Confronting The Lies We Tell Ourselves

In this video, we're going to learn how to call BS on ourselves. I don't know about you, but one of my superpowers is rationalizing. I think that's because I see things in shades of gray and I typically have an ability to see things from multiple points of view. Now, this can be really helpful when counseling other people, but it can also get me into trouble because it can be hard to recognize when I'm not being 100% honest with myself. I'm going to give you a list of questions. When you ask yourself these questions, it's going to force you into a situation to look more clearly at whatever's going on. But before I do that, I'm going to tell you a rather embarrassing story about something that I rationalized and justified in my head a couple of years ago, which was a very costly mistake. This video is brought to you by clearly the remote drug monitoring program with rapid, reliable results. No more uncomfortable conversations or accusations. Just use your smartphone to complete a tamper proof saliva test from anywhere you see. A couple of years ago, it was just after Covid, our online stuff had really been taken off. So at that point, about 80% of all of our client sessions were virtual. And we were in this big giant office building which we actually had built with the specific purpose of running an IOP program. So it had like two huge group rooms in it, it had like five big therapist office in it, a giant kitchen, a giant waiting room. And we found ourselves in a position to not need about 90% of that space. Now, luckily I was able to talk to the landlord and say, hey, we know we're still in this lease and we will happily continue to pay it, but we just want you to know we don't need all this space anymore. So if you run across anyone who wants this space, if you just let us know, we will move. And as luck had it wasn't long before he did run across somebody who wanted that big office space space. And so we were so excited. We're like, dude, we're let off the hook. We don't have to pay this ginormous rent on this huge office building that we're not using anymore. It really was time to downsize. Now, I know that most of you who watch the videos have never really even been in our office, but if you had, you would know that having a cute space is really important to us. And we really like the homey kind of feel instead of like an office or corporate type of feel. It's just not who we are. So we started looking around for like a house we could lease to use as a therapy office. Because I'm telling you, we didn't have many clients anymore that actually came into the office. But we had a hard time finding a space like that. You know how occasionally like in a downtown area you can find these older houses that are like leased out by lawyers or something like that. That's what we wanted, but we couldn't find anything. Well, I came up with the bright idea that we would just lease a house and like a neighborhood and that it really wouldn't be any big deal because we didn't really have clients that came to the office. So guess what? We found one. And finally we were ready to go. Well, guess what? I think it was on day three of being in that office, we got a not so friendly knock on the door that told us that we had to be out within like a week. Yes, yes, it's true. We got kicked out of our nice little office within days. You see what I mean when I tell you I can convince myself of a lot of things? It's dangerous, right? Yeah. That little mistake costed me about $20,000. Not to mention moving twice, painting. You know the drill. It is a ton of work to move and it was especially a ton of work to move offices. Still to this day I get really embarrassed and almost kind of sick at my stomach when I think about it. Cuz I'm like, oh my God, that was so anyways, so you don't make a $20,000 mistake. Here are some questions that will help keep you on track. The first question is when you find yourself in the position where you're trying to justify a decision or behavior, I want you to ask yourself, is this the right thing to do? Really? Now I want you to add that really part on the end. Because if it's just, is this the right thing to do? If you have superpower like me, you could convince yourself that it is the right thing to do. But when you put that really on there, it's kind of like it makes you sort of like fly up a thousand feet up in the air and then look down on the situation and it's going to make you be more honest with yourself. Another question you can ask yourself is, am I making this decision out of fear? Most of the time when we're making decisions out of fear, it's the wrong decision. Ask yourself this, am I choosing this because I'm trying to avoid a really uncomfortable conversation? Or ask yourself, am I making this decision because I'M trying to avoid taking responsibility. Oh, here's another one you can ask yourself, Am I really doing this to protect someone else's feelings, or am I doing it to protect my own feelings? Now, another one to look out for is when you find yourself wanting to justify your behaviors or decisions that you made because of some emotion that you were experiencing. Like when you fly off the handle and you rage at somebody and you say a bunch of nasty things and you're like, but they push my buttons or but I was mad. Something like that. That's a big clue that you're rationalizing and you're justifying. The reason we're talking about this topic is because addict is a sneaky little devil and it will trick you and lie to you and deceive you. It will lead you all the way down the wrong path before you even recognize what's happening. So a major, huge, ginormous key to staying sober, keeping your recovery, is learning to be honest with yourself. Now, back when I used to run intensive outpatient in our office, we used to have this big red button that said BS on the top of it, and it sat in the middle of our group. And you can be sure that the members of the group used to use that button to call each other out. Now, luckily, the members of this group were pretty tight and everyone could take a joke and laugh at themselves, so for the most part, it worked pretty well. But in our regular, ordinary life, most of us, myself included, don't really respond to being called out all that well. Even when we know we're in the wrong but someone calls us out on it, we tend to defend our decisions and our thinking, which actually only ingrains those rationalizations even more. And then we begin to believe our own bs. So whenever possible, it's always best to call yourself out on your own bs. And as a good backup measure, it's really helpful to have some other people in your life that have a way of being able to call you out or make you see something difficult without making you too defensive. If you want a tool that will help you do this, you can actually follow the link in the description and download my free Free Integrity Checklist. Yes, this is a list of questions that you ask yourself at night to make sure that you are cleaning your sleep for the day, that you're taking care of all your responsibilities, that you're not deceiving yourself about anything. That way, when you wake up tomorrow, you're operating from a clean slate. Which feels wonderful. No hiding, no shame, no worried. You're going to run into the wrong person. Once you leave that behind, you don't ever want to experience that again. And up next, more recovery skills.