Martha Beck The Way Of Integrity Quotes

Beware that, when fighting monsters, you yourself do not become a monster.

What upsets people is not what happens to them, but their thoughts about what happens.

And, above all, please learn to trust your inner teacher, the burst of relaxation and freedom that rings through your whole body.

The Indian sage Nisargadatta Maharaj once commented, “The only true statement the mind can make is ‘I do not know.

The extent to which people will defy nature to serve culture can be truly horrifying.

At the deepest level, you know what makes you happy and how to create your best possible life. That knowledge is coded into your very nature. But your nature is forever colliding with a force that can tear it apart: culture.

This was how I discovered the most powerful way I know to kill our own cowardice as we approach a gate to hell. We must pull our minds away from situations that exist only in our hopes and fears, and rivet our attention—all of it—on the present moment.

Believing things that aren’t true for us at the deepest level is the commonest way in which we lose our integrity. Then suffering arises—not as punishment, but as a signal that we’re being torn apart. The purpose of suffering is to help us locate our internal divisions, reclaim our reality, and heal these inner rifts.

we tend to measure our own well-being not by how we feel, but by how our lives compare to other people’s.

Contemplating integrity as a way of life is like deciding to leave your homeland and become a citizen of a new country: it involves a major identity

To be in integrity is to be one thing, whole and undivided.

Because our true nature is serious about restoring us to wholeness, it hauls out the one tool that reliably gets our attention: suffering.

In this rush to conform, we often end up ignoring or overruling our genuine feelings - even intense ones, like longing or anguish - to please our cultures. At that point, we're divided against ourselves. We aren't in integrity (one thing) but in duplicity (two things). Or we may try to fit in with a number of different groups, living in multiplicity (multiple things).

If you don't walk your true path, you don't find your true people. You end up in places you don't like, learning skills that don't fulfill you, adopting values and customs that feel wrong.

Is it true? (Yes or no. If no, move to question 3.) Can I absolutely know that it’s true? (Yes or no.) How do I react, what happens, when I believe that thought? Who or what would I be without the thought?

whatever your lies are, digging through them will eventually take you to the center of your inferno. There you’ll encounter three major aspects of your own psyche: the monster, the betrayer, and the betrayed.

And if the whine and sting of purposelessness isn’t enough to shake us out of our sleepwalking, our subconscious minds will up the ante. They’ll summon the megafauna, the mental wild beasts we call mood states.

express anger. But their reaction is to create justice, rather than merely destroy whatever is bothering them.

They include peace, freedom, love, comfort, and belonging.

Psychological suffering always comes from internal splits between what your encultured mind believes and what feels deeply true to you.

No one can sleepwalk away from integrity indefinitely, because things get worse the further we travel in the wrong direction.

There are infinite ways to make a living. At some level - a deep, instinctive level - you know which of them will work for you. You can feel it immediately when a job requires you to push aside your true desires.

Shifting from righteous self-defense into creativity can catalyze life-changing, even world-changing action.

If someone in your life consistently hurts you, ask yourself if you would treat anyone else the way you’re letting yourself be treated.

If you’ve ever found yourself snapping at someone you dearly love, or sitting down to complete a work project only to spend five hours shopping for home tattoo kits online, it’s probably because you’re internally divided. You’re trying to act in ways that don’t feel right to you at the deepest level. Whenever we do this, our lives begin to go pear-shaped. Emotionally, we feel grumpy, sad, or numb. Physically, our immune systems and muscles weaken; we might get sick, and even if we don’t, our energy flattens. Mentally, we lose focus and clarity. That’s how it feels to be out of integrity.

Physical pain comes from events. Psychological suffering comes from the way we deal with those events. It can grow exponentially in situations where pain is entirely absent. Even when you’re curled up in a comfortable chair, suffering can make you wish you’d never been born.

the single step that will put you squarely on the way of integrity. It has never failed me or any of my clients. And it’s so simple: just tell the truth about how lost you are.

when we’re still wandering around the dark wood of error, knowing we’re lost but clueless about how to find ourselves, a teacher is essential. So stay alert for anyone that may offer help or guidance. The teacher may not look like what you expect.

When we’re feeling fundamentally lost, afflicted by purposelessness, foul moods, and bad jobs, anything that stimulates the brain’s pleasure centers can become an addiction. Some of the most common, aside from the dynamic duo of drugs and alcohol, are gambling, sex, intense relationship drama, shopping, binge eating, and staring at the internet day and night without pausing to sleep, eat, or pee.

Many of us might use the word love to describe the kind of devotion spiders feel for flies. Spiders genuinely love flies (the way they taste, the way they crunch). They express that love by wrapping up any fly they can catch and keeping it close, slurping out its life force bit by bit. I’ve had many clients whose parents, friends, or lovers treated them this way. I call it “spider love,” though of course it’s really not love at all; it’s a predator-prey relationship. And soul teachers never do it. Real love doesn’t want anyone to be immobilized or attached, certainly not in the dark wood of error. It wants—always, always, always—to set us free.

Now that I’ve given you a few pointers for recognizing an outward soul teacher, I want to talk more about the inner teacher, the one who is your goal. This ultimate guide has been with you since before you were born, and will be available to you until the moment you draw your last breath (and who knows, maybe even after).

Won’t people think you’re wrong? Won’t they judge you? Yes, dear reader, they will. As you spot the innocent errors that have been damaging your life, as you dissolve them with observation and inquiry, you’ll soon end up breaking the rules. Which rules? I don’t know. But the people around you who believe in those rules may find your behavior dubious or even wicked. You’ll feel a thousand times freer—and they won’t like it. Don’t worry. This can actually be evidence you’re on the right track. You’re entering the part of the inferno where you’ll learn to cope with judgment—yours, and other people’s. Things are about to get radical.

Getting out of hell doesn’t mean picking up a new set of chains, a new set of absolute beliefs. It means replacing rigid convictions with curious openness, to your own sense of truth in every moment.

they all shifted from obsessing over the same torturous thoughts to noticing that the world around them was full of ideas and experiences that brought them joy. Without much fanfare, they moved on to happier lives.

Whatever your terrors are right now, whatever your inner demons are screaming at you, notice that they don’t feel like your inner teacher, that clear chime of truth. They aren’t just unnecessary, they’re toxic.

Your true self is showing you that. It’s trying to get your attention, to help you question, doubt, and drop the beliefs that are trapping you in hell. If you can feel that, congratulations. Your trip through the inferno isn’t over yet, but you’ve rejoined the way of integrity.

listening to our inner teacher is the most important skill we need to follow the way of integrity.

So another characteristic of the inner teacher—the most important one—is that you can feel it in all aspects of your being (body/mind/heart/soul) at once.

Anything you do solely to influence others, rather than to express your true nature, is a hustle. Being polite to get approval is a hustle. Flirting with people to make them feel special is a hustle. Sitting solemnly in church, consciously exuding piety, is a hustle. Acting a little bit stupid to avoid threatening others is a hustle. Using big words to impress is a hustle. Wearing certain clothes because you want to look professional, or sexy, or hip, or rich, or tall, or nonconformist, or demure—hustle, hustle, hustle.

Many of us might use the word love to describe the kind of devotion spiders feel for flies. Spiders genuinely love flies (the way they taste, the way they crunch). They express that love by wrapping up any fly they can catch and keeping it close, slurping out its life force bit by bit. I’ve had many clients whose parents, friends, or lovers treated them this way. I call it “spider love,” though of course it’s really not love at all; it’s a predator

You can trust everything in the entire universe to be as it is. You are already coping with it right now, and right now is the only thing you’ll ever have to cope with.

In 2018 a group of psychologists led by J. D. W. Clifton published the results of a five-year study, for which they analyzed enormous amounts of internet data looking for major trends in human attitudes. They found that our culture is divided between people who see the universe as dangerous, frightening, and meaningless, and those who see it as “safe, enticing, and alive.” The researchers called these two perspectives “primal world beliefs.” They described how, because perception is selectively screened and interpreted according to belief systems, people in either camp can find abundant evidence to support their worldviews.

Integrity is the cure for unhappiness. Period.

When you experience unity of intention, fascination, and purpose, you live like a bloodhound on a scent, joyfully doing what feels truest in each moment. Your daily work, whether it’s writing computer code, gardening, or building houses, is so absorbing that at the end of the day you don’t really want to stop. But when you do, you enjoy hanging out with loved ones so much, and sleep is so delicious you can’t imagine anything sweeter. And when you wake up the next morning, the day ahead seems so enticing you practically bound out of bed.

In this rush to conform, we often end up ignoring or overruling our genuine feelings—even intense ones, like longing or anguish—to please our cultures. At that point, we’re divided against ourselves. We aren’t in integrity (one thing) but in duplicity (two things). Or we may try to fit in with a number of different groups, living in multiplicity (many things). We abandon our true nature and become pawns of our culture: smiling politely, sitting attentively, wearing the “perfect” uncomfortable clothes. This is why a soldier will march into gunfire without complaint. It’s why whole communities once thought it made sense to burn a few witches here and there. The extent to which people will defy nature to serve culture can be truly horrifying. But the whole thing works very well from the perspective of creating and sustaining human groups. There’s

In this rush to conform, we often end up ignoring or overruling our genuine feelings—even intense ones, like longing or anguish—to please our cultures. At that point, we’re divided against ourselves. We aren’t in integrity (one thing) but in duplicity (two things). Or we may try to fit in with a number of different groups, living in multiplicity (many things). We abandon our true nature and become pawns of our culture: smiling politely, sitting attentively, wearing the “perfect” uncomfortable clothes. This is why a soldier will march into gunfire without complaint. It’s why whole communities once thought it made sense to burn a few witches here and there. The extent to which people will defy nature to serve culture can be truly horrifying. But the whole thing works very well from the perspective of creating and sustaining human groups.

The word integrity has taken on a slightly prim, judgmental nuance in modern English, but the word comes from the Latin integer, which simply means “intact.” To be in integrity is to be one thing, whole and undivided.

The word integrity has taken on a slightly prim, judgmental nuance in modern English, but the word comes from the Latin integer, which simply means “intact.” To be in integrity is to be one thing, whole and undivided. When a plane is in integrity, all its millions of parts work together smoothly and cooperatively. If it loses integrity, it may stall, falter, or crash. There’s no judgment here. Just physics.

But speaking of science, solid research shows all sorts of links between living in harmony with our truth and maintaining good health. There’s a whole field of medicine, psychoneuroimmunology, that focuses on the way psychological stress, including the stress of lying or keeping secrets, contributes to illness. Studies have linked deception and secret-keeping to elevated heart rate and blood pressure, increased stress hormones, higher bad-cholesterol and glucose levels, and reduced immune responses. The more significant our deceptive behavior, the worse the effect on health. For example, in one study of gay men with HIV, researchers discovered that the more closeted the men were about their sexuality, the faster their disease progressed. There was a dose-response relationship between the level of concealment and immune status—in other words, the greater the concealment, the higher the rates of disease and death. “Don’t ask, don’t tell” sounds benign, but living in even tacit separation from our real identity can literally hasten our death.

There are infinite ways to make a living. At some level—a deep, instinctive level—you know which of them will truly work for you. You can feel it immediately when a job requires you to push aside your true desires. Your awareness of your true career path may be buried deep under layers of acculturated false beliefs. But it’s still there, like a flower trying to grow through toxic sludge. If you continue to resist your genuine impulses, you’ll become slowly aware that what you’re doing to make a living is turning you into the walking dead.

The process that frees us from our inner hell is very simple, though not necessarily easy. Dante models it in The Divine Comedy. Horrified by the anguish of the tormented souls, the poet often wants to give up or turn back. But his soul teacher won’t let him. Throughout the inferno, Virgil keeps urging Dante to do three things: observe the demons, ask questions about them, and move on.

At the core of all this hoping was the mega-hope that I wouldn’t have to lose anything. Not my lifestyle, my goals, my self-image, my work, my place in society. I was twenty-five: old enough to imagine the losses ahead of me, but not old enough to realize that hope is a harsh, unstable master and that there are many benefits to abandoning it. This is the next step on your journey toward integrity.

Our worst psychological suffering comes from thoughts that we genuinely believe, while simultaneously knowing they aren’t true.

If whatever you’re doing isn’t working, don’t do it harder.

Listen: the problem isn’t how hard you’re working, it’s that you’re working on things that aren’t right for you. Your goals and motivations aren’t harmonizing with your deepest truth. They didn’t come from your own natural inclinations. They came from the two forces that drive us all off our true paths: trauma and socialization.

Real love doesn’t want anyone to be immobilized or attached, certainly not in the dark wood of error. It wants—always, always, always—to set us free.

Now, of course, having just told you that your inner teacher is indescribable, I’m going to try to describe it. When we think, hear, or understand something that’s deeply true for us, our inner teachers rise in us as a delicious, lucid resonance. When we grasp truth—any truth, from the correct solution to a math problem to the capacity for love—all of our ways of knowing align. We recognize this alignment as our ideal state of being. It feels calm, clear, still, open. That feeling is the inner teacher saying yes.

The body’s reaction to recognizing truth is relaxation, a literal, involuntary release of muscle tension. When we surrender to the truth, even difficult truth, our bodies may go almost limp and we begin breathing more deeply. This may have happened to you when you read the statements at the end of Chapter 1, such as “I don’t know what to do” or “I need help.” When our minds recognize truth, we experience that invisible cartoon light bulb going on in our heads, the feeling of a riddle being solved. “Aha!” we think, or “I get it!” or “Of course!” All the puzzle pieces fit. The math works. Everything makes logical sense. To our heart, the ring of truth feels like a flower opening up. In total integrity, we’re completely available to all emotion: overwhelming love, deep grief, terrible anger, sharp fear. This emotion may be painful, but it doesn’t cause the intense, dull suffering we feel in the dark wood of error. The emotional pain of a hard truth is eased by our soul’s response to aligning with reality. Around and beyond mere emotion, we feel a sense of freedom, a vast openness that includes all aspects of our experience. We connect with an unalterable stillness around and within us. There’s space for pain. There’s space for joy. And the space in which all sensation happens is made up of absolute well-being. It is (we are) a perfect, fertile no-thing-ness in which everything, even pain, has a useful place.

We don’t have to trust that we’ll be okay in ten minutes or ten seconds, only in this razor-thin instant called NOW. If we do this repeatedly, we discover something remarkable: by dropping resistance to whatever is happening right now, we are always able to cope. Even when we’re not coping, allowing ourselves to not-cope gets us through this moment, over and over and over. Presence is the sanctuary integrity offers us as denial comes to its dreaded end.

Just notice that right now, you’re basically okay. You can trust that gravity will keep holding you in place. You can trust the air you’re breathing. You can trust everything in the entire universe to be as it is. You are already coping with it right now, and right now is the only thing you’ll ever have to cope with.

We don’t have to trust that we’ll be okay in ten minutes or ten seconds, only in this razor-thin instant called NOW.

When we aren’t distracted by culture, we move directly toward fulfilling our innate longing.

Their wants are as widely divergent as their social conditioning. They want different kinds of clothes, houses, experiences, relationships. But they all yearn for just a few things, and those things are remarkably consistent, even among people from very different cultures. They include peace, freedom, love, comfort, and belonging.

Here’s what I’ve noticed: if you spend your life pursuing culturally defined goals (climbing Mount Delectable), you may manage to get what you want, but you probably won’t get what you yearn for. If you choose to leave Mount Delectable behind, you might not get what you want in that socially driven, craving kind of way. But you won’t care, because your entire world will fill up—pressed down, shaken together, and running over, as the Good Book says—with all the things for which you yearn. And here is how to leave Mount Delectable behind: stop with the hustle.

When we’re feeling fundamentally lost, afflicted by purposelessness, foul moods, and bad jobs, anything that stimulates the brain’s pleasure centers can become an addiction.

It turns out that the deeper, evolutionarily older, more subtle areas of the brain are much better at making decisions than the calculating neocortex. That’s why, in order to “hear” our inner teachers, we have to tune in to physical and emotional sensations. No matter how hard our minds insist on something like “I am meant to take out the garbage,” the body and emotions won’t hop on that ride. They’ll stiffen our muscles, clench our jaws, make our stomachs churn and our heads ache. It’s not that there’s anything wrong with taking out the garbage. You don’t need to stop doing it. But taking out the garbage is not the meaning of your

It turns out that the deeper, evolutionarily older, more subtle areas of the brain are much better at making decisions than the calculating neocortex. That’s why, in order to “hear” our inner teachers, we have to tune in to physical and emotional sensations. No matter how hard our minds insist on something like “I am meant to take out the garbage,” the body and emotions won’t hop on that ride. They’ll stiffen our muscles, clench our jaws, make our stomachs churn and our heads ache. It’s not that there’s anything wrong with taking out the garbage. You don’t need to stop doing it. But taking out the garbage is not the meaning of your life.

The first neuroscientists who studied decision-making were surprised to find that people who’d damaged the logical, calculating areas of their brains had no trouble making good choices. On the other hand, when people had damaged parts of their brains that handled emotion, they became unable to make any kind of decision. They would weigh options endlessly, dithering and comparing, but never moving forward. They could reason all day, but they couldn’t recognize a good decision if it bit them on both legs.

I couldn’t know what would happen to him, me, or anyone else, except that we will all eventually die.

Your true self, by contrast, is pure nature. It doesn’t give a tinker’s damn who wore it best, or if anyone wore it at all. Olympic medals and Pulitzer Prizes interest it only because they’re shiny. Your true nature loves things for their capacity to bring genuine delight, right here, right now. It loves romps, friends, skin contact, sunlight, water, laughter, the smell of trees, the delicious stillness of deep sleep.

Whenever you go against your true nature to serve your culture, you freaking hate it.

The outer teacher is merely a milestone. It is only your inner teacher that will walk with you to the goal, for he [she] is the goal.

Many of my clients, having dipped a toe in popular psychology, believe that “positive” thoughts, like “I love my job,” make us happy, while negative thoughts, like “I hate my job,” make us unhappy. But a cheerful statement can feel like soulmurder if you know it isn’t true, while a supposedly “negative” thought can set you free to experience joy.

So it’s not the positivity or negativity of a thought that makes us feel happy or sad, trapped or free. The operative variable is whether the thoughts we believe match what we deeply feel to be the truth. Being split from ourselves is hell. Reclaiming integrity is the way out of it.

In the pursuit of knowledge, every day something is added. In the practice of the Tao [Way], every day something is dropped. Less and less do you need to force things, until finally you arrive at non-action. When nothing is done, nothing is left undone.

But I’ve learned that the whole trajectory of our lives can turn on the hinges of such minuscule events as they accumulate over time. Each choice against our sense of truth, no matter how trivial, makes us more likely to self-sabotage. It’s as if, by splitting ourselves, we launch the alter ego that destroys our best intentions.

Once we’ve “othered” someone, we may unconsciously define them as inhuman, inferior, even abhorrent. Why, the very existence of such anomalous creatures is a threat to our way of being! When we band together with our in-groups to complain about the “others,” our adrenaline and other “fight” hormones spike, giving us an intoxicating, artificial sense of purpose and belonging. The more violently we speak and act, the more righteous we feel. Again, this is different from the anger we feel when we experience injustice or oppression. Healthy anger motivates discernment. It focuses on specific problems. It works toward changing conditions, and when those conditions change, it subsides. Righteous error attacks for vague, ill-defined, or contradictory reasons, and doesn’t change with circumstances. It passes judgment, often without evidence. Healthy anger makes judgments, discerning what is fair and what isn’t. Here’s a chart to help you tell them apart.

Once we’ve “othered” someone, we may unconsciously define them as inhuman, inferior, even abhorrent. Why, the very existence of such anomalous creatures is a threat to our way of being! When we band together with our in-groups to complain about the “others,” our adrenaline and other “fight” hormones spike, giving us an intoxicating, artificial sense of purpose and belonging. The more violently we speak and act, the more righteous we feel. Again, this is different from the anger we feel when we experience injustice or oppression. Healthy anger motivates discernment. It focuses on specific problems. It works toward changing conditions, and when those conditions change, it subsides. Righteous error attacks for vague, ill-defined, or contradictory reasons, and doesn’t change with circumstances. It passes judgment, often without evidence. Healthy anger makes judgments, discerning what is fair and what isn’t.

The surge of pleasure our egos get from attacking others is a great emotional painkiller.

there’s only one massive lie that turns us toward violence. It is the fundamental belief of the righteous brain. It says, “I can fix everything that upsets me by destroying my enemies.

Arun Gandhi, the grandson of one of history’s most powerful proponents of nonviolence, wrote that Mahatma Gandhi “saw anger as a good thing, as the fuel for change.” But when we become violent, intending solely to hurt or damage, we’ve joined the forces of destruction. It takes wisdom and maturity to use anger for positive change without becoming mindlessly violent. It’s much easier—and in the short term, more gratifying—to go into a psychological mode of blind attack.

We’re also unique in that we’re frightened not only by powerful creatures that want to eat us, but by anyone or anything that may potentially change us. We’re especially leery of people or ideas that might shake us out of our cultural assumptions and preconceptions. Such things feel morally threatening, and we react to them by becoming almost reflexively resistant and oppositional. This is the mindset from which all violence is born.

A lot of what we may call our “ideals” is actually this kind of knee-jerk combative reaction against change. Again, this reflex is different from perceiving an injustice, articulating places where that injustice causes inequality or suffering, and agitating for change. (For example, Martin Luther King Jr. based his civil-rights agitation on an appeal to equal rights. James Earl Ray, who killed Dr. King, was under no actual threat; his actions were based on fear of change and reflexive self-righteousness.)

People in the grip of their righteous minds generally believe that their personal moral codes are logical, rational, and universally true. But research shows that such judgments actually come from emotional reactions, shaped by specific cultures. This means that the violent mind literally can’t hear reason. It shuts down our ability to make thoughtful judgments. People who are emotionally attached to a political leader may observe that leader flagrantly violating their own values—and simply not care. In fact, when people learn that their political beliefs are based on inaccurate information, they don’t change their minds—instead, they cling to their belief systems more tightly than ever.

This sounds irrational because it is. The part of the brain that causes us to feel that familiar ways are right, no matter what, is older, bigger, and stronger than the rational mind. One psychologist, Jonathan Haidt, compares the logical brain to a human rider sitting on the back of an illogical elephant. We assume the rider is in charge, making fair, just decisions and directing the elephant. But it’s usually the elephant who’s calling the shots. In Haidt’s words, “The rider acts as spokesman for the elephant, even though it doesn’t necessarily know what the elephant is really thinking.

The elephants in our heads—our reflexive reactions—perceive anything unfamiliar as just plain wrong. Familiar things feel right, right, RIGHT! This is the sensation comedian Stephen Colbert famously dubbed “truthiness.” It’s like being drunk or high: delicious in the short term, ultimately toxic. The righteous mind can temporarily overwhelm our sense of truth, including our allegiance to justice and fairness. When our righteous mind is in control, we lose the way of integrity and become weirdly, obviously self-contradictory, like proponents of world peace who advocate war against anyone who disagrees with them. Because violence and the righteous mind are closely linked, I don’t call destructive actions sins of violence, as Dante does. I think of them as “errors of righteousness.” They are psychological mistakes we make when our irrational rejection of the unfamiliar takes over our thinking.

The eighteenth-century social reformer Robert Owen pointed this out in his famously ironic statement, “All the world is queer save thee and me, and even thou art a little queer.

The high energy of anger helps correct unfair situations, the way a fever fires up the body to kill an invading virus. Without it, no one would leave abusive relationships, question the systemic oppression of certain populations, or work toward fairness in the world.

The moment you begin any creative activity, you leave the realm of violence, which knows only destruction.

A closed mind is like a weapon whose only function is to harm. It grips the thought “I exist in continuous violent reaction to whatever is threatening.” By addressing problems with core values and creativity, we choose a different mode de vie: “I exist in continuous creative response to whatever is present.” Sacrificing our reflexive tendency toward destruction gives us access to a much greater power: creation.

Psychologist Steven Hayes calls this connecting with our “core values.” His research shows that focusing on values has an almost magical ability to accomplish the very things we think we’ll get by attacking our enemies. Simply shifting our attention from attacking our enemies to defining our values can “reduce physiological stress responses, buffer the impact from negative judgments of others, reduce our defensiveness, and help us be more receptive to information that may be hard to accept.

You are infinitely worthy. You are infinitely precious. You have always been enough. You will always be enough. There is no place you don’t belong. You are lovable. You are loved. You are love.

Accepting responsibility is honest, but blaming ourselves when we did nothing wrong is cruel, deceptive, and devastating. Even as children, we sense that there’s something off about it, something horrendous. We know deep down that we’ve betrayed ourselves, and (here’s where the lies really are a tangled web) we hate ourselves for our own self-betrayal.

But bad things happening to powerless people are uncomfortable for everyone. It’s always easier to go along with the system—white privilege, domestic violence, animal abuse, as well as child molestation—than to stand up for those it has harmed.

A lot of my clients try to follow the Golden Rule to a fault: they are continually accepting, even apologetic, toward people who treat them badly. “Well,” they reason, “I’m treating others the way I want them to treat me.” These people are telling as many lies as Cindy, though a very different kind. They’re violating the opposite of the Golden Rule (I call this the Elur Nedlog, which is Golden Rule spelled backward). This version says, “Never allow others to treat you in ways you would never treat someone else.

If someone in your life consistently hurts you, ask yourself if you would treat anyone else the way you’re letting yourself be treated. If the answer is no, then to stay in integrity you must start thinking of ways to change the situation. This may take courage, ingenuity, civil disobedience, and time. But to accept your own mistreatment is to participate in a lie.

All lies, whatever their origin, wreak similar kinds of inner havoc.

That said, unless you’ve experienced profound trauma, your deepest lies probably aren’t devastating enough to need this kind of support. Maybe you’re just reluctant to face the fact that you’re getting farsighted, or that you actually do have a favorite child, or that some of your friendships just don’t work. But whatever your lies are, digging through them will eventually take you to the center of your inferno. There you’ll encounter three major aspects of your own psyche: the monster, the betrayer, and the betrayed.

Almost always, our deepest self-betrayals have their roots in our childhood. Jesus, so the Bible says, hated it when people hurt children. Most folks agree with him. But we’ve all betrayed and hurt at least one child: our young selves. Each time you obediently kissed scary Aunt Ethel, each time you forced a laugh while being taunted by other ten-year-olds, each time you pretended to feel fine when your parents fought, you abandoned and betrayed yourself. You had no other option.

It isn’t just our brains that struggle when we lie; our bodies weaken and falter as well. One study showed that people who present “an idealized image of themselves” had higher blood pressure and heart rates; greater hormonal reactions to stress; elevated cortisol, glucose, and cholesterol levels; and reduced immune-system functioning. Lying and keeping secrets have been linked to heart disease, certain cancers, and a host of emotional symptoms like depression, anxiety, and free-floating hostility.