“Okay,” Ana said, “I think I’m following. But I’ve been wanting to ask you both something.”
“Go for it,” Theo said.
“You’ve been telling us that when we fail to respond to our helpful senses toward others, we get into a distorted place, right?”
“That’s right.”
“But what about times when we’re not wrong about others?”
Tom sat up taller and scooted forward in his seat.
“Tell me more, Ana,” Theo said.
“Well, what if Tracie had been pretending to be asleep? I mean, what if she was mad and wanted to punish you or something? Or what if your coworkers in San Francisco had been deliberately excluding you from the updates or food plans?”
“Ah,” Theo said, nodding. “I think you’re asking how we can know whether or not we’re seeing clearly. Are others intentionally mistreating us, or are we just perceiving mistreatment?”
“Yeah, exactly,” Ana said. “I can see how it’s important to question your perceptions, but how do you not drive yourself crazy by second-guessing what you see? What if the other person is actually a jerk or even manipulative?”
“They could be,” Theo admitted. “It’s certainly not impossible for our negative perceptions of others to align with who they are—at least, how they are behaving at that moment in relation to us.”
“Seeing other people as people doesn’t mean wearing rose-colored glasses and assuming everyone has innocent intentions,” Kate added. “And it’s not about taking responsibility for other people’s choices. Abusive situations are real, and people can be legitimate victims of circumstances beyond their control, including the actions of other people.”
Ana nodded.
“When we’re determining how much we trust someone or whether it is healthy for us to spend time with them, the kind of person they choose to be matters,” Theo said. “You don’t want to hire or get married to someone who is unkind or manipulative. Remember, the truth is that other people matter like we matter, not that they matter more than we matter or that we matter less and should accept mistreatment.”
“That makes sense,” Ana said.
“The thing is,” Theo continued, “in the majority of interactions we have, we’re dealing with other human beings who are as imperfect as we are. But self-deception makes us more likely to see malevolent intent or animosity even when that isn’t the case. In fact, we’re likely to assume the worst if that gives us justification.”
“And if we’re trying to address our own self-deception,” Kate said, “the other person’s intentions or feelings toward us are actually irrelevant.”
“Irrelevant?” Tom asked.
“I mean that we have a sense to be helpful to others that exists independently of anyone else’s choices,” Kate said. “It’s our own choice to betray that sense that leads us to seek justification and become self-deceived.”
“Imagine if I had immediately responded to my sense to get out of bed and care for David that night,” Theo said, “without waiting or making excuses. I would have been back in a few minutes. And you know what? I bet I would’ve fallen asleep quickly.
“What kept me awake was my resentment toward Tracie and the self-justifying story I was telling—the story I needed because I knew I should’ve gotten up right away.
“So even if it somehow wasn’t ‘fair’ for me to get up, even if Tracie was awake and ignoring David’s crying or trying to punish me somehow, none of that would change the fact that I had felt a pull to help my son and let Tracie rest. We can’t escape responsibility for the way we see others and the way we honor or ignore our senses toward them.”
Tom looked skeptical.
“Let’s hear it, Tom,” Theo said. “What’s bothering you?”
“I’m just thinking,” he said, arms across his chest.
“Well,” Ana jumped in, “what if you hadn’t had the feeling to get up when you heard your son crying? Then it technically wouldn’t have been self-betrayal, right?”
“You’re not pulling any punches this afternoon, are you, Ana?” Theo smiled. “What do you think?”
“Well, it can’t seem like it would’ve been right to roll over and go back to sleep when your baby is crying,” Ana noted, “so maybe it’s not the best example.”
“I’ve got one,” Tom said. “My old supervisor, Pierre, was the kind of guy who was sure he knew best. And he’d take all the credit without getting his own hands dirty, you know what I mean?
“Well one day, he came in and interrupted a meeting I was leading. He looked at some of our plans for the next product launch and loudly made some big changes. I thought his ideas were going to cause problems down the road, but I figured, ‘He’s the boss,’ right? ‘If he didn’t trust me and my team, that’s on him.’
“Sure enough, things went south, and because he had been so public about his plan, everyone knew who to blame. He had his tail between his legs for months, and it almost cost him his job.”
As he finished his story and saw the looks on the others’ faces, the satisfied smile on Tom’s face drooped.
“So if I’m understanding you, Tom,” Kate said, “you’re saying that you didn’t have any helpful senses toward Pierre. Is that right?”
“I don’t remember any sort of sense to help him, no. My whole team thought he had it coming.”
“Does this scenario fit the question you were asking, Ana?” Theo asked.
“Yeah, I think so.”
“Can we diagram it out, Tom?”
“Sure.”
“Because we’re not seeing a sense here, I’ll leave that part blank,” Theo said. “Next, how were you seeing Pierre?”
“Arrogant, entitled, aggravating, unqualified.” Tom said each word in rapid succession. “But I’m telling you, everyone else was seeing it too.”
“I don’t doubt it,” Theo replied. “And how were you seeing yourself?”
These answers came slower. “Unrecognized…taken advantage of…overlooked…justified—shoot.”
Theo cocked his ear. “What was that last one?”
Ana covered her smile with her hand.
“Justified. Fine, I felt justified,” Tom said. “But I’m still pretty sure I didn’t betray any sense to help or anything.”
“And what do you make of that?” Kate asked.
“What do you mean?”
“Why do you think you didn’t feel a sense to help Pierre and prevent things from ‘going south’?”
“I told you, he was arrogant.” Tom was agitated. “And he was constantly undermining how I was leading. He didn’t deserve my help.”
“Sounds like you found Pierre really difficult to work with,” Kate noted.
“Everyone did.”
“We’ve been looking at specific episodes that illustrate self-betrayal and how we turn inward,” Theo said. “And it’s helpful to slow things down and get more granular. But life isn’t really a series of separate snapshots, is it? It’s more like a constant stream. I suspect you had many interactions with Pierre before this incident, right, Tom?”
“More than I would’ve liked, yeah.”
“So this episode didn’t happen in a vacuum. You had a shared history that influenced how it went.”
Tom nodded.
“I want to clarify an important point about self-betrayal. We notice our feelings or senses toward others only when we’re open to their humanity to some degree.
“And sometimes, we’re just not. We may be busy or tired or wrapped up in our own problems. But there’s another reason too. We may not experience helpful senses toward others because we are already inward toward them.
“Self-deception can be like a bout of food poisoning, where the symptoms can be traced back to a single self-betrayal. That’s a problem, to be sure, but it’s also fairly straightforward to understand and correct.
“The far more dangerous variant of self-deception isn’t episodic,” Theo said. “It’s chronic.”