Psychology Of Self Deception
According
to psychology, self deception is one of the popular escapement methods that
people use to prevent themselves from feeling guilty while in the same time
allowing themselves to escape from something that they don't want to face.
Of
course people don't deceive themselves on intention but it’s their subconscious
minds that come up with such tricks in order to protect their psychological
well being.
If
a student lacks self esteem when it comes to exams and if he is afraid to get
bad grades he might find himself unable to concentrate whenever he tries to
study without knowing why.
In
such a case the student's subconscious mind came up with this brilliant self
deception plan to prevent him from testing his self worth in the exam without
feeling guilty!! The self deception part here can be noticed easily because the
student will blame his lack of ability to concentrate whenever he gets poor
grades and thus protect his self esteem.
According
to individual psychology each self deception attempt has a very important goal
behind it and the only way to prevent self deception is to help the person
attain that goal in a different way.
For
example, if a man was unsure of his skills and was afraid to test them in work
he might turn into an alcoholic without knowing why. Using that self deception
method that person can blame his alcoholism for his poor performance without
realizing that its all a scenario set up by his mind to allow him to escape.
The only way to help that man stop deceiving himself is to allow him to feel
worthy.
Even
stuttering can be a sign of self deception, one theory that was proposed about
the psychology of stuttering claimed that its a self deception method that
helps a person avoid social contact in order to prevent others from discovering
that he is less worthy than them.
As
you just saw it’s not easy for someone who used to deceive himself for years to
suddenly admit that he was escaping or deceiving himself.
In
fact it takes a lot of courage to find out the self deception plans your
subconscious mind is coming up with because they are usually set up to hide
something that you don't want to admit.
I
still remember that man who had no social skills at all and who deceived
himself by becoming a workaholic and thus blaming his tight schedule for his
poor social relations.
Certainly
reading more about psychology can help you get over your self deception
attempts because one study found that most people tend to believe the
information they read. If a friend or a psychologist told you that you are
deceiving yourself you might not believe him but if this fact came to you
through a book or an article such as this one then you might be able to believe
in it with less resistance.
