Sex, Lies and Attention!

First, Bill Clinton, then Elliot Spitzer, John Edwards, and others and now Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Dominique Strauss-Kahn, all bad boys, all acting out and getting  lots of negative attention, spending millions of dollars on legal fees and causing real emotional damage to their families and friends.

They have also undone much of the good in their careers, impeded the growth of social and political work they began, and brought shame upon many of their colleagues.

Why can’t these men realize their humanity, admit their awful behavior, and simply tell the truth? 

Kids lie, research shows, to get out of trouble. They often make up huge stories about who did what to whom and how.  Very creative kids tell the most outrageous lies. For example, a mother comes into the kitchen and sees that milk has been spilled all over the floor. She asks, “who spilled the milk?” She gets various answers, “He did it, she did it, a bird flew in the window and did it? I don’t know.” The purpose of this exercise is to get the milk cleaned up, no matter who did it.  After the milk is cleaned up, Mom could talk to the kids about owning up to their behavior, speaking without anger about being honest. The 'milk caper' could have been a total accident anyway, with neither blame nor shame involved.

Perhaps these men never learned that lesson, and have just continued lying, to get out of trouble and to get away without taking responsibility for their hurtful, anti-social behavior. I believe there's learning gap here.

The kind of attention we get in our childhoods lives with us forever, and some of us didn’t get the kind we needed to grow up,  to live honestly, to respect the lives we’ve created and the people we’ve brought along  to live with us.