For years, Bella DePaulo (Ph.D., Harvard) asked ordinary people to tell her research team about the most serious lies they had ever told, and about the most serious lies that were ever told to them. One after another, they opened up, describing lies about love and sex, cheating and shoplifting, illness and abuse, kinship and adoption, achievements and resources. They told about lies that resulted in the loss of relationships, reputations, and large sums of money. They even described lies that proved deadly. Some admitted to living a lie. Although there was much pain in their accounts, there was also evidence of some remarkable resilience. There are lessons from these hundreds of stories of major deceptions. Dr. DePaulo shares tips for avoiding the temptation to tell serious lies, and explains why some of the most unlikely people can be vulnerable to getting duped.
Genre: SELF-HELP / GeneralBehind the Door of Deceit was first published on August 7, 2009 and both print and ebook copies have been sold every month ever since.
An Amazon reviewer of the print version said, "All in all, this is a wonderful and highly recommended book." An Amazon reviewer of the ebook said, "Great insight into this subject. Easy to read and based on research from a author who has published extensively on this subject."
Hurts So Bad
When something like this happens, you suddenly have no sense of reality at all. You have lost a piece of your past. The infidelity itself is small potatoes compared to the low-level brain damage that results when a whole chunk of your life turns out to have been completely different from what you thought it was. It becomes impossible to look back at anything that's happened--from the simplest exchange between the two of you at a dinner party to the horrible death of Mr. Abbey--without wondering what was really going on. See the couple. See the couple with the baby. See the couple with the baby having another baby. What's wrong with this picture? Everything, as it happens." --Rachel, from Nora Ephron's Heartburn
The most devastating lies are those that obliterate a cherished piece of your identity and your life. When Rita saw the lovely pendant around the neck of the secretary, she learned in that split second that the pendant was not a token of her husband's love for her, but of his devotion to someone else; that her marriage was not "basically happy"; that her husband was not the moral pillar that he seemed; that the life that he had been living with her was a lie; and that the reality that she believed in and lived her life by, was equally fraudulent. One reason why serious lies hurt so bad, then, is that they violently impose a wholesale redefinition of your past, and force you to face a new and uncertain future.
The dupes who seemed to feel most lost, disoriented, and devastated by the discovery of the deceit were those who had been most enmeshed with the persons who betrayed them.
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French
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Already translated.
Translated by Gaella Attieh
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Italian
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Translated by Angela D'Ambrosio
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Portuguese
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Translated by Neila Domingas Xavier de Gouveia Vaz
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Spanish
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Already translated.
Translated by Monica Sarro
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