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4 ways we lie to ourselves

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As much as we are rational animals, that does not mean that we have a reasonable and realistic image of what we have most at hand: ourselves. It may seem paradoxical, but having access to almost all the information about who we are and how we feel does not mean that it is reliable.

In fact, there are many situations in which those who understand us best are others, for the simple fact of being other people. The biased view on own me It is a burden that each of us carry, while our friends, family and colleagues already They have the advantage of observing us from a more distant perspective and, on many occasions, analytics.

Definitely, there are so many ways we lie to each other ourselves so as not to compromise certain aspects of our own mentality.

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The importance of cognitive dissonance

Why is it that we try to remain blind to those aspects of reality that we do not like, if knowing them could be useful to solve them? The answer lies in a well-known concept in the world of psychology: the cognitive dissonance.

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Do you recognize that feeling of discomfort that you experience when you realize that two beliefs that you feel attached to or that, at least, seem reasonable to you? There is the key. In short, cognitive dissonance is the state of tension that appears when two or more beliefs are in contradictionas they are incompatible.

There are several ways to avoid cognitive dissonance or to cease its existence, and many of them do not allow us. lead to a better understanding of reality from the reflection of what we thought we knew until the moment. In this case, what happens is that we are deceiving ourselves. This happens in different ways, as we will see now.

In these ways we lie to ourselves

Although it may not seem like it, most of us are more than delighted to resorting to self-deception to keep the mental image of who we are intact. And is that the self-image is very delicate and, sometimes, the mechanisms we use to avoid confronting it with reality are automatic.

Now, for the same reason that we try to preserve this self-image automatically, it is difficult to realize those moments when we are fooling ourselves.

To make it easier for you to spot the red flags regarding self-deception, below you can see the 4 ways in which we tend to deceive ourselves.

1. Confusing the need with the will

Many times, situations where one party dominates the other they are camouflaged under a false image of freedom. For example, there are relationships in which the glue that binds the two parties is simply the fear of the loneliness of one of them. This fear causes the relationship to run its course despite being clearly damaging and asymmetrical.

In these cases, the person who remains because of the dependency dynamics believes that all these moments of discomfort you experience are due to the sacrifices we are supposed to make for the good of romantic love. Any indication that what is really happening is that her partner is vampirizing her will be ignored by all means.

By the way, something similar happens many times in the relationship that recently addicted people have with the substance they consume.

2. Play with the meaning of words

When it comes to alleviating the discomfort caused by cognitive dissonance, one of the most used strategies consists of modify our belief system to assign a new meaning to some of those that were in contradiction and, thus, get it to "fit" well into one's own mentality.

If this results in a deep reflection on our beliefs and we end up accepting that the reality is not as simple as we thought at first, possibly that will be a constructive experience and sobering. But if the only objective that is pursued with this is to appease as soon as possible that anxiety born of the uncertainty of not knowing what to believe, we will fall into self-deception.

Specifically, what is usually done in these cases is to "remove" a little the concepts that we use to understand certain parts of reality. so that its meaning becomes more ambiguous and the illusion is created that the idea that used to come into conflict with them now fits.

For example, someone who may believe that homosexuality is unnatural because it does not promote reproduction but, confronted with the idea that many heterosexual people decide not to having children, defending the idea that homosexuality is unnatural because it is a statistical abnormality, and so on until giving the concept of "unnatural" as many definitions as possible. lack.

3. Avoid contact with dangerous ideas

Another way to fool ourselves is to completely ignore one of those "dangerous ideas", not paying attention to it, making it void. In this way, it is common that if someone brings up this topic of conversation, the other replies with a "well, let's not argue" or, sarcastically, with a "well, okay, only you have the absolute truth." They are ways of winning an argument by not winning it, a lazy resource to avoid being in an uncomfortable situation.

4. Believe that we are the only ones who are unique

This is a very recurring thought that is used as a shield for our self-image when everything around us yells in our face that we have a problem. Basically, it consists of believing that no matter how much the outside world is governed by attending to objective truths, our case is unique and special, and nobody can tell us what happens to us or what will happen to us.

For example, this happens a lot with tobacco addiction: we see that people who smoke more than three cigarettes a day have serious problems quitting. to consume it, but we believe that we, who do the same, have neither developed an addiction nor would have problems if we wanted to abandon that habit.

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