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Intellectual and Emotional Honesty (podcast $)
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Episode Intellectual and Emotional Honesty (podcast $)
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“We are all multiple personalities, in a sense, and to be healthy mentally, I think, learning what those multiple personalities are and inviting them in your life is really important.” — Sally Field, actress and trauma survivor
We think of personalities as people, not just attitudes or presentations. Most of the time there isn’t much more to us than our attitudes and behavior. If you stop right now and look at what ideas are guiding you, you might find one. More likely, you won’t find any. We rarely think thoughts of any consequence. Our fleeting thoughts arrive with no explanation.
Disconnection
Disconnection between thoughts and feelings lies at the root of many people’s inability to act or change. They’ll claim to know what needs to be done, yet they’ll want something else. As a result they take no action, excuse themselves, and argue they’re doing the right thing.
This morning my ex-wife claimed, “I’m a nice person.” I thought, “Is being nice something one claims for oneself?” I recalled the serial killer Normal Bates, in the final scene in the movie Psycho, asserting his piety as he says to himself, “They’ll see…They’ll say, ‘She wouldn’t even harm a fly.’”
And then there’s the strategy of contradicting another person’s reality in an effort to make them question their sanity, otherwise known as gaslighting. There is also reverse gaslighting, the strategy of asserting a delusion in an effort to get other people to endorse it.
Is my ex-wife a nice person? Are you a nice person? Is being nice an attribute one assigns to oneself? “I'm a much nicer person than people would think,” Donald Trump has said. Assigning oneself the attribute of niceness is like smiling at yourself in the mirror. It makes no sense.
People can reasonably disagree on factual matters, but emotional matters represent different versions of reality. When a person says they’re motivated to one end but their actions lead to another, who is in charge? What about the case when a person’s consistent acts and attitudes at one time contradict their contrary but otherwise consistent acts and attitudes at another?
When Presentation Conflicts With Reality
We all have these two personalities. They manage different worlds and largely stay out of each other’s way. The parent who loves their child and the parent who beats their child are usually the same person. The 1996 movie Shine is about a father, Peter Helfgott, who obsessively protects his family while simultaneously destroying it. Peter and Norman have the same mental disability differing only in the degree. Both are pathological and delusional.
My mother used to tell me, “Be nice!” as she fashioned herself to be. The fact that she was both nice and an inadequate mother never bothered her, but it caused me distress. She was nice but absent; a nonresponsive robot.
Now, as a therapist, I have little use for being nice, and suspect as dishonest anyone who looks for credit in being nice. I find fabricating an image of being nice is often a screen beyond which bridges are burned and bodies buried.
Be careful about the virtue you claim for yourself. Don’t confuse self respect, which is a right, with self virtue, which is a fantasy.
Honesty of Facts and Honesty of Feelings
If honesty is what is true, then there is one world of true facts and another of true feelings. Truth of fact enables you to build reliable bridges; truth of feelings enables you to build reliable relationships. These are different bridges to different destinations.
Facts are elusive and interpretations uncertain. Simple honesty is the world of facts, with accommodations made for uncertainty. You’re considered honest if you tell the truth or think you do. You don’t have to be right, you just have to be sincere in wanting to be.
Little kids are honest even when their facts are wrong. I have a client who is certain I’ve said things completely…
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