Verified by 
Key points
- We're blind to the corrective nature of painful memories when our efforts to keep safe violate deeper values.
- Self-deception is rampant in groupthink, when pressures of conformity dominate thinking and behavior.
- Hope and meaning rise with self-awareness and fall with self-obsession.
“Mankind cannot take too much reality.” – T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets
We have many ways to fool ourselves beyond the obvious defense mechanisms and coping habits. This post addresses only the few that deplete hope and drain experience of positive meaning.
Misinterpreting Disappointment
Disappointment occurs when outcomes do not meet expectations. The only way to avoid disappointment is to have no expectations. But the cost of having no expectations is low interest and hope, with an elevated risk of depression. It’s a better choice to embrace the benefits of disappointment. Yes, disappointment has benefits, when it motivates reflection, improvement, and perseverance, as any successful person will attest.
Disappointment depletes hope and positive meaning when we interpret it as personal failure, rejection, inadequacy, or disrespect from others.
Blame
Blame depletes hope and positive meaning because it forfeits control of emotional well-being to whomever we blame. It replaces hope with wishing that someone else would behave better, while motivating coercive efforts to get them to do so.
Misinterpreting Painful Memories
It may sound counterintuitive, but painful memories are not really about the past. The repetitive nature of painful memories evolved to keep us safe in the present. If you step on a nail in bare feet, you’ll have unpleasant memories of having stepped on the nail long after the physical wound is healed. The memory will persist until your brain is assured that you can walk safely by watching where you step. Painful memories motivate corrective behavior.
We undermine the corrective nature of painful memories when our efforts to keep safe violate deeper values. For instance, pain that results from the death of a loved one has a natural healing course. We disrupt the process when we try to protect ourselves from loss by withholding love. The violation of the deeper value of emotional connection keeps the memory of loss ever painful. But once we allow ourselves to invest value in other areas of life, the memories of the deceased loved one become pleasant reminders of enriched life experience. When a loved one dies, we lose nothing we experienced with that person. We lose only the future, which we don’t have anyway. To use the cliché, we feel better about having loved and lost than never having loved at all. Over time, painful memories activate the powerful human capacity to heal, improve, hope, and create positive meaning.
Taking It Personally
A generic form of self-deception that inhibits hope and positive meaning is “taking it personally.” Who hasn’t been offended by the bureaucracy, the opinions of other people, the performance of our favorite sports teams, or anything outside our personal control? Taking it personally gives us an illusion of control. A sure sign of this form of self-deception is disappointment turning into anger.
Groupthink
Groupthink occurs within a group of people when the pressures of loyalty and conformity dominate thinking and decision-making. The opinions and values of the group often override individual opinions and values.
Groupthink features unquestioned beliefs, stereotyping, and oversimplifications. It requires confirmation bias that drives the group to cherry-pick facts supporting the group's opinions and reject facts that disconfirm them. It’s a major contributor to the polarization that plagues our country. Where individual values drive us to seek conciliation, groupthink demands submission from or rejection of those who disagree.
The goal of groupthink is dominance of the group’s opinions and values over those of other groups, at the cost of self-awareness, hope, and positive meaning. It can make people do things as a group that they would never do individually.
Who Is Watching You?
People tend to behave one way in public and another way when alone. Social mores evolved to ensure that we do not behave the same way in public as we do when alone. Picking your teeth or nose are trivial examples. More serious are variations of moral behavior, depending on who’s watching. Moral behavior is foundational to hope and positive meaning. When it’s determined by who is watching, we deceive ourselves into thinking we’re more moral than we are.
Self-Obsession Is Self-Deception
Self-help authors tend to conflate the virtue of self-awareness with the vice of self-obsession. Self-awareness is sensitivity both to our internal experience and the effects of our behavior on others. Self-obsession is preoccupation with our internal experience, while oblivious to the negative effects of our behavior on others.
We’re all self-obsessed when experiencing strong feelings. At those moments, it’s difficult to see other people’s perspectives and, consequently, the effects of our behavior on them. We tend to judge other people by their negative reactions to us, without seeing what we’re doing to stimulate their reactions. I had one client who thought his wife was “mean” when she called him insensitive after he told her she was an idiot.
Because the self-obsessed can’t see other people, they do a lot of projecting—liars think no one tells the truth, and cheaters suspect dishonesty from everyone. They make judgments of others according to their own feelings and states of mind. Chronic self-obsession reduces other people to sources of feelings. You’re OK when you make them feel good and seriously flawed when you disagree with them. Hope and meaning typically rise with self-awareness and fall with self-obsession.
Certainty
Many of the mistakes we make when we experience emotions are due to the illusion of certainty they create. High adrenaline and cortisol emotions, particularly anger, fear, and, to a lesser degree, shame, create the most profound illusions of certainty, due to their amphetamine effects. Amphetamines create a temporary sense of confidence by increasing metabolic energy production while narrowing mental focus. That's why we feel more confident after a cup of coffee than before it. It's why we feel confident that we’re right and everyone else is wrong when we’re angry, that something is dangerous when we’re afraid, and that we’re failing or defective when ashamed.
Certainty is an emotional state, not an intellectual one. To create a feeling of certainty, the brain must filter out far more information than it processes, which, of course, greatly increases its already high error rate during emotional arousal. In other words, the more certain we feel, the more likely we’re wrong.
Ideology vs. Life Experience
Ideology is a system of ideas and ideals, often used as a basis for economic, political, and social theory or policy. It organizes interpretations of life experiences, with distortion and oversimplification. Most contain contradictions.
Ideologies tend to create more problems than they solve. Most throw out the baby with the bathwater, and many do more harm than good. Yet people kill and die for ideologies.
