In the 1950’s, the Dayak people in Borneo had a problem. They were experiencing a terrible outbreak of malaria. The World Health Organization decided to help. After assessing the situation, they came up with a plan. To stop the spread of malaria, they needed to stop the mosquitoes. And the way to do that was to spray the area with DDT. And it worked! Soon, dead mosquitoes littered the ground. Now, this was particularly good news for the resident gecko population who loved to munch on a meal of mosquitoes, especially when they didn’t even have to work for their dinner. Mosquitoes were everywhere. Unfortunately, the geckos didn’t realize these mosquitoes were being served with extra zip. As a result, after eating a few mosquitoes, the geckos began to stagger around like they were drunk (they were actually poisoned, but let’s not kill the mood along with the mosquitoes). Now, usually the village cats had a hard time catching these speedy little lizards, but a gecko on a buzz is apparently easy to catch; and so before too long, the village cats had devoured an abundance of these, now toxic, but nevertheless delicious, geckos. And as a result, wouldn’t you know it; all the cats got sick and died. Now that was good news for the rat population because without their natural predator, they could begin to breed like . . . rats. And so, before anyone knew what had happened, the whole village was overrun by rats which, as anyone in the WHO will tell you, is a much greater health risk than mosquitoes. And just like that, what started bad went really bad (the WHO finally turned things in the opposite direction by parachuting a crate of new cats into the village to solve the rat problem that they created in the first place). Here’s the point: We see the same thing in our personal interactions when they go bad; but in those cases, we often start and end with being a rat.

We are in our third segment of our study on the book, Leadership and Self-Deception (the Arbinger Institute, 2000). We’ve covered some important ground so far, but if you were hoping that things would turn positive at this point, you are going to be severely disappointed. Here’s what we’ve said so far:

  1. A big problem with being self-deceived is that we don’t know we are self-deceived.
  2. When we have an inward mindset, we see people only in term of their impact on us. People are just vehicles to our success, obstacles to our goals or simply irrelevant to us. However, we can choose to move in the opposite direction and embrace an outward mindset and treat people as people. 
  3. Since the term, “self-deceived,” can be misconstrued as only an intellectual problem, we will refer to it in a more vivid and useful term. To be self-deceived is to be “in the box.” 
  4. When we are in the box, we see ourselves and others in a distorted way. We ignore the truth and see things in the way we want them to appear.
  5. In every situation, we have a choice. We can choose to honor that inner sense of what we know we ought to do or we can betray that sense.
  6. When we betray that inner sense to do what is right and loving, we put ourselves in the box. 
  7. When we betray ourselves and enter into the box, we ward off all guilt feelings and remorse by blaming the other person. When the conflict is all their fault, we have not done anything wrong. 
  8. But blame by itself is ineffective. So, we add to it a list of faults that puts the other person in the worst light possible. Simultaneously, we justify our own behavior and put ourselves in the very best light possible.
  9. And all of this happens in the blink of an eye.

Now, you may think that is the whole story, but we are just at the gecko stage! We are just now discussing how our choice to betray what is right poisons our relationships. And that means that things between us are going to get worse, much worse.

 

Part 1: Key Points to Think About (Chapters 12-13)

  • Once we are in the box, the other person seems worse than they really are; and we see ourselves and our responsibilities as far more important than we really are. 
  • Even when the other person does not meet anyone’s expectations (maybe they really are a bad dog-mom; maybe they are self-centered), we still had an inner sense of what we ought to do to serve them, a sense that we betrayed. That means that we cannot blame our failure to do the right thing on them. They may not be a great person, but we still betrayed our sense to serve them, making our sin our fault, not theirs.
  • Even if the other person is inconsiderate, lazy and rude, after we betray ourselves, we will see them as even worse than they really are. This is important. Regardless of how bad the other person truly is, when I betray myself, I will distort my view of them and make them out to be even worse than they are.  
  • Once we are in the box, our whole being—our thoughts, our feelings and our will—blames the other person. We are sure it is their fault. But the truth is, when we are in the box, we are self-deceived. We do not see the truth. We only distort it. 
  • Whenever I blame someone, I simultaneously feel it is necessary for me to justify myself. I do this in three ways. I justify myself by inflating their faults (“They don’t deserve my help because they are a rat.”). I justify myself by inflating my virtue (“I’m not a rat. I would never think of acting like they are acting.”). And I justify myself by inflating my importance (“She doesn’t have to get up early tomorrow, but I have a critically important breakfast meeting!”). 
  • We may feel that if we don’t have this inner sense that we should help the other person, then we can’t betray it. And if we can’t betray it, then we can’t enter into the self-deceived cycle of doom where things go from bad to worse. But just because we don’t feel compelled to help someone we don’t necessarily like, that does not mean we are “out of the box.” In fact, after betraying ourselves over a long period of time, we develop patterns that are characteristic of us. Sadly, wherever we go, we take these patterns with us. We don’t need to betray ourselves to display them. They are already with us. To use the jargon of the book, we carry certain boxes with us everywhere we go.  
  • “Over time, as we betray ourselves, we come to see ourselves in certain self-justifying ways. We end up carrying these self-justifying images with us into new situations, and to the extent we do, we enter into new situations already in the box. We don’t see people straightforwardly as people. Rather, we see them in terms of the self-justifying images we’ve created.” (LaSD, p. 86). 
  • When we are already in the box and we come into a new situation, we tend to see people in one of two ways. If they act in a way that conflicts with our (distorted) view, we see them as a threat and as an enemy (and we often jump to that conclusion without much time or evidence). If, however, they seem to support our view and seem to take our side, we see them as an ally.  
  • The absence of prompts to help someone may be an indicator that we are deep inside the box.
  • Most of the self-justifying images we create are deeply concerned about our own image: how we are being portrayed to others and how we are being portrayed to ourselves. Everything we do is all about our image. We want people to think about us in the same way we think about us. 

Part 2: Show and Tell

Mosquitoes, geckos, cats and rats—what started off with (perhaps good and honest) intentions (or at least, an honest feeling), quickly spiraled downward until we were an absolute rat to the people around us. This is the story of us, and it happens all too often, and it happens all too quickly because, before we know it, we are already deep into the cycle of blame. We blame. We justify. We inflate (our virtues and their faults). And we deceive ourselves so that when all is said and done, we are victorious and the other person has lost.  But in the process, we rarely do or say anything to strengthen our relationships. In fact, most of the time, our disputes leave open wounds and scars of resentment.  And once we have dead mosquitoes, it is full-steam ahead to obliterate the other person (at least in this moment). It’s not a great picture of our relationships.

I hope you can see all sorts of ways this cycle of doom affects your relationships. Trust me, it happens. And if you don’t see it, it either means you have a very healthy pattern of relating or you are self-deceived (and 9 times out of ten, it is that you are self-deceived). One of the keys here is to break into this cycle so that it never gets to the rat stage.   

One of the things Jo taught me early on in our marriage is the value of preemptive forgiveness. I know that whatever issue we are quarreling over, that at the end of the day, she is going to forgive me (even when I have treated her like a rat). She has told me this after every struggle we have had so that when we get into our next one, we already know how it is going end. It may take a while to get there and we never leave things unaddressed, but we know that, at some point, we are going to forgive each other. Knowing this helps take some of the steam out of our arguments (why get all wrapped up in geckos and cats when we can step out of the death spiral and talk like two normal people who love each other?). Having “preemptive forgiveness” is a lifeline for us to grab when find ourselves being overrun by drunken geckos.  Maybe you have a different tactic; that’s great. The key here is to get out of the spiral of blame as soon as you can (or better yet, don’t let yourself get pulled down into it in the first place).

 

Part 3: A Theological Thought

James 5:16 is rarely placed in an interpersonal context, but it should be. James gives this advice to people caught up in the cycle of blame as a way to break into the cycle and escape its gravitational pull. He writes: “Therefore confess your sins to each other and pray for each other so that you may be healed. The prayer of a righteous person is powerful and effective.”  It seems to me James is providing two ways out of the cycle. One, forget about promoting your own image and righteousness and, instead, confess your sin to the other person (avoid the geckos and confess that you’re a rat right at the beginning). That’s hard, but it is doable. It’s hard, but Jesus calls us to die to self and to follow him. It’s hard, but it is better than turning everyone into a rat. Second, don’t forget to pray daily for the people you love. James’ advice seems to be this: you can either spend your time praying for the people you love or fighting with the people you love. Which would you rather do?  

Think about this quote from Dietrich Bonhoeffer:

“l can no longer condemn or hate a brother for whom I pray, no matter how much trouble he causes me. His face, that hither to may have been strange and intolerable to me, is transformed in intercession into the countenance of a brother for whom Christ died, the face of a forgiven sinner. This is a happy discovery for the Christian who begins to pray for others. There is no dislike, no personal tension, no estrangement that cannot be overcome by intercession as far as our side of it is concerned.”

Part 4: A Few Things to Think About

This week, while you are out and about. . . . 

  1. Pay attention to when you are inflating your virtue and importance as well as when you are inflating the faults of others. If you can course-correct midstream, do so. But if not, take note of the circumstances. What “drove” you to do such a thing?
  2. Try to go a whole week without saying anything bad about anyone. See how you do.
  3. How important is your image to you? Why do you think that is?
  4. What are some ways you feel you could step out of the cycle of death (mosquitoes to geckoes to cats and to rats)? What would that require of you?
  5. Where do you feel you are easily self-deceived?