One major cost of self-deception is that we use painful life experiences to justify being non-ideal versions of ourselves.
We would all benefit by shifting our focus from seeing pain as bad to seeing pain as motivation to change.
The truth is that our self-deceptive lies range from seemingly tiny untruths to massive life-altering falsehoods about reality.
I cannot overemphasize the impact our childhood has on our ability to be honest because we live out what we learned as children in our adult relationships.
Living through difficult life circumstances in not an excuse for passing trauma onto someone else.
When you are not aware that you are bringing old learning to your current relationships, you will want to lie about where it is coming from.
We lie to reflect the aspirational goals that we unconsciously know we will not uphold.
Perhaps the most tragic way that self-deception harms us is that we start believing our lies and we teach them to others.
In fact, lying to ourselves may be the most dangerous thing in the world because we live our truth whether we are honest about it or not.
It is actually a good survival strategy to manipulate twist, and reorganize the truth in a way that is more consistent with what we can psychologically tolerate.
At the most basic level, self-deception is fooling ourselves into believing something that is false — or — not believing something that is true.
Whether what you learned was objectively true or false, the conclusions that you made about yourself, your environment, and other people will be replayed in your life because they become a part of who you are.
We lie to ourselves about the smallest details, and we lie to ourselves about our largest life choices.
As a clinical psychologist, I am regularly confronted with the brutal truth that we are all lie.
When we aren’t honest with ourselves about who we are and what we want, we allow other people and circumstance to determine our life course.
When what we say doesn’t match how we act, we are lying to ourselves.