The Enchanted Forest and the Bully Lie
When the powerful remake reality
Our parents are the stewards of our pasts, as individuals, families and communities. They tell us who we were from the time before we can remember. Stories of our birth, our first word, how old we were when we started walking. They tell us stories about their lives, or our grandparents’, building a scaffolding of history and identity upon which we can train our own understanding.
Unless they don’t. My mother was an unreliable narrator. The stories she told did not connect with what I had lived through. At first, they were largely cosmetic lies, reconstructing a wished-for family life. She often said we ate dinner together every night, with candles on the table. The candles were important to her, although I don’t remember having lit candles on the table more than once or twice a year at a holiday. But she was insistent, greedy for the fabricated memory of ease and hospitality that those candles represented for her. These small lies continued, innocuous in themselves, but together it unsettled me. What was true? Who did I believe? My own memories or my mother’s insistent drumbeat of fantasy?
After my son died, my mother’s reconstruction of history became more damaging. She was comfortable in her identity as a young widow. Her husband’s death when they were both in their forties, after his long illness, was traumatic for her. I know. He was my father. I was there. But as the years passed, she focused so much on her loss, how wonderful her husband was, the depth and constancy of their marriage, that she erased the fact that my sister and I lost our father when we were teenagers. That part got removed from the story.
When my son died she was unnerved by the attention I got as the bereaved mother and doubled down on her stories about the loss of her husband, to strangers, even to me, as if I had not been there, as if I had not known the man she was talking about and grieved his death decades earlier. Once we were in a restaurant, and I realized that the people at the table next to ours would, if they listened, feel badly for this poor woman who had just lost her husband, as she told this other woman (me) about it for the first time. I stopped my mother and reminded her that my son, her grandson, had just died. She looked at me blankly, and made no response, then continued to talk about the death of her beloved husband, skipping the part about it being thirty years in the past.
Not surprisingly, I was in therapy for a really long time. And in therapy I came up with a phrase I have used for years – the Enchanted Forest. The Enchanted Forest is an alternate universe made up by an abusive person. Come into my lair where I am the victim, and you are the malefactor. Follow this path to the fantasy land where your son never existed so I can stay the center of attention. I lived in the Enchanted Forest for years, and it terrifies me, so I am attentive to other Forests, other paths in, other false narratives that seek to rob me of my perception, memory, agency or opinion. I won’t go into the Enchanted Forest willingly again. Plenty of people in my personal and professional life have beckoned me to follow them into the Enchanted Forest, to warp my reality to match theirs so that I can stay connected, in relationship or employed. And I resist.
In a recent episode of the podcast This American Life #855 called That’s a Weird Thing To Lie About, I was introduced to a concept that built on the Enchanted Forest. Masha Gessen, a writer who grew up in Russia and writes extensively about Putin, explained the concept of the Bully Lie, or the Power Lie.
However unskilled a person may be at lying, they usually hope that the lie will be convincing. Executives want shareholders to think that they have devised a foolproof path to profits. Defendants want juries to believe that there is a chance that someone else committed the crime….
The Trumpian lie is different. It is the power lie or the bully lie. It is the lie of the bigger kid who took your hat and is wearing it while denying that he took it. There is no defense against this lie because the point of the lie is to assert power, to show I can say what I want, when I want to.
The power lie conjures a different reality that demands that you choose between your experience and the bully's demands.
Gessen goes on to talk about how this Bully Lie is a central tactic of autocratic leaders, including Putin.
Gessen articulated what I had sensed but been unable to name – what the Enchanted Forest looks like writ large in the political sphere. This is why so many of us who have been in abusive relationships, who have had people with power tell us that they didn’t take our hat while wearing the hat, are so activated by the sound of Trump’s voice, by the virulence of his lies. It is a play for dominance, a demand that our own knowing, our navigational systems that help us determine true from false, life giving from death dealing, democratic from authoritarian be jettisoned. It’s a psychic jamming of the signal, a hacking of our emotional and intellectual GPS to disorient and disempower us. Don’t listen to your own experience, understanding, the information you can see with your own eyes. Believe me.
I walked into the Enchanted Forest with my mother because she was my mother, and being in relationship with her was hard wired as a survival mechanism. Denying the Trump lies also has a price. He is coming after his detractors, firing those who disagree with him, denying access to the Associated Press, moving to exact revenge against perceived enemies using all the tools at his command. There is a genuine risk to challenging the lies.
The bully lie is different. It doesn't try to convince you. It doesn't present evidence. It just tells you to pick a side. So when the president said that diversity programs caused the plane crash over the Potomac, when he called the president of Ukraine a dictator without elections, he didn't lay out a set of facts to make his case. He wasn't interested in rebuttal.
When he does this kind of thing, Masha writes, he's "asserting control over reality itself" and splitting the country into those who agree to live in his reality and those who resist and become his enemies by insisting on facts.
There is also a relational risk. Believing Trump has become a cherished identity for many. And for many it’s binary. You either believe he is doing a great job, agree that Putin is a good leader who didn’t start the war in the Ukraine, scorn vaccinations and guzzle raw milk or you are a lefty leaning woke crazy. The veterans who voted for him who lost their federal jobs and are watching the VA be dismantled, which will impact their health care and other vital services, are caught in this bind. Admit that the Trump they voted for is damaging their survival and well-being and be ostracized? Or bow to the Bully Lie?
It is painful to admit you are wrong. It is excruciating to walk out of the Enchanted Forest, especially if friends and loved ones remain behind. Most of us probably know or know of people who have left families who refuse to name and confront sexual abuse, active addiction, domestic violence or other serious ills and, in the process, left behind beloved relatives who cannot name reality because it is too threatening. They need to stay in the Enchanted Forest and believe that Uncle Billy was misunderstood and falsely accused and not a pedophile.
Reality is not fungible. Not everything is a matter of opinion. There is true and there is false. There is good and there is evil. I am trying to stay firmly grounded in true. Even if it’s only to myself and the small circle of people who read what I write, I am going to name true, and name false. I invite us all to cling to the evidence of our own observation, to seek out information and opinions that inform based on fact, and to hold tight to common sense. While at the same time trying to hold compassion for people who have been dragged into the Enchanted Forest and don’t have the capacity, ability or even desire to leave. Yet.