"It's not that he was lying to all these years but lying to himself"

So my wife, my mother-in-law and I were talking and my wife mentioned how it felt like I lied to her all these years about my dressing. I thought I could ignore and just not do it and that worked for the most part, until it didn't. And my mother-in-law said "It's not that he was lying to you all these years but lying to himself." That is such a true statement and glad for her insight and support. She truly is the one who surprisingly is the most supportive of me through all of this.

Sometimes I wonder what would of happened if I didn't lie to myself all of those years, my life would probably been completely different now.

I had to apologise to my wife for exactly the same thing.

Twenty years ago when I came out to her as a crossdresser, she asked me if I wanted to become a woman.

I said no, I just like the way I look, it's sexy, blah, blah, blah... reasons why she shouldn't worry...

Turns out I was lying to her, but honestly I was lying to myself most of all.

I am so very lucky that she understands that, accepts, and supports me wherever my journey leads.

Roberta, I also worry about doing something like that down the line. For now I am happy with being non-binary / CD and never want to be a woman (though in her eyes what I do is being a woman). But we all know how things change over time.

Asew,
I do find this debate frustrating , some women just don't grasp what men live with especially if they are TG, I call it a male straightjacket . They don't know how hard it is for man to admit he needs to wear women's clothes , to some it can be devestating accepting that fact , of course many are going to lie to themselves , what is the alternative ?
OK it maybe more to do with my age group but I complied with growing up as a boy and a teenager . I married bought a house with a mortagage and then had kids , nothing wrong with this apart from being TG at the same time . The thought of lying or not never came into it I was fighting the internal battle while trying to be outwardly normal , if it's considered a state of lying then at some point the truth has to come out , it's too mentally destructive to live an entire life with the issue .

While I understand the argument about lying to yourself because its true.

From the perspective of a spouse, they are being lied too. After that, you can argue about the mitigating circumstances.

I take umbrage to the use of "lying to" in these types of scenario

If you are talking about having a fetish sure, but not if you are talking gender.

As a verb lie means;
"an intentionally false statement"
"the whole thing is a pack of lies"

used with reference to a situation involving deception or founded on a mistaken impression.
"all their married life she had been living a lie"


As a Noun a lie means;
to get oneself into or out of a situation by lying.
"you lied your way on to this voyage by implying you were an experienced sailor"


Lying TO someone with the purpose of deceiving someone is not an acceptable way of building relationships


To say you lied to yourself? How does anyone do that ? One of the hardest things i have had to come to grips with is that people change , in how they see themselves and how they see others.

It's more plausible to say we did not understand ourselves.

Kelly,
Some people talk about two parts or halves , it can be a serious confilct , which part is true and which part a lie ? The only way of solving that for me was attempting to bring the two parts together , once you stop deceiving yourself then the lies stop to other people .

I've made this point before but our wives / partners aren't always the inocent party , I feel I was mislead by my wife on certain issue when we married , she withheld things from me.

It's not unkown for some people to live an entire life with a lie , some have the ability to preserve the happiness of another at all cost . The debate about telling children or not , both partners may withhold the truth permanently . Some fear losing their jobs if the truth comes out .

Sometimes a lie preserves the staus quo , some people could and have taken drastic action when they learned the truth .

As a teenager my father accused me of being deceitful , my reply to him was his actions were the cause of it ! I maybe a little cynical but I don't believe anyone is " Whiter than white " !

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Kelly DeWinter

To say you lied to yourself? How does anyone do that ? One of the hardest things i have had to come to grips with is that people change , in how they see themselves and how they see others.

It's more plausible to say we did not understand ourselves.

[/B]

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No, you do not understand, for most of my 20's, 30's, and 40's I was in complete denial. You can probably go back through the board history and find my posts where I adamantly argued that I was just a Crossdresser with not even the slightest inkling of being transgender, transsexual or that this was anything more me just "getting off on wearing women's clothes".


Turns out there was a lot more to it, and honestly I have known this since I was like 12

I like the way your MIL thinks and she is a smart woman.
It took me a long time to figure out just what I was and yes I denied almost everything and essentially lied to myself.

Roberta,

I think that denial is not lying. This fits in with what Kelly is saying, I think? Lying means that one knows the truth and then tells a lie. Did you know the truth about yourself? Did you know what trans meant so many years ago? You were confused, a little or a lot in the dark, etc. Liker most people I understand what you are saying, but I believe that technically you were not lying to yourself a good part of your history. I sometimes think that it is an unnecessary compromise with ourselves to, in a way, blame ourselves for this other being inside us that needs to get out. If we got immediate acceptance, I doubt that most people would do that. However, real life is not like that. We feel that we are doing something wrong, something that we are causing, when in fact it is our mind telling us we need to face the problem head on. We have no control over who we are. We do have control as to what path we need to follow to live with others, family, friends and others, for the rest of our lives. Some can compromise and others can not. I could not.

Your mother-in-law is a very wise women.I guess we all traveled that road for awhile.Some longer than others but we all come to that reality after awhile.However the consequences differ for each of us and our families once we realize it.

I accept that I was lying to myself, and unintentionally lying to my wife.

Why can't everyone else?

Roberta;

I understand what you are saying, it's just I see your path as one of growth into who you are today. Sure at first you may have lied about being 'just' a crossdresser to family or friends, however just like anything in our lives the things we have no choice in can be a denial, but a lie ?

When in High school age 16 or so I sneakily put on a girl's dress and wondered what I was doing. From there on for fifty or more years, zip, nada, no dressing. But many years of fearing that something was radically wrong inside. I made up for it by trying, unsuccessfully, to be more manly, yet not wanting to be more manly. By supressing whatever emotional baggage was hiding within. So, no I cannot call it lying to myself because I didn't know what that dark empty hole inside was all about. I was in denial, not a liar.

Ineke

Asew, with my ex-wife I was not lying to myself, but to her. So glad I never told her. She would have used it against me.

To be human in this life, is to be in conflict, sad, but true, about many things. Some have to keep it secret.

Kelly
You lie to yourself by telling even convincing yourself it is less then it really is. Like for instance you convinced yourself it is just the clothes and you don't feel like your female at all. I don't know if it is lying or if one has progressed. When all of this started for me I thought it was just a fetish. Then i realized I'm at least a crossdresser then I figured out I maybe gender fluid. Now i don't know. I am at the very least gender fluid but now wondering if I want to transition. I had bleeding thoughts of transitioning in the past but always brushed them away. As that's not for me, but now I think it might be. Have I changed or was I lieing to myself?

The thing is, we all lie. Husbands, wives, parents, children, everyone. The only question, is what we lie about, and, who we lie to. Is not telling someone, something about ourselves, a lie? My wife thought so. Insisted it was a 'lie of omission'. But when I asked why she did not tell me about her bout with depression before we got married, I got, 'Oh, that's different'. Who gets to decide when it's a lie and when it isn't?
Why is it that our wives always seem to reserve the right of deception, for themselves; but they insist that we be honest about everything?

Yet, how? Unless we narrate every moment of our lives, they can always say that it was a lie of omission because we left something out. What defense against an accusation like that? There is none. They automatically just treat us as guilty by default. Yet, aren't they, as well?
When we meet, and get to know someone, we have to decide what truncated set of facts of our life, we will decide to tell them; after all, it would take a lifetime to tell every single thing we ever thought or did. So we tell what we think they need to know; and they do the same thing to us, don't they? That little tidbit is often ignored when we are accused of lying, isn't it? Of course, because it doesn't fit with their narrative.
Are we lying to ourselves, if we're not sure of what we are? Or if we think we've outgrown it, or if we think it was just a phase? Or if we haven't done it for quite some time, and think that we've 'beaten it', and will never do it again? What are we to make of all that?

Fascinating, important, and useful discussion. Let me put yet another spin on it. The human mind (consciously and unconsciously) protects us from hurt. We have a set of psychological defenses that help us do this. The first defense we learn (developmentally) is denial, and, as alluded to by others, this is often indistinguishable from a lie. We also utilize repression (a favorite of mine, I will admit), sublimation (finding other outlets — perhaps diversions into career, parenting, etc.), compartalization (sometimes this is the sexualization or fetishistic aspect of crossdressing), etc.

For me, I know that my defenses protected me against experiencing my tremendous shame about my gender identity and wanting to be female. Once I was married, my deception —repression, suppression, denial, sublimation, rationalization, etc., etc. also had to do with protecting me from my tremendous fear of rejection. Although I’ve made progress in taming the shame, I continue to very much fear the rejection.

I would agree that the MIL’s comment was particularly insightful and empathetic. Nancy

I think the lying to her and lying to yourself is a bit simplistic. The whole thing can be far more complex than simply lying. When denial is in the mix the one who is denying the reality is applying an avoidance behavior often in an attempt to make that which they would need to lie about go away so they don't have to lie about it. Perhaps they attempt to counter the feelings with a bit of being hyper masculine in an attempt to bury the feminine feelings. But when the feelings are built in to their basic personality as a result of genetics and/or environmental influences, anything that can destroy the feelings, the urges, and the needs to express in a way that is contrary to the social norm is fair to try. They are trying to "fix" themselves in a way that will be unlikely to ever work for anything more than a temporary fix.

Being honest with themselves and reaching out to achieve personal acceptance is the only way out of the vicious circle of express the feelings followed by denial. It is not a matter of stopping the lying; it is a matter of stopping the denial. This is one of the big sources of the deep depression that can take hold of crossdressers and TG people. It is driven by the shame of doing something that is considered unacceptable in the context of the society they live in. That is a long ways from lying. Shame is one of the initiators of the vicious circle so many of us find ourselves in, usually in childhood when we are unable to understand it or do anything about it. In time it becomes a habitual behavior and it is that behavior that eventually creates serious problems in the person's life, including mental illness. The illness is not the urge, desire, or need to behave that way, but the continued attempt to drive those feelings out so they can be more normal. It can never work because they are not configured like other people and thus cannot comply with social expectations in a "normal" way. Of course, at the root of it all is society's definition of what is normal. In societies where that behavior is acceptable, the deep conflicts never occur, there is no denial, there is no lying.

Gretchen, Bingo! Well said. I totally agree. Add avoidance to the list of psychological defenses (second most utilized, second only to denial). We would not need to engage in all of these mental gymnastics if our femininity was embraced and celebrated. Nancy

Hello. So I was in a marriage for a while and I never told her about me cross dressing. I had brought up the subject of cross dressing from time to time to probe her reaction and every time she gave a very definitive answer of ?no way I could ever be with/stay with someone like that.? And I didn?t cross dress at all while we were married. There might have been a few days I did while she was off visiting her family and out of state but I told myself I could just live with out it. It was a total lie to myself. I have been cross dressing for nearly my whole life so it really is just a part of me now.

Needless to say she eventually came across my stash of clothes which I kept in a hard plastic tote in the storage crawl space of our house (buried behind other totes). I made a mistake and forgot to put something away once before she got back and she found it which is probably what led her to finding the rest. While she never said it was a part of her reasoning for wanting a divorce, I?m pretty sure it played a part. I wish I had told her in the beginning of our relationship before we got married (I?m a coward and couldn?t tell her) maybe we wouldn?t have gotten so far in the relationship or maybe we could have figured something out.

I agree with Gretchen, Kelly and Nancy that psychological defenses can be incredibly potent tools to rationalize our cultural and social programming. Lying to oneself and others means we consciously understand and accept who we are. Then we tell ourselves and others untruths as a way to mitigate/deny the issue. For me the efforts at suppression on a conscious level have been incredibly powerful my entire life and I am finally coming to grips with it. I now see I was consciously unaware of many issues underneath the surface. Going forward I would be lying straight up to myself or anyone else about those issues but prior to the last couple of years I was in incredibly deep denial and I find that most of all a bit heartbreaking. If I knew then what I know now my trajectory would have been very different. I see that now and have shame and regret that I was not circumspect and evolved enough to come to grips with who and what I am. At the same time I understand why my subconscious did what it did to protect my conscious from my true self. It's a process for everyone and everyone's process is different.

A lot of good insights! It was definitely denial. The reason I denied it was due to our culture, and I was afraid of having no friends and girlfriends if I accepted it. I decided to suppress it and take this secret to my grave. This was shame driven, and definitely denial because of a greater need of "fitting in". The only real lie at this time was that this was part of who I am but made a compromise for the greater good of self.

And when I suppressed it, it became second nature and the day to day it was not on my mind. So by the time I met my wife it really seemed like something I could take to the grave and not deal with. Even when I had a tell all with my wife about my teenage years, I consciously did not tell her about the CD part. Not technically a lie but not telling the whole truth. So it felt like a lie to be a tell all and not really be telling all. But denial also perfectly fits at this time too.

And now that I have accepted this side of myself, is it no longer believing the lie or no longer being in denial. It feels like both for sure. It was a lie that I couldn't be happy if others knew I CD (also decades later people are more accepting so who knows how this would have been if I came out in high school). But accepting this is no longer denying what I would have preferred in all these years.

My wife doesn't want me dressing in our town, and while I am out at home, at work and such it feels like a lie to change into male clothes for town errands. Have I traded lying to myself to lying to the strangers in the town? Ugh.

It is not a lie to be discrete: “Discretion is the better part of valor.” (Shakespeare - Henry IV)

"You're lying to yourself" is something we've heard from our ancestors. It's an expression that was used by our grandparents before defense mechanisms became common knowledge to people other than psychologists. Everyone unknowingly uses defense mechanisms in order to cope and CDs have a lot to cope with.

So, probably mother in law was correct but she also could have been wrong. Forcing someone to face something about their self like this is kind of harsh, but sometimes it has to be done. It's like saying, "grow up"!