I’ve been watching “Candice Renoir” lately, a French police procedural featuring a middle-aged, plumpish woman as the chief detective in a Mediterranean coast town. She’s also blonde and pretty, and when she first shows up at the station (after a 10-year hiatus staying home with the kids, of which she has four), she is dismissed as “Barbie” and resented for supplanting Antoine, the detective who was the local superintendent’s choice for the job. But Candice slowly wins respect as her unconventional approach to solving murders is successful. She relies heavily on her intuition and innate grasp of psychology rather than hard evidence, driving the superintendent – a woman who has very much bought into the idea that to succeed in a traditional masculine job, women have to be as masculine as possible – crazy. It doesn’t help that Candice wears a lot of pink, including hot pink Wellingtons at crime scenes, or that she behaves seductively toward most of the men.

But Candice isn’t all sweet soft femininity. She also has a strong sense of when she’s being lied to, and when someone lies, her ears prick up and she goes after that person like a pit bull until she uncovers what they are hiding. “I hate liars,” she says, over and over.

She hates lies, and yet Candice lies all the time. There’s never a show in which she doesn’t lie to someone or everyone. She lies to her children, she lies to her boss, and most of all, she lies to Antoine. They make a good team; Antoine brings the masculine energies of structure (procedure), logic, and hard facts to bear, complementing Candice’s intuition and ability to coax confessions out of people by being sympathetic and understanding. There’s a strong attraction between them, but Candice can’t own up to it. Every time they begin to get close, she does something to sabotage the relationship. She’s so annoying, I remarked to a friend that sometimes I just want to slap her. “So do I,” said the friend.

But there are reasons why she is as she is. Although Candice often talks about what she learned from her father – she’s an accomplished car mechanic who loves hot cars, for one thing – we learn over time that Candice’s father was abusive to both her and her mother. Eventually the adolescent Candice reported him to the police and he was jailed. When he was released, he couldn’t live with the shame and killed himself. Candice’s mother blamed Candice and they did not speak again for many years. When Candice finally meets up with her mother again, her rage at how her mother “lied” by pretending that her father was a good man erupts.

So here we have a woman who was raised in the context of a big lie – that the abusive father was a good man. A big lie often forms the basis for dysfunctional families: we pretend that Mom isn’t an alcoholic; that Dad is at the office working hard to support us, not out seeing other women; that Mom and Dad have a perfectly healthy, loving relationship, not a co-dependent one; and so on. Everyone feels the lie running under the pretense. Having to pretend all the time that everything’s fine makes everyone anxious and hypervigilant. And it makes them all liars.

Candice hates lies. But on some level, not quite consciously, she knows she lies also. Therefore, without really knowing it, Candice hates herself. This is how the shadow side of the personality works. We rightfully hate some behavior that has been and is harmful to us and others, but we don’t want to admit that we also engage in that behavior. We may not even realize that we do. But how can we not do it, when it is what we were taught to do as children, when it was the behavior modeled for us by our family of origin? Children who were abused hated it and knew it was wrong, but when they are grown, abuse others or get into relationships with abusers. We stick to what’s familiar–what we were raised to think was normal.

I remember like it was yesterday the moment when I realized I was pulling the same kind of manipulative behavior on my friends that my mother used with us. It was a real dark night of the soul for me, coming face to face with what one guru calls “the full horror of who you are.” We all want to think the best of ourselves, after all, and realizing that I was engaging in this behavior that I detested knocked me literally to my knees. I wept most of the night. In the morning I called all my friends, owned up to my behavior, and made a vow not to do it again – “Or if I do, please call me on it.” Most of my friends said “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” but a couple of them said “yes, I know you do that, and yes, I will call you on it in future. But I love you anyway, you know.”

It wasn’t easy to stop this learned behavior, especially when I was stressed. When we’re angry or hurt or sad or scared, we don’t think straight; we’re not in our adult minds. At such times we tend to default to the behaviors we were taught as children. Decades later, I hope I at least recognize when I’m starting to default to this old way of behaving and can stop it in time. What has come harder is forgiving myself. But thinking about Candice, I realize it is not my fault, or hers, for having been raised with a big lie that we knew was wrong and still struggle to free ourselves from. Maybe the next time I watch an episode where Candice lies, I’ll have a bit more empathy and not feel like slapping her.