Do People Lie To You To Get Love?

Okay, 11:30. Let's start. My name is Doug Noll, and I am a visionary, a lawyer turned peacemaker, a teacher, and a trainer, and I am doing these Facebook Lives to sort of help you develop a superpower that you don't even know you have, and we'll talk more about that as we go through. But today, the topic I want to take up, which is something that we all confront although we don't realize that we have this problem, is understanding why people lie to you to get your love and approval. And we're going to look at this in the next 30 minutes or so in some depth and get some tools, uh, that will help us. And I see some friends online. Miko, welcome! Good, good to hear from you. So, uh, in the chat, in the comment section on Facebook Live, or, and I think on YouTube too, I'm live streaming to both YouTube and Facebook, put in whatever comments you have, questions you have as we go along. I will take the questions as you pose them to me. There is no agenda here, so I want to make sure that I answer the questions that, uh, you may have as you come up. So feel free to ask questions. And every now and then I'm going to do something like this where if we get a good question, I'll put it up. And there's Miko, his picture, his greetings from Germany. So that's— we'll see that. So when I ask questions, uh, I'll be popping them up. So think about that when you ask the question. Okay, so what I want to do now is flip over to another view this way so that you can look at the slides as I put them up. So the question, of course, we want to answer is why people lie to you to get your love and approval. And let's see if I can get this thing to click forward. So have you ever experienced any of these problems? And if you have, um, put— write, write yes. Or some tell us that you have experienced them, and I'm going to go through them slowly and we can find out how all of you have experienced these very— what I consider to be very common problems. So for example, have you ever dealt with a child who denies responsibility, or denying responsibility for something the child has done wrong? Pretty common. How about At work, a team member glossing over what turns out to be an inconvenient truth. Or how about a family member who's avoiding you, doesn't make eye contact, doesn't want to have a conversation, doesn't return texts, doesn't return calls, is basically in avoidance mode. Or do you experience a situation where people are avoiding difficult, important but difficult conversations? Is that a common problem you're having, or have you ever experienced it? Well, these are all some of what I call the lies that people make to you to get your love and approval. And in many cases it's benign, but in many cases it's not benign because it allows for a breakdown in relationship. And if there is underlying conflict, it allows for that conflict to simmer and boil underneath, and the discomfort becomes more and more intense. So what is going on here? Um, well, let's take a look at this from the perspective of emotions. So I'm going to go through a bunch of different types of emotions that people have when they lie to gain your love or approval. So the first is fear of rejection. People will lie to you to get your love or approval because they're afraid if they tell you the truth, you will reject them. And this is a deep fear. We are social animals. And we need connection, not rejection. So if the fear of rejection is great, the motivation to lie will be great too. People have a fear of consequences. In my work as a professional mediator, one of the things that I find most remarkable is how few people in a conflict are willing to take personal responsibility and personal accountability for what they've done or for the consequences, because they're afraid of— they're afraid of the consequences if, in a legal setting for example, they are found to be wrong or liable. There's a deep-seated fear of abandonment. This goes all the way back to childhood, and children especially have a survival instinct that compels them to attach to a caregiver, a parent most often. And a child knows intuitively— well, I'll say instinctively, it's built into the genes— that abandonment by a parent probably means death, or at least a very difficult life. So we carry this fear of abandonment into our adult relationships. And so if you have a relationship where somebody is fearing that you'll abandon them, or maybe not you, but they just generally have a fear of abandonment in general, then they're more likely to lie to you to get your love and approval, and of course that creates lots of problems. Um, fundamentally, people fear pain, and negative emotions can be experienced as a form of pain. It can be intense. We all know this. So people are going to avoid pain whenever they can, and if that means that they have to lie to you to avoid the pain, uh, and instead get love and approval, then guess what? That's what they're going to do. Many people have very weak self-image or self-worth, and again, this goes all back to childhood programming when you were shamed as a child and humiliated and emotionally invalidated. And haven't had the opportunity yet to, to clear that. And, and so you, you have— if you have a fragile identity where you believe your identity is being threatened by any number of different consequences, or you believe that your identity is going to be threatened by the person— let me rephrase that— if the person who's in your relationship with is has a fear that you will damage their self-worth by what you say or what you do when they tell you the truth, they're going to lie to you because they don't want their self-worth, as low as it is, to be damaged or injured. People have a fear of shame. Shame is one of our basic 9 affects. We're born with it, and it is very powerful, and it's manipulated in early childhood by parents to create social control. But unfortunately, no— nobody deprograms us when we become adults, and so shame can be overwhelming and difficult to deal with. And so people have shame, and they're afraid of being ashamed, so they will lie to you. People likewise have a fear of embarrassment. And they have a fear of humiliation. All of these go back to self-worth, self-esteem, sense of identity in relationship to you. And so these are problem— these are things that people bring to every single relationship. And it doesn't matter whether it's a personal relationship, family relationship, friendship, or a business or professional relationship in a workplace. It's all the same stuff. And people bring all of these fears with them into the relationship they have with you. There is also an interesting fear of being seen. So let me describe that a little bit. So the way we think about it is imagine my two hands. So I'm going to go this way. So this hand here that I'm facing out to you is the hand that I present. This is who I present to you. So when you look at Doug Noll, this is what you see. 'But maybe Doug Noll has another part of himself.' He doesn't, but maybe other people have a part of himself that only I can see. And this is my shame and my lack of self-worth and my worthless sense. This— and this is who I think is really me. A lot of people are this way. So they're going to put the big hand up. Yeah, see, all you can see is the hand. You can't see the other hand. And so what people really get worried about and have a deep fear is that I'm going to see through the hand that I'm facing out. I'm going to see through your hand, through, see through that wall and look at who you really are. And since that person may already have a low self-worth or low self-esteem and think they're utterly worthless and they suffer from imposter syndrome and all this other crap that people have to deal with, that they will, they are very much afraid of that. So they will lie in order to keep the hand up because there's this fear of being seen. So all of these fears cause anxiety, and the one thing that we know about anxiety is that humans will do anything to avoid it. I mean anything. Anxiety evolved in us as is— first of all, anxiety or anxiousness is the anticipation of future danger. So when we're anxious about something, we're not fearful of what's happening right in the moment. We're fearful of something that's going to happen in the future. And since we don't know what's going to happen in the future, we get this emotion called anxiety that produces us— produced inside us. And the purpose is to make us take action And the only way we can reduce anxiety if we're not self-aware is usually by some kind of physical action. Now we can stuff anxiety, you know, we can suppress it or repress it, but we all know that when we do that, it comes, it comes, it's like a water balloon. You take this water balloon and you start squishing it around. You can move the water all through the water balloon and suppress it here, but then it'll pop out on this side, or you can squeeze it here and it'll pop up over here. And guess what? If you squeeze the water balloon too hard, you end up with a big wet mess. And that's kind of the same thing that anxiety is. It's like that water balloon. So people will do anything to avoid anxiety, and they don't have tools to manage their anxiety, then they can oftentimes find themselves in physical and emotional trouble. Anxiety is very, very uncomfortable. For me, when I feel anxious, which is not too often, but when I do, it feels like ants are running up and down my skin. So I get this itchy feeling. It's really uncomfortable. And so I have to, for me, I isolate, well, what is it that's causing me to be anxious? What's the fear? What's the worst thing that can happen? I go through a, I have a formula that I go through to deal with the anxiety. And then I go out, work out for a little while just to work off the adrenaline and excess energy. Um, so as I said, anxiety makes people want to take immediate action to relieve the anxiety. And part of the way they can relieve that anxiety is to lie to you, because once they lie, they've taken the action and they have relieved themselves of the future fear because they've told you something, and now they know you're not going to react to this lie that they've told you. And you probably love them or approve of what they've said, and so it's going to be non-reactive, and that, that's what they're looking for because then they feel soothed. So what's really crazy is that many people will accept short-term relief from this deep anxiety they experience even though they know at some level it's going to cause long-term pain to them. It's going to harm a relationship. There are going to be consequences, but the consequences are simply being bumped down the road. And most people would rather accept the short-term relief, even as opposed to accepting the consequences of a short-term pain to get the long-term gain. And that's just the way we are. Most people don't have the discipline or the courage to accept short-term consequences to preserve relationships. They would rather accept short-term relief by lying for approval, even though it's going to cause long-term pain down the road. And I've learned this lesson the hard way many, many, many, many times, because I've all of this, I've been through all of this many, many times. And it wasn't until I engage my superpower that I'll talk about in a little bit, that I really learned how to manage this and, and deal with this in a way that was constructive in the relationship and prevented people from lying to me and prevented me from frankly lying to other people. So in a moment I'm going to show you this superpower that's going to fix all of this, but first I want to talk about what's really going on. So what's really going on is that you, if people are lying to you for love and approval, are not creating sufficient emotional safety. And that gets us into a question of what is emotional safety? Well, let's look at it from the opposite side. Why is it that most people do not feel emotionally safe? And by emotionally safe, what I mean is you're in a place where you can accept your own emotions, positive, negative, or neutral. They're just there and they don't disturb you. You experience them, but fundamentally those emotions don't define who you are. And likewise, you're emotionally safe when other people are experiencing intense emotions around you, and those intense emotions are not provoking anxiety or fear or a reaction that you want to run from them, for example, or shut those emotions down. But most people don't have this, and most people don't feel emotionally safe, and they've never felt emotionally safe, and they wonder why they're not happy, and they wonder why their relationships are not working, and they wonder why the promise of happily ever after was never fulfilled. It's because they don't feel and never have felt emotionally safe. And the cause of this is that they have been emotionally invalidated from a very young age. And I talk about this a lot. So for example, and I use this example because it's pretty classic, you run outside as a little 2-year-old and you fall over and you skin your knee and you start to cry. And what are you told? You're told, don't cry, don't be a sissy, be a big boy, be a big girl, big girls don't cry, big boys don't cry, oh, it doesn't hurt, and on and on and on and on. And while parents and caregivers think that they're trying to soothe you and comfort you and maybe even toughen you up a little bit, what they are doing through this emotional invalidation is brutally abusing you. They're abusing the little toddler's brain because at about 18 months, the emotional centers of the brain begin to mature. And they have— that those centers of the brain have to go through a certain learning process for the next 5 or 6 years to learn how to master emotions. And I mean, the terrible twos, the, the tantrums and the meltdowns at 2 years old are all part of the brain's way of dealing with emotions. And tantrums are not abnormal, they're perfectly normal. In fact, a child that doesn't have a tantrum, at least in the beginning, is a child you should worry about. But you can help the child work through those tantrums using the superpower I'm going to talk about in a few minutes. The key here is that most families, 96% of all families in fact, are emotionally dysfunctional and emotionally abusive and they don't even know it. They think they're— it's a lovely, kind family. But I can't talk— I can't tell you how many people I've talked to even in the last couple of weeks that have talked about situations, for example, at the dinner table where it was okay for dad to be angry but it was not okay for the children to be angry. They couldn't show any emotions at all in many households, or if they could show emotions, they could only show positive emotions. This is incredibly abusive, and it is a form of invalidation, emotional invalidation, that is pervasive in Western culture, probably pervasive around the world. So what has happened is through this many, many years, 15 years or plus of emotional invalidation, until you, you become an adult and maybe leave the home. You've learned that emotional experiences have not turned out well, and you've learned that as a teenager, that horrible time that we all have to go through, uh, puberty, you've also learned that there are no rules and you sort of stumble your way through it, and you're more embarrassed and humiliated than you are validated by your peers and by other people. And all you learn is that emotional experiences are bad. And so you shut down, you become defensive, you become emotionally unavailable, because it's much less— it's much more comfortable to avoid your emotions than it is to confront them. And so people have been taught that emotions are weak, they're irrational, they're unmanly, they make you vulnerable, and so forth. So let me ask you a question for those of you that are watching. Did you experience anger at the dinner table growing up? Did anybody experience that? And if you did, you pop, pop a yes into the, into a comment. And the, my experience in talking to a lot of people is that this is very, very common. As I said before, it's a situation where Dad or Mom are allowed to be angry. They're allowed to have whatever emotions they want because they're adults, but the children are not allowed to have any kind of emotional experience. Those emotions are evil, they're bad, they're weak, and Mom and Dad will shut you down and send you off to your room without dinner if you have a display of emotion. And the reason for that is because mom and dad can't handle your emotions. They become anxious around your emotional experience, and rather than working with you and validating your emotions, which is what they should be doing, they end up invalidating you and punishing you for having an emotional experience, which is crazy because we're 98% emotional and 2% rational. So parents are doing the opposite of what they should be doing. Because they have to soothe their own experience. Yep. So here's one. Yeah, I did experience anger at the dinner table. Many, many people do. This is very common. And yet we think that we're all alone and isolated, that, oh, I was the only one that ever experienced this. I would say that the vast majority of people experienced anger at the dinner table, and as a child were defenseless against it. And so we build up defenses to protect ourselves. And that leads to lots of problems later in life, including lying to get approval and love from other people. Okay. Earlier I said we would cover a superpower for creating emotional safety. And some of you that I can see on the call probably already have either taken my courses or listened to me before. And so you'll know what the superpower is, but it never hurts going back and reinforcing it. And also for people who have never seen this before, getting an understanding that there is a particular skill and technique that is extraordinarily powerful, and it's a superpower that once you master will change everything in your life. So here's the top-level view. There's a lot more to learn about this, and you'll see links to sources that I put up here as we go along where you can get more information if, if you're interested in learning more. But here's the top-level view. Basically, we are talking about, uh, basically we're talking about a process known as reflecting emotions, or the technical term is called affect labeling, and it involves 3 steps, and here they are. Master these 3 steps and everything changes. I don't have time, of course, in a Facebook Live or YouTube live event to really get into the details of all of this. But that's why I'm putting links up, so if you're intrigued by this, you can go master the superpower yourself. So the first step is ignore the words. So when you are listening to somebody, we learn how to listen to their words. We hear their words. But what would happen if we ignored their words? Well, you're going to think to yourself, geez, well, if I ignore the words, I'm ignoring them. No, no, no, no, you're not ignoring them. You're only ignoring the words they're speaking, because those words for the next minute or two are going to be unimportant. And here's the other thing that's really cool: when you ignore the words and pay attention to the emotions, you will remember what the words are, because all memory is associated with emotion. So if all you do is focus on the emotions, it's not like you won't hear the words, You're just ignoring them, but your brain will still register them, and you'll actually be able to repeat back what the person said verbatim if you ignore the words, as opposed to trying to memorize on the fly what a person said so you can say mirror or reflect back the words word for word. So that's step number 1. Step number 2, you have to read the emotions. Now the challenge is this, that if you are yourself emotionally shut down, defensive, unavailable, or you have unresolved anger, for example, inside yourself. You'd be thinking to yourself, how can I read the emotions of other people when I can't even manage my own emotions? And this is the beauty of this whole thing. We have an innate ability in our brains to read the emotions of other people., and all you have to do is get out of the way of yourself and you can read those emotions efficiently, accurately, and very, very quickly. There are ways to do this. I'm just giving you the top view of how we do this, but actually, if you just let yourself relax and sit in silence, you'll be able to read other people's emotions. One exercise I like people to do is to listen to a, I don't happen to own a television set, but if you own a television set, turn just listen to a television ad and close your eyes. And in the 20-second or 30-second ad, how many emotions can you detect in that ad? And you will find that there will be 10 or 15 different emotions in that ad because all ads are based on emotion. And then the next trick is to start identifying, well, what emotions were there? And just as a really interesting exercise every day, you can take one a television ad and see if you can identify every emotion in that ad as quickly as possible. And that will teach you in just a couple of days that you really can read the emotions of other people. Your brain is hardwired to do it. You just need to exercise the muscle a little bit. And the last thing we do, which is the hardest, is to reflect back the emotions with a you statement. So let's say that somebody's coming to me, a friend, for example, and the friend is really avoiding me, wants to say something that she doesn't think or he doesn't think is gonna be taken well by me. And I'll say, you're really anxious. You're kind of nervous and worried and you're a little scared. And you don't know, you're confused and you don't know how to approach this and you're nervous that bad things will come of it. And notice how I always use the you statement. I didn't do any of that old pop psychology stuff from the 1960s. Oh, what I hear you saying is, no. That's all based on the work of a psychologist named Thomas Gordon. He invented the word active listening. And if you've ever taken an active listening course, you know it doesn't work. The only thing that has been proven to work is using you statements. But problem, people have a really hard time using you statements because it seems so intrusive. Well, you know, now we're getting into our fear, our fear of being rejected, of being abandoned, of being accused of being manipulating or patronizing when we do a you statement. Or maybe we're afraid that if we tell somebody how they're feeling, they will come back. And occasionally people do push back, but not very often. So the key is to reflect back the emotions with the use statement. There's a lot more to learn about this, but that's the basic idea. Now, when you validate emotions by using a use statement, some really amazing things start to happen. First of all, and most importantly, as you validate emotions, which is your new superpower, you begin to create emotional safety. People will feel safe around you because rather than attacking them or invalidating their emotions, you're validating who they are as a human being. And people stop lying to get your love and approval because once they feel safe around you, they won't have a compulsion to lie to get your love or to get your approval. They'll tell you whatever they need to tell you. They know you're not going to explode at them. In fact, they want to talk to you because they're going to feel extremely grateful that you've listened them into existence. You've listened them into existence. And that's how you get people to stop lying, and that's how you create emotional safety. So that's pretty much it. We're right at 30 minutes, which is just the perfect length here. So what I'd like to know, for those of you, a couple of you are online, is does this idea work for you or not? Give a shout out in the comments and let us know what's working for you. And if anybody has any questions about any of this, put your comments in, and we— I can— we'll hang in there and talk for a few minutes and see what kind of stuff you have. So any comments, questions from people online? Processing this. All right, so obviously to do all of this takes some more training and more knowledge. And, uh, if you want to learn more, then— and I know a couple of you that I see here have already been taking the course, which is great— um, here is a link to James, good to hear from you. Here's a link to my two online courses, Basic Emotional Competency and Advanced Emotional Competency, all bundled up in one package. And if you take these two courses and do what I ask you to do as you go through the courses, you will gain a superpower that you have, that you will not believe how powerful it is. It will change your life. And it will change the lives of others around you forever. I learned, I developed these skills back in the early 2000s. 2004 is when I first discovered them. The science support, the neuroscience came out to support this work in 2007. And even then I was getting a lot of skepticism. And so I began to acid test these ideas in maximum security prisons with the Prison of Peace Project that I co-founded with my colleague Laurel Kaufer. And we have today, pre-pandemic, we were in 15 California prisons, 15 prisons in Greece, and a prison in Connecticut, and we've trained thousands of long-term and life, uh, incarcerated people, people serving sentences for life, how to become mediators and peacemakers. And the first thing we teach them are these skills, and the transformations are absolutely unbelievable. So it works. And, but it's counterintuitive and counter-normative. So that's why I put the courses up, so that you have an opportunity to learn and gain the knowledge that what's going on, why does it work, and what kind of problems come up and how do you solve those problems. So that's what the course is all about. Okay, any other questions that anybody has? Well, great. Well, thank you for attending. I'm going to be doing these Facebook Lives, uh, every week. I'll be basically be covering the same ideas but with different applications. So next week I'm going to talk about what to do when someone takes their anger out at you. Next Thursday it'll be 11 o'clock, not 11:30. And so, uh, when you see the event pop out, uh, feel free to sign up and we'll see you next week. And if you need to Ask me any questions, you can contact me at my email, Doug@dougnull.com, or simply message me on Facebook and I'll get, get to it. So thank you so much for joining and hope to see you next week.