Self-Deceiving Stories
To Trust Ourselves, We Have to Be Honest With Ourselves
The following excerpt comes from an exploration of Tenet Six, which reads: “While everyone has the capacity to be self-deluded, you have more expertise about yourself than any other human being. Do not defer to others’ opinions or judgments of you against your own consistent intuition.”
…Let us not think that [] self-deception and self-justification [are] monopolized by genocidal maniacs or their goons. You and I do it all the time. Perhaps I’m trying to watch my blood sugar, but I also want to eat the delicious cronut sitting in the break room. Rather than exercising self-control, I remind myself of the unreasonable standards of appearance promoted by culture, and that I had a savory (rather than sweet) breakfast this morning. I call to mind how rarely I ever eat cronuts, and assure myself that I can just skip having sugar in my coffee tomorrow if I really want to balance it out. Off I go to fetch my cronut; never mind that my blood sugar has nothing to do with beauty standards, or that I actually had maple syrup on both servings of French toast at breakfast, or that I actually had a cronut two days before, or that I just had a cup of coffee with an extra pack of sugar. My heart wants what it wants, the will chooses it, and the mind justifies me getting it.
I see this all the time with my clients. They have an affair, but insist that it’s really just self-actualization in the form of expanding their sexuality. They call out sick from work when they are perfectly healthy so that they can go to the beach with friends, but insist that capitalistic, corporate culture is so inhumane that this is not dishonesty— it’s resistance. A wife screams at, threatens, and intimidates her husband, but insists that this is not abuse, but the discovery of her empowered voice— in short, it’s feminism. A husband controls his wife’s every choice, down to the clothes that she buys and wears and insists on sex-on-demand with her whenever he pleases, but this isn’t chauvinism or exploitation— it’s “Biblical male leadership.” A parent shames and harshly punishes their child, but this isn’t bullying— it’s tough love.
Our capacity for self-deception and subsequent self-justification is expansive, and without a healthy level of suspicion about ourselves and our motives, we are apt to do all kinds of terrible things while feeling great about it. My colleagues in the world of Adlerian Psychology often speak about the difference between our “good intent” (the nice little story we tell ourselves about why we do things) and our “real intent” (our true motivations). When we unthinkingly buy into our own bullshit narratives full of virtuous motives, we cut ourselves off from meaningful and necessary changes for our own good and the good of the community around us.