How your mind can fool you

Think that just because you’re smart and educated, you know what the hell you’re doing? Hell no!

Why not? Isn’t that what smarts and education is supposed to accomplish? Yes — to an extent.

However — and this is a giant however — the mind has an astonishing ability to fool itself. And fool itself it does. Do you want to frequently focus on how you futz up? Do you want to face painful realities about the people to whom you feel closest?

If you’re a masochist, your answer may well be “Yes, that’s exactly what I want to do. I want to keep focusing on my mistakes and the fatal flaws of my friends and family.”

If you’re like most of us, however, you don’t want to do any of those things. You want to feel good about yourself and the people you care about. So what do you do?

You rely on defense mechanisms that shield you from what you don’t want to know, don’t want to face, don’t want to deal with. Defense mechanisms operate outside of conscious awareness so we get to fool ourselves about 'what is'.

How else could you run up mega credit-card debt and not even be aware of it?

How else can the proverbial wife be the last one to know about her cheating husband when all the signs are obvious to everyone else?

How else could the Madoff sons work the business without knowledge of the Ponzi scheme their father was running? (A proviso: I don’t know exactly what the sons knew and what they didn’t know. But, I wouldn’t be surprised if powerful defense mechanisms shielded them from realizing the full extent of what was happening.)

Amazingly, defense mechanisms work well. Until the fateful day: the day the credit card no longer works; the day the cheating husband is caught with his pants down; the day the Madoff bubble burst.

When reality intrudes so forcefully, people generally find their defense mechanisms useless. No more projection (blaming someone else for your difficulties); no more compartmentalization (dealing with that’s comfortable while you ignore the unpleasant truths); no more denial (refusing to acknowledge ‘what is’ in spite of overwhelming evidence that everyone else sees).