Today

Addicts are really good at lying to themselves.  So, a really good question right now would be, “why do we [addicts] lie to ourselves?”  

The answer is really quite simple – everyone’s brain experiences cognitive bias (in other words, distortion of the truth or reality).  Read that statement again:  everyone’s brain experiences cognitive bias – it is part of the human experience.  (There are a number of reasons for why the human brain can be so inaccurate. Books like Predictably Irrational, Stumbling on Happiness, etc. provide much more depth).

We – humans in general – have brains that are predisposed to distorting the truth. Even the healthiest brain among us experiences cognitive bias – ways of thinking that arise from our brains taking short cuts. These short cuts result in our telling ourselves stories about what is happening that may not be reflective of what is really happening.  Cognitive bias arises from processing too much information, not having enough context or meaning, the need to act quickly, the limits of human memory and other reasons.  While not always adaptive, it is a very common human issue that I believe plays strongly in the disease of addiction.

A recent article in Psychology Today, 20 Ways You Are Lying to Yourself (citation:  https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-second-n,,,.oble-truth/201805/top-20-ways-you-are-lying-yourself), summarized how cognitive bias skews our perceptions.  My favorites included:

• Self-Serving Bias: This bias enhances or preserves self-esteem by viewing oneself in an overly positive manner. With this bias credit for accomplishments is due to hard work, but failure is due to external factors.
• Egocentric Bias: People see the world from their own lens and accept it as reality. Over relying on one’s own perspective, which everyone naturally does, is egocentric bias.
• Doppelgänger Bias: This…is the propensity to trust someone who looks like someone who, in the past, you found trustworthy.
• Mere Exposure Effect: This is the tendency for one to like something simply because it becomes familiar.
• Self-fulfilling Prophecy: This is the tendency to enact what one believes. For example, if you believe you’ll fail, you do.
• Backfire Effect: This is the idea that telling someone facts that counter their beliefs will change their beliefs. In actuality, the person becomes more tied to their beliefs.
• Illusion of Control: This occurs when one overestimates the amount of control one has in life. An example is victims blaming themselves because it is easier to believe they have control than the world is chaotic and horrible things can happen without reason.
• Negativity Bias: It is the tendency of the human mind to give more weight to negatives than positives.
• Confirmation Bias: The tendency to focus on information that supports one’ beliefs and / or remembering confirming information more than information contradicting one’s beliefs.
• Dunning-Kruger Effect: When unskilled people are overconfident about their answers or ability, and remain unaware due to the lack of ability to recognize their shortcomings.
• Affective Forecasting: Daniel Gilbert has studied the tendency for one to believe, and overestimate, that her preferences today will remain the same in the future.
• Projection: Projection is taking something that resides in your unconscious and believing another possess it.
• Confabulation. This usually means creating false memories, and though the malleability of memory is another way we distort reality (through distorting our personal history), in this case it is creating, and believing, reasons for our behavior without realizing the true motivation.

My favorite bias listed here is confabulation – the ability of the human mind to  believe the story it is telling itself – which just happens to serve its self-interest.  If you’ve ever engaged with an addict while they are active in their addiction, you will find confabulation and many of these biases in every sentence they utter.

So, beyond the obvious issue that our brains might be distorting the interpretation of what is really happening – what does this really mean in the context of addiction?  How about, everything?  If you think about the Kolb Cycle, learning begins when our brains encounter a prediction error and comes to understand that the solution that it just used isn’t as effective as it might be.  Our brains are primed to learn when concrete experience is compared to reality and a big “uh-oh!” results.  If our brains are looking at concrete experience through the eyes of cognitive bias – that’s not my fault, look what they are doing to me, etc. – that teachable moment is lost.  There is no reflection on what we need to change in ourselves, and, in the case of people with addiction we cast blame elsewhere and begin to build resentments toward others just so we don’t have to look more closely at ourselves.

So, the comparing concrete experience to reality piece of the learning process gets derailed because someone driven by ego or self-serving or confabulation cannot possibly embrace and objectively compare concrete experience to reality, identify gaps and thereby learn.  Our brains may confabulate for years telling ourselves the story we want to hear.  We’re not choosing to do this – we often can’t see the truth because our brains are so busy trying to hold on to the story it wants to maintain to avoid the pain of accountability or growth.

We ignore or discount countering evidence presented to us, we deflect and distract so we don’t have to address the issues we fear, we cast blame onto others so we can explain away the situation and not have to look too closely at ourselves.  This may continue until we can no longer ignore concrete evidence:  that moment when the unmanageability and the wreckage in our lives becomes too painful to discount and we wake up.