On Lying to Oneself, Handling Guilt and Regret

The first question, obviously, is: Why do we lie to ourselves? To understand this, we must first understand why people lie at all, and the answer is simple: to hide the truth, for a plethora of different reasons. One could simply lie because the truth is embarrassing, harmful to the speaker, etc. We lie to anybody in order to hide the truth. Thus, we lie to ourselves too to hide the truth.

How can one lie to oneself simultaneously knowing the truth all the same? In general, through these three ways:

1. By pretending it didn’t happen – denying that anything ever happened and thus what you are saying is true.

2. By ignoring it – trying to shut the matter out of your mind.

3. By changing the narrative – changing the significant details of the event (which make you guilty) in your mind.

Generally, these are significant lies. The acts that provoke the person to lie to oneself or to deny the happening of the event altogether is something that brings them deep regret. They want to forget it altogether so that they can be free from guilt.

Therefore, people lie to themselves to protect their reality.

The amount of guilt and regret that can be generated by accepting what they did gives them the notion that it would be dangerous, and thus they resort to trying to forget the incident.  The problem is, these things are not easy to forget. And when we determine that we have to forget something, we think about it more often because we have to remember it to make it manually vanish from our memories. This gives rise to more guilt.

Guilt is like rust – it is slow, but powerful, and it eats the person alive.

Keeping the truth in the dark is a very tough task, and it generates such amount of immense pressure on the person that it starts to get depressing for him or her. The state of denial that the person had resorted to earlier, takes their energy away. It makes the person hollow.

The person loses self-credibility, and the self no more can be relied upon. The person can’t trust him/her self anymore. Self-confidence collapses.

This is because the problem demands an effective solution. For the solution, the problem must be identified correctly. Often times people think that doing the deed which is making them feel guilty is the problem i.e., the action that gave rise to all of this is the problem, but it’s not. The problem is our incapability to forgive ourselves and move on.  We are very liberal to forgive others for their mistakes, but we do not do the same with us. We tend to analyse our shortcomings more critically than others.

The problem: Our incapability to forgive ourselves and move on.

The Solution

What do we do when we make such a grave mistake? We tell ourselves, “I am never ever going to do this again, no matter what happens!”. The reason we do that is because we want to wash off the notion from our minds that we can do something of such evil nature. We still feel guilty about it anyways, and the reason is that our mind refuses to believe the reassurance we provide it with, because of the fact that our reassurance is hollow. We had directly rushed to the decision that we wouldn’t do it again, but prior to that did we think where we went wrong, did we identify and analyse our mistake properly? We just felt guilty, and we provided ourselves with some reassurance, and given the fact that we are more critical of ourselves than of others, our mind refuses to believe that reassurance. Surprisingly enough, reassurance is the solution to this problem anyway.

The order of the solution begins with the first step which is sheer acceptance of facts plain and simple. This is a non-negotiable part. After the acknowledgement of facts, you need to think about your mistake, how you can avoid it in the future, how you can make things better. In simple words, you need to turn over the whole idea in your head and draw significant conclusions out of it, to implement them in your life. Now, it’s time for reassurance. You wouldn’t be able to reassure yourself immediately. Once you have drawn useful conclusions that you have to implement in your life to avoid any such deed from happening furthermore, you will have to show your own self that you are actually implementing those conclusions. We have all heard the phrase, ‘Actions speak louder than words”, and it fits here as neatly as a piece fits in its puzzle. When your virtue would begin to lift up, though on small scale, your mind will start to believe you have improved and that you have changed. That, the confirmation to yourself that you have changed is the ultimate reassurance you will come across. You would now be capable of believing that the person that existed before and the person that exists now are distinguished. This ultimate reassurance will make you rise above your guilt, regret, sorrow and will give you what you need the most – the peace of mind.