There are lies we tell so often that they have stopped sounding like lies.
“It didn’t bother me.”
“That’s how things are, I’ll get over it.”
“I don’t need anything from anyone.”
More than a hundred and fifty years ago, Fyodor Dostoevsky wrote with rare penetration about how a person can gradually drift away from what they truly feel, want or fear — and about the cost that this drifting can have for their relationships.
He did not write manuals for living. He wrote about people who get confused, contradict themselves, undermine themselves; who want something and at the same time do everything they can not to have it. He wrote about human contradiction, something that runs through all of us. Knowing, for example, what is good for us and doing the opposite.
Perhaps that is why we still read him.
Dostoevsky’s own life was no model of balance or mental health. He was arrested in 1849 for taking part in a circle of political discussion, was led before a firing squad, and learned only at the last moment that the death sentence was staged. Four years of hard labour in Siberia followed. He had epilepsy, a gambling addiction and debts that weighed heavily on his life and his marriage.
And yet, a few days after the mock execution, he wrote to his brother about life as a gift, about the value of every minute.
And then he went on doing things he himself knew were harming him.
Knowing what has value does not mean we can automatically live according to it.
Between knowledge and action lies an entire psychic landscape: fear, habit, shame, the need for relief, the ways we once learned to protect ourselves — those learned, almost automatic ways we have of soothing all of our feelings.
An authentic life is not a flawless life. It is more the capacity to notice when we have drifted away from what is really happening inside us, and to be able, at some point, to return.
In The Brothers Karamazov, the elder Zosima says something that seems simple but becomes more and more complex the longer we think about it: do not lie to yourself. Because when we keep repeating the same lie, at some point we stop being able to tell it apart from the truth.
It does not have to be a big, conscious lie.
It can be the “I don’t care”, while inside we keep thinking about it constantly. Or the “I don’t need you”, while we are desperately afraid that the other person will leave. The “that’s just how I am”, when in reality it is a way we learned to protect ourselves.
The paradox is that these phrases usually do not begin as lies. At some point they may have been a way of bearing something that was too difficult to see as it was.
When something hurts more than we can bear at the moment it happens, the mind tries to give it an explanation that makes it more tolerable.
“It wasn’t that important.”
“It’s my fault.”
“Everyone is like this.”
“I don’t need anyone.”
The explanation may bring relief at first and make a situation easier to bear. An event that acquires meaning often seems less frightening than an event we cannot explain or that overwhelms us.
The problem begins when these explanations become a permanent way of seeing reality.
At that point we no longer tell ourselves “this was the way I once found to cope”. We say “this is the truth”.
In psychotherapy we do not set out to demolish these explanations and tear them violently out of a person’s life story. First we need to approach them with curiosity.
In Gestalt psychotherapy this process is linked to awareness: to the capacity to notice what is happening now, not only in our thoughts but also in the body, the voice, the breath, the movement.
Because sometimes the body disagrees with our words long before we realise it. For example, someone says: “I’m fine with it.”
And yet we notice that their hands tighten, their shoulders close, or their breathing changes — a posture that perhaps reveals a contradiction, that something inside them does not agree with what they are saying.
This does not necessarily mean they are lying.
It may mean that there are two different experiences inside them that have not yet met.
One part says “I’m fine” because that is what it needs in order to keep going. Another part may be saying “I’m hurting”, “I’m afraid”, or “I don’t want what is happening”.
Awareness does not require us to decide immediately which of the two is right.
It requires us to be able to hear both.
Perhaps no character of Dostoevsky’s expresses this drifting away from life more clearly than the narrator of Notes from Underground.
He is an extraordinarily analytical man. He observes himself, other people, his own intentions, his own reactions. He anticipates what might happen and imagines his encounters over and over again.
And precisely for that reason he struggles to live.
He thinks about an action so much that in the end he does not carry it out. He imagines a meeting, analyses it, rehearses it, and finally destroys it himself. This is a form of alienation that is very familiar to us.
We want to speak to someone, but we spend so much time thinking about what we will say and how it might unfold that in the end we do not take the step.
We want to leave a situation, but we analyse all the possible consequences so thoroughly that we stay in it.
We want to move closer to someone, but first we try to guarantee that we will not be rejected.
And in this way, thinking — which is there to help us make sense of experience — becomes a way of avoiding it.
In Gestalt we speak, among other things, about retroflection: the case where energy that concerns the world and other people is turned back towards ourselves instead. A way of being that may once have been protective — for example, holding back my anger when my boundaries are violated and not expressing it because I am afraid of being told off — can later become something that limits my capacity to recognise and express my feelings, to assert myself and to connect authentically with others.
So anger, when it is turned against the self instead of being expressed outwards, can become self-criticism.
Desire can become endless analysis of desire.
The need for contact or exploration can become a thought about how dangerous or futile contact is.
From the outside it looks like a great deal of thinking and inhibition.
From the inside it may be needs and desires left on hold.
Returning to our own truth is not one big decision
Perhaps this is the most interesting point where Dostoevsky meets psychotherapy. We do not need to find the “great truth” about ourselves. Sometimes the return to our authenticity begins with much smaller things.
Admitting that something hurt us.
Recognising that we were angry.
Admitting that we need someone, when only yesterday we were saying that we need no one.
Being able to say “I don’t know” instead of constructing yet another story.
Authenticity is not always knowing what we feel, nor expressing every feeling and thought immediately.
It is more the possibility of not abandoning so easily what is happening inside us for the sake of an easy explanation.
And that is not easy at all.
Dostoevsky himself did not live a life free of contradictions. He lost years, made choices he knew were harming him, tried, failed and tried again.
Perhaps that is why his characters feel so alive.
They do not speak to us from a position of perfection.
They speak to us from within human contradiction.
From that place where a person knows and at the same time cannot. Wants and at the same time is afraid. Loves and at the same time withdraws. Understands what needs to change and nevertheless returns to the same point again.
And perhaps returning to our truth is not something we achieve once and for all.
Perhaps it is the willingness to return every time we realise we have drifted away from it.
Sometimes this is difficult to do on our own. Not because someone else knows our truth better than we do, but because the presence of a person who listens without rushing to correct can help us hear ourselves a little more clearly.
This, to a great extent, is what psychotherapy can offer.
