Honesty: An Invitation To Overcome Our Bias

I taught Introduction to Psychology for a number of years, and studies on social psychology and cognition consistently reveal the fact of human bias. There are numerous studies that show how most people believe they are ethically superior to their colleagues at work or more religiously righteous than members of their church or family.

Humans (we, you) have bias, prejudice, preference, blind spots that cloud the truth. We get the truth wrong all the time. And I’m not just talking about your missed questions at Thursday night trivia, or character judgments about how your aunt is a chronic victim (you’re probably right about that). I’m talking about our own self-perception, especially our relationship to the good, to being honest with ourselves, to our morals and sense of righteousness. 

Sometimes (and it’s rare) we see it; we get it wrong and we know it. Although, most often and despite our best intentions, we are unconsciously biased; we get it wrong and we have no idea. And in darker moments we resist, even refuse to see the truth, clinging as we do to our neglect, ignorance, and sin. 

Working in recovery, education, and the mental health fields I get a first row seat to the human condition. Its messiness, entanglements, and the rampant role of human bias and dishonesty. I will listen intently to case-studies of moral superiority bias when another client shares “honestly” about their drinking problem.

What shows up as “honesty” early in the healing process is often riddled with forms of self-delusion, confusion, and bias. 

I remember one of my clients' healing process was typical. When I met Darin (pseudonym), he started off being “rigorously honest” about his decade-long drinking habit. He continued at length, explaining how his drinking wasn’t the “real” problem. Darin’s reason for talking with me, for “trying to get sober,” was because he loved his wife and kids. But, unfortunately, he explained further, it was his family that was really the problem. He explained that if the family would just stop complaining about his drinking everything would be fine. He had been drinking for years without any issues. Astonishingly, Darin would remain in a state of relative close-mindedness for another year - seeing me at intervals in an attempt to gain domestic credit back with his wife and children. 

To most of us, Darin, sounds like a negligent alcoholic from the start, blaming his family for what is obviously his error of bias, behavior, and judgment. But, to the man in the trenches, that his family is to blame is “rigorously honest” for him; to him, for his part, he is unconsciously ignorant. We might say this man is basically asleep and will suffer the consequences of self-betrayal, family dysfunction, confusion, etc. until awakened. 

Darin’s course of sickness would continue to get incrementally worse until in the same week he wrecked his car while driving drunk and his wife threatened to divorce him. Darin “woke-up” from his unconscious slumber by experiencing these significant consequences. The pain of these circumstances, constellated within him a deep flood of remorse typical of what in recovery circles we refer to as a “bottom.” Bottoms of this nature are usually deeply painful depending on the level of attachment the client has to their own belief, bias, or behavior. They seem to dissolve the entire bulwark of egoic identity and logic. And, they are entirely common, even predictable, in the human experience especially at the precipice of massive shifts in life. When integrated holistically, these seemingly tragic events are some of the most profound spiritual experiences in a person's entire life, initiating entirely new awareness, healing behaviors, and transformation of character. 

After about a year, Darin, having deepened his relationship with honesty and healing, integrating most of the lessons learned from his spiritual experience, discussed his drinking in entirely different terms. He would frequently admit and tell others how his drinking numbed his feelings and eroded his ability to be fully present with his family; he was now grateful to be sober for himself. And more recently, Darin was relating to me that serving others and growing spiritually are the bright spots in his life. It’s pretty incredible to be a witness to a transformation such as this.

Darin’s story is typical for so many suffering from mental dysfunction, neuroticism, and “isms” of all types. Darin’s case may be a grosser example of our cultural sickness, but his bias and confusion about his life are normal and natural for us all. No matter how “functional” or “woke” we esteem ourselves to be, it’s still very likely we remain either negligent or ignorant about all kinds of vital dimensions of our lives; indeed, it would be unreasonable to think otherwise. What shows up as “honest” changes as our character develops, as we deepen our commitment to healing and transforming our lives one day at a time. It’s the healing process that gives us unprecedented access to deeper and deeper levels of honesty, that moves us to overcome our own internal bias and blindness.

I want to leave you with a final thought to consider. What if we started with the assumption that we are indeed biased or even asleep, like our friend Darin? And further, that in order to wake up we have to build relationships with powers and emotions we don’t yet know or experience, that feel like strangers to us? What if honesty or even consciousness or God was a stranger? What if part of our struggle was fearing that stranger?

But, what if we were hospitable, welcoming, to these strangers instead of fearful? 

The more I witness true transformation in the human spirit, the more I’m convinced that if we think about honesty as a stranger, perhaps we can give ourselves permission to develop a new relationship, to approach honesty, with care and humility, like we would any stranger we sought to know and develop a relationship with. And the truth about every stranger is that I don’t know what it will feel like to approach a deeper relationship with them; it is uncertain; I don’t know how I will feel, nor who I will become.

Sometimes our own worst enemy is ourselves; it is our bias, our containers, our walls, even the familiar, predictable present; the predictable personality you’ve grown to overly identify with, to obsess over, pine over, for the familiar payoff of the predictable emotional feeling of being “oneself.” Yet, as Darin’s story illustrates, indeed so many stories of profound transformation, it is imperative that we be good hosts to the strange transformation beaconing to unfold within us, through us. We must learn not to fear the approaching honesty or the call to let parts of ourselves fall away. We must risk continually shedding our bias, our neglect, our blind-spots in order to see more clearly, to grow a deepening relationship with transformation and truth that we never knew we needed until now. 

My friend sent me a text message with a quote from Kahlil Gibran: 

“And God said, ‘Love your enemy.’ And I obeyed Him and loved myself.”