Knowing What You Are Up Against in Your Own Self

Active in our addictions, we are often susceptible to various forms of self-deception. There are the usual suspects that get trotted out regularly: denial, minimization, and rationalization. There are some unusual suspects that are often trickier to identify.

Perfectionism and Procrastination

One unusual suspect is perfectionism, which is the conviction and the actions that spring from that assumption that one should be able to do everything perfectly. Anything short of perfection is abject failure. A perfectionist fails to grasp what is in her control (intentions, attitudes, and efforts) by assuming she can control the outcomes or results of those actions.

Another unusual suspect is procrastination, which gets its power from the gap between wishing or wanting something and being willing to act in ways to make something more likely come to pass. Procrastination is putting something off that a person claims to want or need because their willingness is missing.

Our patterns may be so deeply engrained that we fail to see them. Many of us not yet in recovery or early in it believe that we must somehow be perfect in recovery, and the fear of not doing so keeps us from making a commitment to recovery sooner. We may tell ourselves that we will fully commit when everything in the universe is in alignment.

We fail to see that the universe may never align in the way we hope or expect.

The Difficulty of Self-knowledge

As we enter recovery, it’s crucial to know what we’re up against in our own selves. As much as we might like to believe that in recovery we leave these forms of self-deception behind, we often don’t. We may get better at identifying and interrupting them earlier. Doing so is a matter of self-knowledge.

Self-knowledge can be incredibly difficult to achieve. Oftentimes we think that we are infallible when it comes to knowledge of ourselves. We take ourselves to have privileged access to the contents of our minds, and no one else can truly detect what we are thinking or feeling. If we have spent large periods of time wearing masks or presenting facades, this reinforces our view that we are infallible when it comes to our beliefs, motivations, efforts, feelings etc.

However, we may be hindered in seeing ourselves clearly or accurately because we lack perspective. We are too close to ourselves in some way. Think about the ways that as we age we may need to hold things further away so we can see them clearly. There really isn’t an equivalent when it comes to looking deep inside of ourselves.

Our ability to see ourselves clearly, accurately, and charitably is also affected by reflections. Think of looking inside yourself as looking in a mirror. Mirrors always distort, even a flat or plane mirror. An image is always backward.

Our view of ourselves may be distorted by the curve of a mirror. Fun house mirrors distort; a concave mirror curves inward, making the image appear short and wide. A convex mirror curves outward, so the reflection is taller and thinner. Our most deeply held beliefs can be fun house mirrors. Consider that many of us in the worst throes of addiction become fixated on the belief that we are bad, incorrigible, irredeemable, and beyond any kind of measure.

One of the fun house beliefs that is especially pernicious is, I can never be sober. We may believe that we are incapable of doing so because we have failed so many times in the past. We may not be able to see that that fun house mirror belief along with the actions that spring from it is a type of self-deception.

Self-Examination in Service of Self-Knowledge

It’s necessary that we loosen that fixation of beliefs, which is oftentimes accomplished only through a kind of intentional and rigorous self-examination. Philosophers for millennia have understood the relation between self-knowledge and the possibility of flourishing. Aristotle (384-322 BCE) claimed that the beginning of all wisdom is knowing yourself. Writing nearly 1800 years later, Montaigne (1533-1592 CE) extolled the virtue of being an expert on himself rather than being an expert on any other topic. He counsels us that

He who remembers the evils he has undergone, and those that have threatened him, and the slights causes that have changed him from one state to another, prepares himself in that way for future changes and for recognizing his condition. The life of Caesar has no more to show us than our own.…Let us only listen: we tell ourselves all we most need.

For Montaigne, we truly need to know what we are up against in our own selves, because all of that is a consequence of our experiences and the meaning we have given them. Coming to know when we feel resentment is as important as knowing what makes us feel gratitude. Knowing what sort of circumstance lend themselves to nerves or anxiety will help us to meet challenges in both the present and the future. Our past and our experiences have so much to teach us when we listen to ourselves.

We need to look at the reflections of those fun house mirrors and understand them for the distortions that are. When we can do this, Montaigne might say, we are much more likely to belong to ourselves. When we do this, we can flourish.

Originally published on psychologytoday.com September 9, 2026