People of the Lie: The Hope for Healing Human Evil by M. Scott Peck

Author:M. Scott Peck
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Psychiatry, Medical, Self-Help, Psychology, General
ISBN: 9780684848594
Publisher: Touchstone
Published: 1983-05-15T04:00:00+00:00

Ambiguity and guilt

Can really drive one crazy—

You send me my clean laundry

Which you did.

In it you include the first turned

Leaf of fall.

Manipulation? Guilt?

…your method really works.

Yet little changed. Billie, now twenty-three, still spent most nights sleeping in her parents’ house and most of her free time with her mother. Although falling behind on her payments for therapy, she would pay a substantial portion of her week’s salary to take her mother out to lunch at the most expensive restaurant in the area. And the pattern of her relationships with men continued unaltered—the falling in love, the clinging, the suffocating, the breaking up, the frantic searching, the falling in love again—man after man, time after time. And she was just as terrified of spiders as ever. The hard part was yet to come.

“Nothing’s happening,” Billie complained in therapy one day.

“That’s the way it feels to me too,” her therapist responded.

“Well, why not?” Billie demanded. “It’s been seven years I’ve been seeing you now. What the hell more do I have to do?”

“Figure out why you still have your spider phobia.

“I’ve recognized that my mother is a spider,” Billie replied.

“Then why do you keep dropping into her lair and web?”

“You know. Like her, I’m lonely.”

Her therapist looked at Billie. He hoped she was ready. “So maybe, in part, you too are a spider,” he said

Billie sobbed for the remainder of the session. But the next session she was there, right on time, even eager for the painful work ahead. It was true; she felt like a spider sometimes. When men started to leave her she clutched at them—just as her mother clutched at her. She hated them for going. She didn’t care about their feelings. She didn’t care about them. She wanted them for herself. Yes, it was like something evil in her, an evil urge, an evil part of her taking over. The spider phobia had not only helped her to deny her mother’s evil, she had used it to deny the evil in herself.

It was all so connected and intertwined. She had identified with her mother. They were so much the same. How could she genuinely fight against her mother’s evil unless at the same time she fought against herself?’ How could she condemn her mother for holding onto her without condemning herself for refusing to tolerate her own loneliness? How could she stop trying to trap men in her own web—men who ought to stand free and tall and strong, just as she ought to stand free and tall and strong? The problem was not how to extricate herself from her mother’s web anymore, since her mother’s identity was so much hers; the problem was to extricate herself from herself. And how in God’s name do you do that?

But Billie is doing it. In the name of God or her true self she is somehow beginning to separate from her mother, to definitively break free from their symbiotic relationship. In her leather-bound book she recently wrote:

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