This is a continuation of my series on self-deception. For more background, visit the beginning post of the series here.
Insight #2
“Lying to yourself is bad.
The worst part of it is that when you lie to yourself, it makes it that much easier for others, who do not have your best interests at heart, to lie to you about what those lies are. Particularly when they themselves desperately need to believe these lies.”
Self-deception about others can take on many forms, but often involves projection of our own issues onto that person and/or idealizing that person (and thus overlooking their very real faults).Of course, others tell themselves the same sorts of lies about us.
Why do people do this? Because we need justify our feelings about, and reactions to, each other. If we have engaged in self-deception, we have built up a self-image that needs to be propped up by more lies. If our relationships prop up this self-image, it is to our benefit to maintain our self-deception regarding others. They, in turn, tell themselves lies about us in order to maintain their own self-image.
The problems with this round-robin lying are numerous. Many an unhealthy relationship has dragged out longer than it ought because one or both partners inappropriately idealized the other. Similarly, failing to live up to this idealization, and/or projecting negative ideas onto the other can, and regularly does, end relationships that might otherwise have survived.
Even worse, when we are already in a pattern of self-deception, we become more vulnerable to believing the lies that others are already telling themselves about us. After all, our self-deception is often more obvious to others than it is to us, and is thus fairly easy to exploit. If our self-deception has been exposed, we might well be more inclined to listen to what our exposer has to say about us, even if they themselves are telling us their own set of lies. We see this sort of thing happen in dysfunctional romantic relationships, of course, but also between unscrupulous therapists and their clients, as well as gurus/clergy and their disciples.
The sad thing is that ending a pattern of self-deception often, though not always, does require the intervention of outsiders. But if the outsiders we rely on need to believe their own lies, they are unlikely to be of much use to us. And so the pattern of self-deception continues, made even worse by outside cooperation.
