Unfortunately, we all know about lying because it seems impossible to avoid it. Even sincere people sometimes keep silent, don't pay the ticket in transport or think that it is simpler not to tell the truth, that is, that it would bring them too many problems. Over time, almost all of us learn how to recognize when someone is lying to us, and there are, of course, artists in lying. But as interesting a process as it is an important cognitive and social achievement, there is something even more mysterious here. How is it possible for people to believe what they are saying the truth, and deceive both themselves and their interlocutors? How do we convince ourselves that something (didn't) happen - that we are better, taller, more beautiful than we are, that we did our best, that we are victims, the most honest people of all time, that our children are special - when it is objectively obvious that this cannot be the case?
FORTRESS DEFENSE
I will give you a common psychotherapeutic example: many people live with an extremely inflexible image of their parents or unquestioningly believe in the narrative of their own upbringing; after some time, despite the fact that the therapist does not have any objective information about these persons or events and cannot say anything about them, the picture becomes more complex, contradictory, sometimes even astonishing. People say "I was convinced for so many years..." or "I'm only now realizing how much I am." deceived himself yes...", but they can't explain how exactly they did it.
Freud told the story of a woman who, almost ten years after the end of the war, is still waiting for a letter stating that nothing happened to her son and that he had just arrived home. His point is that this mother waits for nothing to happen, refuses to see a change in the external reality. The problem, however, is more complicated - we all sometimes wait for some inner letter to confirm that nothing has changed in our inner reality: "I know everyone says it's impossible to have a perfect childhood, but mine really was perfect."
An additional similarity is that in neither case does persuasion help. Rational arguments, explaining with the help of rules and legalities, referring to other examples - all this is seen as cold, inapplicable, impersonal. Deception is so necessary that it acts like a fortress that will be defended at all costs, whether we are protecting our image of ourselves or our significant other. "I didn't fall in love at all." "I never stole anything!" "Impossible! I didn't even think of that!" On an even more general level, it can go so far that some people say: "Maybe I just dreamed it all" or, after telling you something, add: "It all seems like something from a movie, I don't know if it really happened to me or not". (I will ignore, for now, situations in which someone does not trust their judgment enough and easily changes it under external pressure.)
THOSE POWERFUL MECHANISMS
There can be no doubt as to whether this is happening. Anyone with an iota of introspection has at least once realized - usually, after the fact - that they are deceiving themselves. More mysterious are the questions of how and why we do it, and a thorough investigation of what we hide even from ourselves is difficult to organize.
One of the important strategies that make self-deception possible is minimization. You think that you have done something, as a rule, negatively, that you have hurt, let down or disappointed someone, but almost at the same time you say to yourself: "Oh, well, everyone does that, it should have been a long time ago to get used to it." And although the argument is nonsensical - as if the frequency in society is in any way relevant to the assessment of ethical behavior; as if someone's (un)accustomedness is a parameter for our decision-making - we use it to forgive ourselves and very often even completely forget that it ever happened.
Additionally, there are numerous social formulas that make it easier for us to resort to this mechanism: "Children don't remember anything anyway", "It's like men have feelings", "She's a grown woman, what can I do to her, she's not a teenager", "Black people aren't really people". We hear many such platitudes around us and reach for them when we need to deceive ourselves that our actions are negligible and easily forgivable.
Another similar mechanism is what psychoanalysts call displacement - some feeling or instinctual desire that we do not dare to connect with a certain person, we tie it to someone else, someone who is not forbidden to us, towards whom we can express love, hatred, jealousy, envy and all other feelings without an attack of intense anxiety. Even this abbreviated description of that mechanism shows us that its main task is to deceive others and ourselves. Whenever you are angry with your husband and have an argument with your boss, you are doing an important job - the real source of your anger remains hidden from your consciousness and, when you return home, you can believe that you have no problems. It's the same with a boy who is not allowed to hit his brother and then beats a school friend who has the same name as his brother, or a young man who knows that it is not allowed to fall in love with a cousin and then goes crazy for her best friend. And if you questioned them, none of them would believe that these interpretations make sense, they would remain completely convinced of their deceptions.
An old saying goes that a good speech is worth its weight in gold. This is very noticeable in schools and workplaces, wherever people encounter figures who have more indulgence than authority. However, the same applies when you justify yourself. You won't tell yourself how your grandfather died for the third time this semester, since that would be too obvious a lie, but almost everyone sometimes thinks "I had to take it when there is still a long time to pay" or "I'm not the only fool who doesn't prescribe when everyone else prescribes". With these maneuvers we try to invent mitigating circumstances before the internal court and jury, but their basis is to convince ourselves of something that another part of us knows is obviously not true.
This can also be achieved by what we call projection. As is well known, it is a mechanism we use to attribute some of our feelings or aspirations to others. We believe that someone is competing with us all the time so that we don't have to admit our own competitiveness; we resent someone being in love with us so we can remain blind to our own infatuation; we accuse everyone around us of stealing and thereby cover up our own greed. Projection is, therefore, an excellent tool for maintaining self-deception and, if you start paying attention, you will often and easily notice it in everyday interpersonal communication.
It would be possible to enumerate more such mechanisms, simply because numerous defense mechanisms, in different ways, serve to keep something outside of our consciousness, to prevent us from seeing our true motives. But it is important to note that there are worse options, since sometimes, simply put, we manage to deceive ourselves and convince ourselves of the untruth. Again, it is clear that we can easily lie under external pressure even if we wanted to be strong and honest. Unfortunately, our moral strength is rarely so great that we can resist internal pressures, so we, in order not to suffer, convince ourselves of falsehoods, if necessary by repeating them to ourselves many times.
THIS IMMENSE PRESSURE
Finally, the question remains what are the internal pressures that override our morality - which makes up our character, the core of how we perceive ourselves and present ourselves to people - and because of which we deceive ourselves or even give up on ourselves. What could be more powerful in a human being than a decision and an attempt to mobilize forces for development, self-knowledge and honesty?
On the one hand, all this takes place under the influence of various fears and anxieties. Where the personality structure is not stable enough, i.e. self-esteem is realistic and solid enough, anxieties can act like mythical creatures that jump out of some abyss and threaten to pull you down, like Balrog Gandalf. And as fear is an extremely powerful feeling, evolutionarily anchored in the lower brain structures, it can easily happen to us that we feel overwhelmed and give up on ourselves and everything we would stand for in peace.
An even more vicious persecutor can be an immoderate feeling of guilt, which does not punish justly and deservedly, but crushes everything in front of it even for a small transgression, if it falls into a domain to which you are particularly sensitive. Such uncompromising guilt can easily completely destroy your sense of self-worth, leaving you dust and ashes instead of hope and enthusiasm. If this happens to you just once, you can forever remain marked by the horror that it could happen again, and then, running away from that possibility, or just someone's (sometimes quite manipulative) threat of it, convince yourself of any nonsense or "wooden iron".
In some cases, self-deception becomes so widespread or necessary to use it so often that we get the impression that someone has built an entire false identity, that no matter how we try to approach it, we always come up with the same unrealistic beliefs about ourselves. Cynics would probably say that this is the only option and that all identities are false and based on (self)deception. It seems, however, that some differences are obvious: in the readiness to reconsider something, the courage to speak honestly about oneself, flexibility, inclination to change. But if there is a lesson in this story, it is that we should be aware that we can never fully know ourselves (not to bid with percentages now), and that, as every psychotherapist understands his patients better than himself, we must not lose sight of the fact that we only get to know ourselves in dialogue with someone in front of whom we dare to be extremely honest and bare.
The author is a psychologist
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