We All Lie to Ourselves: Self-Deception

Not only people lie, but feelings also lie too. How many times have we done something for or to someone else thinking that we are doing the righteous and the best thing for or to that person, just to find out that we were wrong, or probably, very wrong. We frequently lie to ourselves; it becomes normal because we do it consistently, and because we repeatedly do it, we don’t notice it. A lie can go from simply saying a false statement in order to deceive, or a statement checked through biased resources, to a subconscious and unconscious thing to do, or as it should be called after doing it consistently, a habit. That’s the process of self-deception, it starts with bending our reality just a little bit. Sometimes it starts with doing something for someone else, something that we don’t want to do, like not mentioning to your friend that stealing or bribery is wrong, like not telling your friend to do research before adopting ideas and beliefs that aren’t aligned with his authentic self. It usually happens because of two reasons, we don’t want society to judge, label, or disapprove of us; or because we have a special interest in things being in a certain way, it can be financial, or emotional interest.

The first step is betraying yourself, looking away, and pretending that everything is fine when it doesn’t go against your integrity, that’s forsaking your values. The second step is covering our wrongdoing, guilt, shame, etc. with explanations to validate our actions. Victimization becomes the tool of trade, how? Inventing justifications for our actions to authorize what we’ve done. We need to reason and validate our actions with ourselves first, so we use victimization, or persecution, or manipulation to do it; we also blow up the consequences of not doing what we did, deceiving ourselves even more to the point that we end up even giving credit to ourselves for what we did. So, in our mind, the wrong has started to shift from a wrong to a right; and we have started to transform in our own eyes from a wrongdoer to a savior. When self-deception happens, you can move quickly from someone that has problems dealing with the betray of his own integrity to your unconscious mind creating an image of a redeemer, a protector, to cover the urgent need to dissipate your mixed emotions; you need something that reassures you that what you have done was not only correct but necessary.

Any mind can bring to reality a fictional place or thought, for good or bad, and continuously revisiting that place or thought eventually leads to it becoming truth, inevitably.

Mauro Gallardo

By the time you have distorted reality to justify it and yourself, you have created an inaccurate realism twice and you are unconsciously starting to live in it, you’ve gotten serious preparing the ground to live your own fantasy. The problem is that the consistent repetition of your justifications, work as concrete on top of your old values’ foundation and it’s just a matter of time until that transcends your formation. The lies you have been telling yourself or others have been telling you have gone deep into your personality and it affects the way you think, feel, and behave. Something that started as a mere and insignificant deed has done what not even you have noticed, has turned you into someone else. The worst part is that you have become someone else, and all this has happened unconsciously, meaning you haven’t noticed it, and it stays like that, hidden from your attention. You are not only betraying your values, you are mastering the toleration and creation of distorted perceptions through repetitiveness, on time, it will become reality to you. After involuntarily submitting to fantasy as reality, you stop accepting information or facts from different sources, you only take them from one or two origins that you’ve chosen because their words match the reality that you want to believe.

Any mind can bring to reality a fictional place or thought, for good or bad, and continuously revisiting that place or thought eventually leads to it becoming truth, inevitably. In the depths of your mind, that fictional place you wanted to believe in, regardless of how unreal, deformed, or misrepresenting of reality it is, has matched reality. Not even facts that can be seen, touched, or proven get through your mind or bend the reality that you have built and chosen to believe. That’s when you’re lost in your fictional reality. No friend, no relative, no person, nor any kind of source can remove the mask from your eyes. Even worst, if there were ever a tiny glimpse of hope that you might open your mind just a little bit to look at the fictional environment where you live, there’s the shame factor.

According to the brainwash-minded person, just opening yourself up to a different reality would mean, in the eyes of others, that what you have believed all this time was wrong, how to deal with that? Consequently, even if you were open to change, you are not open to “humiliation”, the believer doesn’t see it as waking up from his fantasy, it’s seen as a humiliation. Some people don’t open their minds even knowing fully well that their beliefs and/or acts are wrong because it’s easier to explain what’s going on with more deception, better than accepting the guilt of being wrong. This explains how when you allow what started as a small snowball to roll, you might get to the point where you lose the sense of reality and won’t see that the snowball, that has rolled down the mountain wild and free, has grown and taken you on its path. So, when your free will has been possessed by self-deception, victimization (blaming) becomes the key to explain and manipulate all events, blaming is the easy way out to all your wrongdoings, and the explanation to all your unfavorable circumstances. Victimization usually pairs with anger. Victims are consistently angry people, angry because they think that no matter what other people do if the actions of others don’t align with their way of thinking and what they want, it’s a personal attack against them. Victims believe that every little thing that others do is to disapprove and condemn their beliefs, actions, and behavior. That’s why trying to force a shift of beliefs on people doesn’t work, much less trying to make them change attacking their beliefs. Opening your mind is something that happens out of a free will, it’s got to be the choice of the individual to do it. You can put things in perspective for them, put all the information and facts on the table. You can bring the horse to the creek, but if he doesn’t want to drink the water, there’s nothing you can do.

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