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accidentally out of exasperation. Imagine the kind of scene where the child is making those unpleasant sounds which Australians call ‘grizzling’. The child feels in need of a cuddle and something to eat. He says, ‘I’m hungry. I want a biscuit.’ His mother says, ‘You’re no; hungry. You’re tired. Go to bed.’

      The child is confused. He thought his feelings meant he was hungry but his mother says this isn’t so. She implies that she knows his feelings better than he does.

      Our own truth is always private. Other people cannot know our truth unless we choose to tell them.

      Small children have to learn that this is so. Some parents lie to their children in order to make them obedient. They say to the child, ‘I know what you’re thinking.’

      Sometimes the parent is right about what the child is thinking. It’s an educated guess, not direct knowledge, but the child doesn’t know that her parent is making a guess from an assessment of the situation and the expression on the child’s face. The child thinks that the parent can read her mind.

      I’ve met many adults who still have the feeling that their parents can read their minds. They dare not think, much less say, anything critical about their parents in case the parent, however far distant, knows what they are thinking and punishes them by making them feel guilty. ‘How could you think that, after all I’ve done for you.’

      I’ve come across many people who, seeing psychologists as parental figures, believe that psychologists can see their deepest secrets. I’ve seen a banker turn pale when I’ve asked him if I could ask him a few questions about banks and money, while dozens of people, in the course of a casual conversation, have nervously asked me, ‘Are you psychoanalysing me?’, that is, ‘Are you seeing into the deepest recesses of my being?’

      Some parents tell their children that God knows what they are thinking.

      If God made us, He equipped us puny creatures with aggression to help us to survive in a hostile world, and with imagination to let us express our aggression towards one another in thoughts rather than in deeds.

      When we are children, we become aggressive because parents necessarily frustrate us. Frustration leads to aggression. Children soon discover that they can vent their aggression in fantasy, allowing them to both murder (in fantasy) and preserve (in reality) their parents.

      But if God can read your thoughts, and if anger and aggression are wicked, your own truth ceases to be your own certainty and becomes instead a source of shame, guilt and confusion.

      It’s no wonder that some people come to feel that their thoughts are known to powers outside themselves and that these powers insert thoughts into their minds.

      Some parents know that it is important to recognize and respect their child’s own truth. However, knowing your own truth and hanging on to it no matter what is not without its problems. My friends Galen and Helen have brought up their daughter Naomi to know her own truth. Naomi has always been allowed to say what she thinks. Now she is a beautiful sixteen-year-old. Recently Galen said to me, ‘She’s utterly fearless. I’m afraid for her.’ People alienated from their own truth often envy those who aren’t and will seek to do them harm. Naomi said, ‘Why should I be afraid of people? They’re just people.’

       Surviving as a person knowing your own truth is a matter of deciding in an imperfect world which imperfections are the easiest with which to live.

      Some children manage to hang on to their own truth, or at least some part of it, because they are brought up by parents who are too lazy, or too busy, or too inconsistent to police the child’s every act. These parents might, however, on occasion mock or punish their children when they reveal their own truths. Their children soon learn to keep their thoughts to themselves.

      What effect this has depends on how well the children think of themselves.

      If they manage to hang on to some self-confidence they become revolutionaries, inventors or artists who can decide which of the imperfections of this imperfect world they will accept and which they will try to change. The revolutionaries might not lead a revolution except in their own lives. They are critical of society and fail to conform. The inventors and artists preserve something of the child’s fresh vision of the world and out of this vision develop other possibilities.

      Children who grow up knowing that they see the world in their own individual ways but who don’t think well of themselves feel that the fact that they see things differently means that there is something wrong with them. They think, ‘I oughtn’t to feel like this. I ought to be like other people.’

      Some children are brought up by parents who police their every act and forbid the children to have their own truths. Such children cease to recognize what their own truth is.

      Some of these children, as adults, know only what they ought to think and feel and not what they do think and feel.

      Others sense their own truth as a void inside themselves. They say, ‘I don’t know what I feel,’ and ‘I don’t know who I am.’

      To be born deaf and blind to the world around us is an immense handicap to living a full life, but to become deaf and blind to yourself is a far greater handicap – it means losing most of the unique ability we have as human beings to reflect upon our thoughts and actions and the world around us.

       It means too losing the only reliable sense of certainty in an uncertain world, the certainty of knowing what you think and feel. If you have this you have a benchmark against which you can measure every event you encounter.

      However, to know what you think and feel you need to be able to accept what you think and feel. This isn’t always easy.

      Parts of our own truth might cause us pain and fear, and so we try to hide them from ourselves. A friend told me how her parents had always seen her as the good daughter while her sister was the bad daughter. She had accepted this role because she thought that by being good she could stop her parents fighting one another and punishing her sister for her supposed wickedness. Now in her forties, she says, ‘I’m just starting to recognize the anger I felt because I had to be the one that kept the family together.’

      Parts of our own truth can cause us shame and guilt. If you’ve been brought up to believe that anger is wicked and that you have no right to be angry, no matter what is done to you, you have to shut away in your dark cellar all your angry thoughts and feelings. Then you can say to yourself, ‘I never get angry.’

      This, of course, is a lie.

      Telling yourself that you don’t get angry, indeed that you have no need for anger, is as realistic as telling yourself you don’t breathe and have no need to breathe.

      Here is one of those relative truths for which I have yet to encounter an exception:

       Provided you’ve got a good memory you can lie to other people and get away with it, but you can never get away with lying to yourself. Lying to yourself always leads to disaster.

      People who deceive themselves deceive themselves about deceiving themselves.

      I’ve met many people who have led long lives of self-deception. They do not enjoy close relationships, for how can someone know you if you are always pretending to be someone else? Some of these people have a history of failed relationships. Others have managed to acquire a long-suffering spouse (usually a wife) who believes that to be a good, acceptable person she must protect her husband from the consequences of his folly.

       If you want to have a sense of security in an insecure world, and to have good relationships with the people who matter to you, you must know and accept your own truth.

       CHAPTER 4 You and What ‘You’ Is

      ‘YOUR OWN TRUTH’ might sound like some solid mass of gold at the centre of your being,

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