The sad truth about Belle Gibson: she deserves our compassion

IT WAS all a lie. That much we know. Belle Gibson deceived her followers and got rich. But the question we all need to ask isn’t about that.

OPINION

Sympathy for Belle?

It fascinates me that one of the main questions we pose about Belle Gibson’s recent admission that her claim to have brain cancer was a lie, is whether we should have sympathy for her. Should we feel sorry for her, we wonder. Does the possibility that she may be suffering from a mental illness mean we should ignore her deception? Even more than we want to understand why a young woman would fake a serious illness and defraud the public of hundreds of thousands of dollars, we want to know how to feel about what she’s done.

It’s a good question.

Ask yourself: would you trade places with Belle Gibson?

We may never know why she lied, however much unethical and unscientific speculation we do about psychological disorders like Munchausen’s or connections Belle herself attempts to make between her childhood and her lack of attachment to the truth.

What we do know is that this young woman felt a need, for whatever reason, to lie — hugely and expansively — about her real self and her real life. Instead of building a life, she built a fragile house of cards based on a pretty terrible fantasy.

I don’t know about you, but to me that’s incredibly sad. I remember the times I lied as a kid, and I can remember many confessions from my clients about their lies. Each and every one of them was an attempt to cover up the shame of who we were, or the shame that we didn’t know who we were. We were making ourselves up because we thought we were wrong, unforgivable or too insubstantial to matter. And of course some of those lies were incredibly harmful.

Gibson’s explosive magazine confession has brought down her house of cards.

I think we’re wondering about whether we can feel sorry for Belle not so much because she conned vulnerable people — after all, that’s unfortunately not so uncommon is it? — but because we can identify with what she’s done. I think we’re wondering if we deserve compassion for our own lies. Do we even know why we tell the lies we do? The ones we tell in order to get hired or laid, the ones we tell on Facebook, in photos, when we call in sick. The ones we tell our partners, our children, our parents, our friends. All the lies we tell in order to gain advantage and to protect ourselves from shame, punishment or loss.

Belle Gibson deserves our compassion whether or not she meets the criteria for a diagnosable mental illness. Offering that compassion doesn’t mean absolving her of the responsibility of defrauding and betraying thousands of vulnerable people.

She deserves our compassion because the life she built was not a life you would wish on your worst enemy. The more we lie the worse we feel about ourselves.

And the worse we feel about ourselves, the more we lie. And lies of course leave us alone and apart, as Belle Gibson no doubt is at this very moment. How sad is that?

Zoe Krupka is a counsellor and psychotherapist

Originally published as The sad truth about Belle Gibson: she deserves our compassion