WHY WE ARE OFTEN SO HAPPY TO DECEIVE OURSELVES

"The life story of Ivan Ilyich was the most simple, ordinary, and most terrible," wrote Leo Tolstoy. A mid-level bureaucrat who made a successful legal career, painfully dies, his physical decay matching with the awakening of his soul, as he realizes that he had a fruitless and boring life, but sees light at the end of the tunnel. And the miracle happens - the fear of death suddenly disappears.

Who has not experienced the wonder of self-deception, where we start to sincerely believe that the reality we have construed in our mind is the truth. We then feed our confidence with thoughts, illusions and unfulfilled dreams created by our mind.

Self-deception often serves as a form of psychological defense from the painful reality, and some are so immersed in it that on the way back they will have to immerse in real crap to get out.

Let's look at life situations in which people reach the heights of self-deception:

A married man's lover indulges in believing that soon her beloved will leave his family and build a new life with her, just waiting for the moment when his son goes to first grade, the wife finds a job, etc...

A man is subconsciously attracted to men, but his conscious mind carefully suggests to him that this is absolutely unacceptable in his puritan world; so, he convinces himself that he is against same-sex relationships and he aggressively voices it.

When looking at the report card, we confidently tell our child that 'at your age, I only had straight A's', completely forgetting that we ourselves had significant academic setbacks, and sincerely believing in a better younger version of ourselves.

Sometimes we decide to radically change our life and move to another country, convincing ourselves that this will bring us the desired relief, forgetting that we are the cause of our own failures and geochanges don’t always lead to the desired internal changes…

A wonderful method of escaping our failure and anxiety to communicate is to become a workaholic and spend 24 hours at work - a wonderful way of self-deception and protection from overly sociable companions who are always trying to get you to unleash yourself.

A woman has lived for many years with a man who physically and emotionally abuses her, tries to justify his behavior by thinking that maybe it was her fault that prompted him to violence, refusing to acknowledge the fact that the person who regularly abuses her and the person from whom she expects support and understanding are one and the same. Self-deception helps her in this case to survive the harsh truth, but only up to a certain point...

During an analysis of your financial situation, you think that it's just numbers on paper, they have nothing to do with your comfortable life, so if you, like me, prefer to rarely check your bank account and think 'we'll make it through somehow', I have to disappoint you - the cleanup will be long, painful, and painstaking.

Self-deception helps, when we start to behave and act like the person we aspire to be, we start to feel and act like our ideal self. It is a kind of bridge that we lay from our present self to our future self, it helps us keep ourselves in shape and stay on track. To a certain point though…

There is a fine line, beyond which we truly start mastering self-deception, becoming like Ivan Ilyich, who convinces himself of his small career happiness and family life being 'just fine', until he comes face to face with death, which, unfortunately, did not spare him, but dispelled the self-deception in which he lived his entire conscious life.

The more structured and planned our life is, the more likely we are prone to self-deception. So, should we maybe consider ceasing to make rigid demands on life and start to simply enjoy it in all its manifestations.

How can we learn to stop lying to save ourselves? Many of us have a fragile Ego, and our unconscious mind has to work hard to protect our feelings from emotional wounds and confusion, often resorting to distortion to make us feel a little better.

Lying is not good, we were all taught that as children, but sometimes we still lie to people. Lying to ourselves though is the worst we can do.

So, first of all, learn to listen to your inner dialogue. What thoughts and feelings do you have? Positive that support you, or mainly negative that bring you down? It is important to learn to manage your thoughts internally in a positive direction, focusing on strong and positive qualities, the inner hero, mentally transferring yourself to places and situations where you felt in power.

The unconscious mind is your best friend and ally, so boldly turn to it for help and train your conscious to tune yourself to the better emotional version of you. It’s possible.

Secondly, make an inventory of your life, values, and goals in the most flexible way and divide them into small steps that you can do today, tomorrow, the day after tomorrow, etc. Giant ambitious goals usually lead to self-deception or disappointment.

Thirdly, the importance of a sense of humor in your life cannot be overstated: the more things we can turn into a joke and the more we can laugh at our own flaws, the easier it is for us to climb the mountain, shedding the past with a healthy curiosity about life.

Fourthly, spend time playing, entertaining, laughing, being foolish and doing silly stuff that brings you real pleasure and fun. This way you charge yourself with positive energy and feel somewhere deep down that perhaps life is not passing you by, making you an integral part of it.

They help us determine what we really like and help us find our true purpose, which, to our great surprise, may have nothing to do with your job as a bureaucrat, like Ivan Ilyich.