Why We Lie: The Source of our Disasters. Dorothy Rowe

but there were no white lies. The children knew a good deal about the adults closest to them, but they had not yet perceived that some people wanted to be protected from the truth.

      Many of these children told bravado lies. All bravado lies are aimed at bolstering the sense of being a person when it is under attack. We all resort to, ‘No, I wasn’t frightened’, or, ‘No, I wasn’t upset’, rather than admit weakness. However, it is children, more than adults, who receive physical punishment.

      ‘It didn’t hurt’ is a lie commonly associated with school-age children, but in Newton’s study Reddy recorded that ‘there were some heart-rending reports of “Don’t hurt” bravado’. She quoted one report concerned with a little girl of three years six months. The mother of the child said,

      You can smack her legs until they’re red raw, and if she’s in one of her wilful moods she’ll go: ‘Didn’t hurt!’ On a couple of occasions when she’s been threatened with a good hiding for misbehaviour she’s even dropped her trousers for you. The other day she did this and then said, ‘It dudn’t hurt!’¹⁰

      All parents of small children sometimes administer a punishment of some kind far greater than the misdemeanour warranted. Some of these parents, when they calm down, realize that they have overstepped the mark and regret it. Wise parents acknowledge this to the child, and apologize without blaming the child for forcing them to go to such an extreme. Clearly this mother felt she was justified in inflicting such pain on her child. It seems that she preferred her child to fear and obey her than to love her. Did she not know that fear drives out love? Even if we manage to retain some love for the person we fear, our fear and guilt prevent us from expressing fully and openly the love that we feel.

      With this mother and child, the daughter will always fear her mother because her mother has threatened her with the greatest peril, that of being damaged or broken by such a close encounter with being annihilated as a person.

      This little girl would not then, and perhaps never will, be able to take that step back so she could see and describe what exactly happened to her during those beatings. The Hungarian writer Imre Kertész was older than she was when he, just fifteen, was sent to Auschwitz. Years later he wrote a fictionalized memoir of his time in Auschwitz. He called the central character Gyuri.

      One of the most onerous tasks inflicted on the prisoners was the loading of bags of cement. When Gyuri dropped a bag which then split open and spilled its contents, the guard knocked him to the ground, rubbed his face in the dirt and swore that he would never drop a bag again. Kertész wrote,

      From then on, he personally loaded each bag on to my shoulders each time it was my turn, bothering himself with me alone; I was his sole concern, it was me exclusively he kept his eye on, following me all the way to the truck and back, and whom he picked to go first, even if, by rights, there were others still ahead of me in the queue. In the end, there was almost an understanding between us, we had got the measure of one another, and I noticed that his face bore what was almost a smile of satisfaction, encouragement, even, dare I say, a pride of sorts, and from a certain perspective, I had to acknowledge, with good reason, for indeed, tottering, stooping though I might have been, my eyes seeing black spots, I did manage to hold out, coming and going, all without dropping a single further bag, and that, when it comes to it, proved him right. On the other hand, by the end of the day I felt that something within me had broken down irreparably; from then on every morning I believed that would be the last morning I would get up; with every step I took, that I could not possibly take another; with every movement I made, I would be incapable of making another; and yet, for the time being, I still managed to accomplish it each and every time.¹¹

      By carrying out the task of loading the bags of cement Gyuri was trying to demonstrate to the guard the equivalent of ‘It didn’t hurt’, and thus preserve his sense of being a person. However, when we protect ourselves against a massive assault, we use up many of the strengths we have to defend ourselves. If the assaults are infrequent, we have time to replenish our strengths, but, if the assault is particularly brutal, or, if the assaults occur frequently as they do from parents who use physical punishments as the prime form of discipline, we might not be able to restore our sense of being a person to its former strength and cohesion. Like Gyuri, we can lose our ability to view our future hopefully. From then on, each day cannot be enjoyed but has to be endured. Alternatively, we can adopt a position of constant defiance, and each day, whatever the situation, every authority however benign has to be defied and fought. These two outcomes are found in the long-term studies of children whose parents used physical punishment. Some of these children, mostly girls, go on to become depressed, while others, mostly boys, become too wild and aggressive to be contained within society.¹²