Assume some "delusional" thinking
Safer Teams by Tuesday
Delusions are “fixed, false beliefs.” While most of us have heard the word at least a couple of times, I’m pretty certain that it isn’t in most of your self-concepts as applying to you. Saying that someone is “delusional,” is not a compliment, to put it mildly. And you may recognize it as a clinical term, too, referring to the distressing experience of being convinced (and finding evidence to support your conviction!) of “facts” which no one around you seems to believe are factual.
The thing about delusional thinking is that it does not respond to logic. At least not in its pathological form, combined as it is with brain disorders that mess with our perceptual grid, our ability to filter and sort information, and our mood, allowing dangerous swings up and down, and also ensuring our attention is highly focused on what we feel might be threats, or opportunities.
Delusional thinking, in its purest form, is very difficult to witness, and almost impossible to converse with in any useful way. I’ve had some experience with this impasse, and it is no fun. Especially because delusions are not part of an intellectual disability. They are part of a perceptual disability; or maybe more accurately, an experiential disability. To the person holding them, they are real as real can be.
If delusions were just a product of someone’s immature, childlike view of the world, with too little information, and not a very well developed cognitive toolkit, that would make more sense to an onlooker. Childhood belief systems include many aspects we find endearing, even though we don’t agree with them. But talking with a clearly intelligent, articulate, engaged, and deeply sympathetic person and slowly realizing they are not referencing the same reality I live in? That is a disturbing and confusing interaction. It can be very hard to exit, gracefully.
I’m writing about this today because it has come to my attention that I harbour delusions. Not precisely of grandeur (although that did pop up briefly in the predictive text that annoys the heck out of me most times), but more of my own ability to simply disappear (Harry Potter’s Cloak of Invisibility comes to mind - what I wouldn’t give…!) and not cause effects on the world around me. Particularly on the people around me, who I care about, and who I don’t want to inconvenience with my occasional imperfections.
I think I’ve nurtured this particular belief system until it is quite fixed. Unfortunately my husband is quite adamant that it is also false, putting it in the realm of delusional thinking. Well, darn. I argued with him a little, but even I can see that I’m losing this one. I am not sure when it started, and how I’ve managed to keep it just under my logical radar this long, but now that it’s out here, in the sunlight, sort of between us, I can’t quite defend this idea as truth. I can see that it is a wish. Or maybe just yet another way I’ve coped.
I’ve told myself that denying my own existence in other people’s lives is sort of like being unselfish. It’s making myself smaller, which is sorta close to how I probably understood “godly women” to want to be, relative to others. If I think of other people as being more important than me, then I’m being virtuous, right? And it follows that if I’m less important, then they probably don’t notice me, much, and so it’s kinda like I’m invisible in whatever room I’m in, as long as I truly believe that I’m not a big deal.
I can see the childish logic at work here, and also the quiet desperation of needing to hide. It makes me so sad that my younger self came up with this loophole in the social skills training I received - one that seems to have given me a way to not worry quite so much about the consequences of my actions, or inactions, as regards any team I’m in. It doesn’t really matter, I argue to myself (just under the ability of my conscious mind to hear), because no one can see me. I’m not as important as other people, and so what I do or don’t do won’t hurt anyone. Or even affect them in any way whatsoever.
Delusions of…whatever the opposite of grandeur is. Insignificance, suggests AI, helpfully. Delusions of insignificance.
So I have ducked in and out of relationships, not thought to call, forgotten my own promises, and overshared, following this with silence, and then perhaps more oversharing. I have happily retreated into my own world any time I’ve liked, done my own thing, controlled the heck out of my resources (shared or not), and casually hurt myself in countless ways, all with the secure delusion that no one would mind, be affected, or care. Whew. In a funny way, this is another way to make the world all about me. So, maybe grandeur is in there, but hidden, just like I’d like to be.
I’m trying to listen to the reflective mirror my husband is for me; trying to hear him through the unbelievable inner resistance of decades of this structure protecting something vital and precious and tender. I don’t want to imagine an alternative to the reality I’ve constructed, but my recent experiences speaking with people who “suffer” from delusions, in the most clinical sense possible, has sensitized me to how convincing my brain can be, when it’s sufficiently motivated.
At some point, I was sufficiently motivated.
I think that I’d like to use this post to just throw out the idea that most of us have not come this far unscathed. Most of us have some inner scars, or maybe inner wounds, not yet scarred. We carry hurts around for a long time, unfortunately, because we don’t have space or time or the faintest idea as to how to heal them. And while we are carrying them, life is going on, in the frenetic and unrelenting way life does go on. We have to make decisions, talk to people, drive here and there, do hard things so as to get paid money to buy food and shelter and clothes and a sense of relief from the hard things (occasionally). All of this gets in the way of our ability to really attend to our own pain, and find a protocol or bandaid or something, for it.
Delusions are often the creative solution our Minds (presumably this is the character responsible for this extremely mental solution) come up with to sort of bridge the gap between what we can bear to know, and what we really can’t bear, or simply don’t want to understand.
My delusional attempt to shrink myself, Alice-style, into an almost complete nonentity is probably less about me trying to be “unselfish,” and taking that thought to its illogical extreme, and more about me not being ready to calculate the unimaginable price of living. Which is terrifying, when my true effects on others are added to the sum. How do I live with the knowledge that I can cause someone else to feel pain, worry, tension, anger, fear, shame, or grief? My early on solution: I just won’t. I don’t believe it, so it isn’t happening.
Yeah, I’ve got some stuff to work on. And furthermore, it turns out people who love me are affected by my choices, and my presence, and even by my decisions to leave a situation (even if it is only in my head, conveniently dissociating).
So disturbing! So deeply, deeply, unsettling. I can understand why a person who is not ready to go there would find almost any source of confirmation bias to support what needs to be “true,” and use any means necessary to attack what needs to be “false.”
Delusions are a way to avoid handling pain. Hopefully, they are temporary, and a healing journey can permit a person to edge ever closer to the light, and find a way to look at what was previously unbearable. But, you know, many of us don’t get that healing journey. Or, we don’t get enough time to go all the way. I think many of us take our delusions all the way with us to the grave.
I’d like to both thank my Mind for this “creative” solution to a problem my younger self simply didn’t have the resources to face. On the other hand, it is quite tricky to untangle it now from all my assumptions, presumptions, and memories. So I’m a little disgusted, as well. It’s going to take a lot of work to right size myself. Again, Alice-like, I may overshoot and become too large in my own imagination. Or ping pong between extremes for a while before I regain a human proportion, along with other humans, who are already living and relating and dealing with a shared reality that includes consequences for their decisions.
This Tuesday, take a minute to allow yourself to admit that you may harbour some delusions yourself. And that you are doing so for (likely) strategic reasons. The strategies may no longer be as necessary as they used to be, and the delusions may have overstayed their welcome, but it does take quite a break in the action to have the space and time to find them, and then work them out of the many ways they’ve infiltrated your life and attention and belief systems.
This goes for your teammates, too. If you find yourself in conversation with someone who is clearly hanging on quite firmly to a concept you find utterly ridiculous, maybe take a minute. Ask yourself: why the fervour? Why would this person need to attach themselves so strongly to something not supported by objective evidence? And then answer the question yourself, because it’s almost always - pain. And so, the facts are not really all that important, and maybe you can find it in your Heart to offer some compassion, some patience, and some diplomatic privacy to that otherwise frustratingly stubborn person.
I really do think most of us see exactly as much Reality as we can bear. Probably, it’s not the whole deal. Probably, we each filter a whole bunch right out of our own calculations, and omission of the truth is one of those grey areas that can constitute a lie. It certainly supports a delusion.
Safer Teams by Tuesday
Try to see below the inaccuracy of statements and beliefs to the pain that the other person is desperately trying to avoid, or at least delay, feeling. Maybe that person is you. Maybe you can, like me, slowly admit to the possibility that you may have fudged the truth for a while (maybe a long while) in support of continuing to survive. Maybe now you have the time and safe space to approach the original situation and start to see it as it really is or was. Maybe not yet. I don’t know. But I do know that delusional thinking is not a reason for any of us to show contempt for anyone else. I think it is a cue for yet another extension of compassion, grace, and intensely practical love.
