augments his self confidence. The success of a con man augments his panic. The intellectual con man has only one defense against panic. The momentary relief he finds by succeeding add further and further frauds.

So I think that that's very well put. Another quote on honesty from the same woman Ayn Rand who wrote Atlas Shrugged and the fountainhead is this: honesty is the recognition of the fact that the unreal is unreal, and can have no value that neither love nor fame nor cash is a value if obtained by fraud, that an attempt to gain value by deceiving the mind of others, is an act of raising your victims to a position higher than reality, where you become a pawn of their blindness, a slave of their non thinking and of their evasions, while their intelligence, their rationality, their perceptiveness become the enemies you have to dread and flee, that you do not care to live as a dependent, least of all dependent on the stupidity of others. Or as a fool who source of values is the fool he fools,

A man succeeds in fulfilling that honesty is not a social duty, not a sacrifice for the sake of others. But the most profoundly selfish virtue, man can practice his refusal to sacrifice the reality of his own existence to the deluded consciousness of others. So just sum that up, it is your life, your mind and if you live at odds with the fact and keep making up these stories, you're undermining your own happiness. If you come clean, you're you're likely to lose some friendships. Some people may hang in there and give you a second chance. But you want to give yourself a second chance and discover the value of honesty. Train your mind, learn the thinking skills, maybe through therapy, to be able to catch yourself at the moment before you lie, and train your mind to say, Just tell the truth. Just say it as it is. Now you want to learn to be tactful, too. I mean, that's important, but you don't want to live at odds with reality.

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For more Dr. Kenner podcasts go to DrKenner.com. And please listen to this ad . . .

Here's an excerpt from The Selfish Path to Romance the serious romance guidebook by clinical psychologist Dr. Ellen Kenner and co author Dr. Edwin Locke, who is world famous for his theories on goal setting . . .

In deciding whether to forgive your partner for an injustice consider is the problem reversible adultery and serious injury due to drunk driving are not reversible. Forgetting the milk is you can get back in the car and go get it. Patterns of neglect may or may not be easily changeable was a proper sincere apology given assuming that an apology is sufficient. For example, Honey, I'm so sorry. I made fun Have you in front of our guests? I was trying to score points for myself. I promise I'll never do it again. any meaningful apology has to be backed up by subsequent behavior that is consistent with it.

You can download chapter one for free by going to DrKenner.com, and you can buy The Selfish Path to Romance at amazon.com