Have you ever done something — and I mean really done it, not just thought about it — that made you stop afterward and think: who was that? That doesn't sound like me. That doesn't look like me. That is not who I am.
Maybe you slept with someone you knew, in some quiet part of yourself, was wrong for you.
Maybe you spent years playing it safe while calling it “just being smart.”
Most of us write those moments off. We call them mistakes. We say we were tired, or stressed, or that it was a complicated situation. And then we move on.
But some of those moments aren't simply mistakes. They're messages.
Sometimes we repeat destructive behavior because, before we act, we quietly rewrite what we are doing in a way that makes the behavior acceptable to us.
Without that story, we might hesitate. With it, what we are doing suddenly seems reasonable.
I want to show you what that looks like through the story of a woman I worked with — someone I'll call Emma.
EMMA
Emma was beautiful, smart, funny, successful — and carried none of it with an ounce of arrogance. She was the kind of person who brought two cups of coffee to our sessions. One for her. One for me.
When we first started working together I was struck by her extreme and sincere humility. But as therapy progressed, I began to see it was more complicated.
She described herself as “plain at best,” yet she was strikingly beautiful. She called her intellect lacking, but was exceptionally bright. And she could catalogue her character flaws with surgical precision while struggling to identify her strengths.
Humility is a virtue, but a lack of self-awareness is a deficit that carries risks.
Emma came to therapy because she felt chronically unfulfilled. At work, with family, friends, and especially intimate relationships, “something was missing.”
She had high standards. Good ones.
She wanted to be honest. Faithful. Dependable. And she held a particular belief about intimacy — that it belonged in love, not merely attraction. That mattered to her. She'd thought about it. It wasn't just a rule she'd inherited.
Her parents — she described them as “wannabe hippies,” all tie-dye and organic farming and 1960s rock — had also given her old-fashioned values. Modesty. Honesty. Diligence. Hard work. Independence.
That independence was particularly striking.
She once told me that from a very young age she knew that if she had a bad dream, the last thing she should do was wake her parents.
“Why is that?” I asked.
“I tried it once,” she said. “They got really angry, told me not to be silly, and sent me back to bed.”
Not the warmest response, but not soul-crushing either.
But then she went on.
Her parents often left she and her younger brother alone. From the time she was just six or seven years old, they would leave for a weekend.
Emma called these the “Top Ramen marathons” because Top Ramen and peanut butter and jelly sandwiches were how she fed herself and her brother while her parents were gone.
Then she said something important.
“I used to think that was a pretty horrible thing to do to a kid. But as I got older, looking back, I can see they were building my confidence in being able to take care of myself.”
That sentence turned out to matter.
THE MEN IN EMMA'S LIFE
The lack of a deeply satisfying romantic relationship was one of the main reasons Emma had sought therapy.
When I had her describe her relationships, a pattern quickly emerged.
The men were different each in their own way, but the relationships all followed a remarkably similar script.
And Emma didn't really recognize their similarities. She only knew that each relationship seemed to end the same way.
Each man gained entry into her life in much the same manner.
They complimented her intelligence. She didn't care much about compliments regarding her appearance, but compliments about her mind got her attention.
They also showed great interest in her well-being. Was she happy? What made her anxious or sad? What did she want from life?
Nothing wrong with that. In fact, it can be a very good sign when someone's motives are genuine.
But that specific focus on her well-being was, in Emma's words, “very close to an aphrodisiac.” So she would resist their advances at first. She had her values and took them seriously.
But the attention continued. The interest continued.
And somewhere between the second and third date, a feeling would arrive that she described this way: “I thought — I must love them. Or something pretty close to love.”
And so she would become intimate.
The problem was that because the focus had been so completely on her — on how she felt, on the experience of being truly seen, on how rare that was for her — she had learned remarkably little about the man she had decided to give herself to.
Was he dependable?
What were the best qualities of his character?
Usually she didn't know.
After one or two months, each man found a reason to leave.
The message was generally some version of: “You're great. Honest, never known someone like you. It's just not a good time for me to get too close to anyone.”
Emma was left feeling painfully diminished, wondering where she had failed and fighting the feeling that somehow, despite her best efforts, she had betrayed herself.
JULIUS
The last relationship before she came to see me was with a man I'll call Julius.
They had been together for four months and had talked cautiously about moving in together.
One evening after dinner in her apartment, Julius said: “We need to talk.”
Her heart quickened. Maybe, she thought. Maybe this is it.
It was not it.
He liked her a great deal, he said, but thought it best if they “take a break.” He reminded her that he was restless by nature. She had noticed this herself in how frequently he changed jobs.
Now, apparently, it applied to love as well.
“But baby,” he told her, “that doesn't mean what we had wasn't special. I care deeply for you, and what we shared…. Well, that’s something I'm going to carry with me until I die.”
That was the end of Julius.
When Emma told me this story, she became embarrassed describing her reaction to Julius’ dramatic soliloquy.
She said it felt like somebody had thrown her a life preserver, one she eagerly grabbed onto.
“At first it gave me something,” she said. “Something that meant maybe I had not just been stupid. Maybe I wasn't a fool who'd been taken in again. If it was special, then I had not given my heart away for another horny SOB who just wanted to get into bed with me.”
Notice what happened there. The relationship was over, but the story was still doing the same job as usual.
Before intimacy, the story had been: “He really sees me. This must be love.”
After abandonment, it became: “He says it was special. Therefore I wasn't foolish to trust him.”
In the first instance, the story offered an excuse to lower her guard. In the second, it offered a reason not to be too hard on herself.
You can understand each of these impulses, but you can also see that the story kept Emma trapped in a painful cycle of premature trust, followed by vulnerability that ultimately ended in rejection.
The breakup with Julius was a turning point.
A man who genuinely thought what they had was special would not walk away quite that easily. Without a fight. Without a struggle.
Deep down Emma knew this was true.
Eventually she said: “I felt like a toy. Something that could be treasured and played with for a little while, until it stopped being novel. Or became a disappointment.”
Then, after a long silence:
“Why the f..” — she stopped and apologized for the language — “would I sell myself out for someone I can't even respect?”
And then: “The saddest part? I know this wasn't the only time I've done this. How messed up is that?”
WHAT WAS ACTUALLY HAPPENING
So what was happening with Emma?
Start with what she needed. Not simply what she wanted. What she needed.
Emma grew up in a home where a frightened seven-year-old learned not to wake her parents after a bad dream, and where she sometimes spent weekends caring for herself and her brother.
As a child, she desperately needed to believe her parents loved her.
But some of their behavior raised a painful possibility — perhaps they really were not that concerned about how she felt or what happened to her.
So Emma found a solution. She recast neglect as love. They left me alone because they want me to become independent.
Problem solved.
Except it wasn't.
The story did not eliminate the need to be cared about.
It taught her something more dangerous: when behavior was painful or confusing, she could assign it a meaning that made it easier to live with. And like any habit or well-refined skill, in time this could be done automatically, without even thinking about it.
Twenty years later, when a man sat across from her and asked questions about her mind, her work, her fears and her inner life, she experienced a flood of relief and attraction.
This is it. This is what I've been waiting for.
And that flood felt like love. Or something close enough.
Here is where the self-deception entered. Emma held onto a genuine value: intimacy belonged in love.
But she also carried a psychological wound and a powerful hunger to feel seen and cared about.
Those two things were at odds, and one had to be managed.
And the way she managed it was to quietly, efficiently, rewrite the story.
The same move she'd made at seven.
Now she was taking a man's intense interest in her wellbeing and rewriting it as evidence of deep love.
And that story mattered because it made the next step possible.
If Emma had described the situation to herself more cautiously — “I barely know this man, but his attention feels wonderful” — she might have slowed down.
But “this must be love” allowed her to behave in a way that otherwise have conflicted with her own values.
In retrospect, Emma could see that none of these men had demonstrated more than a superficial interest in her well-being. They had said the right things. Asked the right questions. Offered smooth expressions of concern.
But early in dating, words are cheap. Usually, there hasn't been enough time for concern to be tested by inconvenience, sacrifice, consistency, or disappointment.
Emma had been treating expressions of concern as evidence of concern. And those are not the same thing.
She also failed to learn much about these men. Not because she was incurious — Emma was deeply curious.
But because the relief and euphoria of being attended to were so consuming that there was little room left for scrutiny. The hunger was too loud.
Emma could not control the motives or behavior of the men she dated.
The part she could change was whether she kept choosing such men.
THE MIRROR
My point is to show you what sophisticated self-deception can look like.
It isn't merely denial after the fact.
Sometimes it changes our interpretation before the behavior occurs, so that something we might otherwise question begins to feel justified.
Emma's story happens to involve relationships. But the process can show up almost anywhere. We can call fear prudence. People-pleasing can become kindness. Or we can call a need for approval ambition.
The details change, but the story performs the same function in each case.
It allows us to keep doing something we would have more difficulty defending if we described it accurately.
When Emma asked, “How messed up is that?” she meant it as self-condemnation. But the fact that she could finally see what she had been doing was progress.
And here I want to be very clear: insight wasn't the solution. But it let her start finding one.
Emma eventually made a simple rule: she would not become intimate with a man until she had known him for a year.
That immediately weeded out nearly all of the deadwood.
Eventually, it led her to a relationship with a man she married.
The rule mattered because it changed the conditions under which the old story could operate. Feeling intensely seen was no longer enough. Time had to provide evidence about who the man actually was.
Conclusion
So look at the painful patterns that keep playing out in your own life.
Ask yourself what part you played.
What were you trying to obtain?
And perhaps most importantly: What story did you have to tell yourself to make your behavior seem reasonable?
You can't address what you won't acknowledge.
With these insights in hand, you will be ready to set new hard-and-fast rules in life that make it harder to keep repeating the patterns that currently cause you such pain.
And it deserves explicit recognition that the path toward change will be difficult, not for the faint of heart. But then again, continuing on your current path is likely to be harder yet. Choose wisely.
