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“Knowing your own darkness is the best method for dealing with the darkness of other people” Carl Jung
We don’t recognize that our story is just that, a story. We are full of fear,
we justify, we find excuses, we dread that someone will see who we really are. And so, we tell lies to ourself and others and a time comes when we believe those lies and become prisoners to them. Henrik Ibsen, the Norwegian theatre director, coined the term “vital lies” for the fictions that families create to conceal more distributing truths that are too threatening, dangerous, or painful to be acknowledged. The lie is vital because it maintains a superficial harmony, although at great cost.
Self-deception is a mechanism of self-defense, of temporary self-relief, which distorts our perception of reality. We rap ourself in a new acceptable package and we create “personas” in order to belong. Our mask takes many forms and eventually becomes our prison. We long for getting out, being accepted and loved but what we reject we have to bury it, to keep it in the unconscious, to hide it from everybody. We don’t realize that what we cannot be with, won’t let us be. We don’t realize that if there was no dark we wouldn’t be able to know the light.
We take refuge in self-deception because shame can devastate our sense of self. We don’t trust or value ourself and we choose to believe in illusions.
Dysfunctional excessive thinking is the reason why we are not willing to open up to others and to the world. The greater punishment is self-inflicted as we deprive ourself of the energy of the source and keeping us hostage to the past.
We have fears of how we show up, of saying the wrong thing, of being embarrassed in front of others, of losing the people who love us. We are afraid that our envy will show, that our thoughts will be discovered, that we will be left alone, that our fragmented being will reveal itself. We need to be honest with ourself, to be aware of our fears and conquer them because they keep us away from our true identity.
We can recognize self-deception, if we are listening attentively, it is when we become defensive, inconsistent and we make excuses, when integrity slips and there is avoidance of the truth, when we are not aligned with our values and when we hide our motives and our intentions. It is when we convince ourself about something and we change aspects of a story in order for us to feel well.
Self-deception offers remediation for our weaknesses and our fears. Unfortunately this remediation is short-lived and after a while leaves us numb because it has led us to the distortion of our values and beliefs in order to fit our needs, circumstances and our alleged weaknesses.
Demosthenes, the prominent ancient Greek statesman and orator, has said “Nothing is easier than self-deceit. For what every man wishes, that he also believes to be true”.