True Love? or “To Blave”?
72017-07-05 by Object of Contempt
… and “to blave,” as we all know, means “to bluff!”
This light-hearted clip hints at a topic I’ve had on my mind for quite a while. When I wrote my two “Crazy in Love” posts, Emphasis on Crazy and Emphasis on Love, I felt that I needed to address the basics of love and abuse. For a victim of emotional abuse, those two concepts can get amazingly fuzzy. I hope they were as useful for the readers as they were for me to express. So far, I think they are the most important things I’ve written about since I started this blog in February 2016.
Today’s post is related to those posts… a simple underlying assumption that provides a foundation for healthy love, and a bright line to help us discern love from abuse. Today’s topic is: Truth in love. Let me be clear; I’m not just talking about how bad lying is in relationships. Instead, I want to point to how central loving the truth is to relationships.
Those previous posts explain that loving acts tend to center on three qualities they protect and display:
- Value,
- Loyalty, and
- Goodwill.
I could easily have included truth for a fourth quality, but I think it is more foundational than that. Loving the truth is a characteristic of a person, rather than of love. Lacking a love of the truth fits right beside lacking empathy, in my view. In fact, they seem to me to feed each other.
A person who does not love the truth will struggle with candor, to say the least. An abuser sees truth as just a classification for information. This is the case for the truth about the abuser, or the truth about the color of the car that just passed by. Information, is data, is a tool, and is fluid. Truth is just one way to label the information, but the abuser will not care unless it happens to match up with some other label like, “Useful,” or “Embarrassing”. Of course, the information has to be useful or embarrassing to them. If information can accomplish the manipulative task at hand, that is what matters. People, words, actions, and staplers all fit in the same category of tools to be used, however subtly or ferociously.
Until a person loves the truth, there is no chance for truly loving another person. This applies doubly where reconciliation is needed. An abuser gets no perceived benefit from the candor required for a real apology. Repentance just means changing your thoughts and actions that were wrong. To ask an abuser to stop (repent of) any hurtful thing is generally futile on several levels. However, the level at the bottom that has to be addressed first is the abuser’s “relationship” with truth. Rather than repent, an abuser will hide the truth and withhold an admission because that is “the way truth is used” in this situation. And, if the truth has already been discovered? Then new information will be made to deflect, discredit, and invalidate. Subtle (or direct) accusations may be created to malign the memory and sanity of the abused individual.
For reasons I don’t entirely understand, empathy is easier to feign than truthfulness. In terms of accurately knowing if there is hope for a relationship, there is no more critical thing to find in that other person than a love of the truth. It is the basic value that makes every expression of love a real one. If it isn’t there, if you find subtle manipulation going on, that is when it becomes important to consider turning away from that person. To find out what God thinks of these types of people, do a Bible search, especially in Psalms and Proverbs for words like “deceitful”.
Here is one verse as an example:
He that hateth dissembleth with his lips, and layeth up deceit within him.
Make no mistake; deceit, lies, disingenuous acts and words… they all equate to hatred and contempt. Please be careful with dishonest people!
- from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition
- v. To disguise or conceal behind a false appearance.
- v. To make a false show of; feign.
- v. To disguise or conceal one’s real nature, motives, or feelings behind a false appearance.
dissemble:
Useful word, but very old and out of common use.
Roll Away My Shame 
Kind of synchronistic (?) that you wrote something about truth when my last post includes something about a couple lies I told.
I’m not sure I understand your post completely, but in reference to the love of truth. I don’t always love the truth. Or maybe it would be more accurate to say I don’t love what is true sometimes.
I don’t like that every one of my immediate family members scapegoated me as the bad guy and the one all at fault of the family’s problems. I don’t like that I have no money and had to move to this apartment instead of staying at the house we used to live in.
I could go on but I think you get the picture. And I have a feeling that this is not what you mean or are talking about. I do think it’s important to admit the truth and to face it and understand it so you stay in touch with reality and do what’s necessary to change the situation if necessary. I want people to be honest with me and if my bf cheats on me, then I want to know because it is the truth.
I’m still not sorry for the lies I told today. But it’s not something I go around doing most of the time. It just felt needed for my sanity today.
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Hi Sleeping Tiger,
My schedule got changed to working nights (from working almost not at all). Wanted to respond sooner.
I could’ve been clearer. There is an enormous difference between loving what the truth says, and loving the truth in general. For example, we don’t love the truth about holocaust, but denying the holocaust is disgusting. The Bible teaches that the tongue is a dangerous thing. A person who can control the tongue is complete (from James, among others).
What I’m focusing on in this post is that abusers see truth differently. A person who values God values truth because it is part of God’s character to be truthful and true. An abuser just sees information to use. If the information they use is true, it is only because they want to be more believable. Still, half-truths are still complete lies, and are a habitual tool for people like my wife. An abuser has no dedication to God by way of emulating his character, or to the person by way of blessing them with candor and honesty.
For individual instances of lies, the one that comes to mind is the story of the midwives in Genesis. The pharoah told them to throw all the baby boys in the Nile. They let him believe they would do so, but they didn’t obey him. Then, when he grilled them on why, they lied and said the Hebrew women gave birth too fast. They knew that if they told the truth, they would be replaced with someone who would murder the babies willingly. God rewarded them for being wise enough to value life despite needing to lie.
As for your own experience, you don’t need me to jump in there. 🙂
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Lol at your last sentence.
Thank you for explaining further.
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Here is a link to a post on the same topic, but without the context of abuse. I liked it a lot.
https://marissabaker.wordpress.com/2017/06/03/knowing-the-truth-and-loving-the-truth/
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I “liked” because I always like what you write, and I am happy to see a new post here. So sorry I missed it in my blog reader.
However, I have not read this yet, because I want to take our big Boxer dog for a walk/jog to the park, before it gets to be 100 degrees. It is not yet 7 am and already above 70, so we need to go now. I will read this at my leisure when I get back. Yay, I am looking forward to it. 🙂
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Things I especially like about this post:
“An abuser sees truth as just a classification for information.” –Well said! Despite your disclaimer, that sentence is genius.
“People, words, actions, and staplers all fit in the same category of tools to be used, however subtly or ferociously.” –Again, genius.
“Rather than repent, an abuser will hide the truth and withhold an admission because that is “the way truth is used” in this situation. And, if the truth has already been discovered? Then new information will be made to deflect, discredit, and invalidate. Subtle (or direct) accusations may be created to malign the memory and sanity of the abused individual.”
–So right! What you said here reminds me of a favorite Maya Angelou quote: “There’s a world of difference between truth and facts. Facts can obscure the truth.”
“Make no mistake; deceit, lies, disingenuous acts and words… they all equate to hatred and contempt. Please be careful with dishonest people!” –Oh, dear friend, what you have written in this post has blown me away. I already liked you as a friend, now I feel love in my heart for you as a brother. A much younger brother, lol. 🙂
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Thank you for your many encouraging comments!
One person off-line found it difficult to understand the Crazy in Love posts. I think I have a tendency to go deep into my thoughts without clearly explaining them. I come off as very esoteric and academic when I’m actually trying to be clear. Aside from that, I don’t think he was familiar with some of the concepts you and I take for granted.
When I started, I thought I would take a shot at making every post a five paragraph essay with a thesis. I figured that would keep me more comprehensible and so I wouldn’t run-on and follow rabbit trails. Turns out that this kind of emotional writing either flows, or it doesn’t. I can’t shoehorn it into a format without turning it into an enormous chore that would never be published.
Thank you again, Sis!
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