How is it possible to lie to ourselves?

Question:

As when you feel deep down that what you are doing or believing is wrong, but you manage to convince yourself that it is right or you continue behaving in the way you want to believe is right. How is that contradiction possible on either a mental, emotional or chemical level?

Answers:
Self-deception is completely normal. It's the type and severity of that deception, when used in a self-destructive way, that is abnormal and due to either a mental problem or illness, or to a particular type of stress.

Not to go into a long discourse, but essentially the rational brain tells the emotional brain what it asks for in the way of alternative responses to solving a problem, and the emotional brain then chooses the "solution" that it most wants to hear and is less afraid to hear. In most cases the choice is one where short term results or pleasure is chosen over a long-term result that is potentially more harmful.

While it seems contradictory for the brain to lie to itself, it isn't really doing that. The rational brain is not the part that decides what the operative truth is - the emotional brain makes that decision, and not on a true-false basis, but on a probability basis, balancing consequences desires, prejudices, relative ignorance and other factors. The rational brain doesn't monitor these deliberations, and is often disturbed by the results, yet the process is repeated over and over.

Neuroses can be "explained" in this way, even if not completely understood. We can't look into the emotional brain's activities directly, but only by inference - which is why there are competing schools of thought as to therapy and to psychology in general. Nobody yet knows who or which is right as they can't fully demonstrate by direct evidence that their theories are correct. Although neuroscientists are helping a lot to show who or what is probably wrong these days.

You won't find any really good or accurate explanations of this process in the literature, but nevertheless you can study what others have written about such things as rationalization - which is essentially one form of the self-deceptive process.

Denial is NOT a river in Egypt.

People who can convince themselves that what they are doing at the moment is right (when it's really wrong) usually have a chemical and emotional problem. Most alcoholics and drug addicts have this issue. When they get clean and sober, that goes away---unless they are developmentally challenged.

Is like when you are unhappy... If you start faking a smile, just by doing that and continue on with it for a few minutes, all of the sudden I bet you are gonna feel happier, and not even know why. Our brain is not so smart sometimes, and it is easy to lie to him.

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How is it possible to lie to ourselves?

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