“Lying to yourself” wasn’t much of a meaningful concept in the Christian faith I was a part of.
On the whole, we all live a balance between being honest about who we are and striving to be better. We wouldn’t, for instance, consider it lying if you are attempting to cultivating being nicer, or more confident, even if your internal thoughts and feelings didn’t match.
But in the Christian faith I grew up in, it was acceptable to treat the entirety of yourself in exactly that way. We were suppose to “die to self” to say “not my will, Lord, but yours” to ask God to change everything about us so that we looked more like him.
So because an external set of identities and beliefs were supposed to take precedent over ourselves, “lying to yourself” didn’t make much sense.
We were told to disregard whatever our hearts and minds were telling us. If you’re unhappy, God doesn’t want that, so tell yourself you’re joyful, act like it, and that’s all that matters. If you hate your spouse, well, tell yourself you love them, playact actions of love, and don’t pay any mind to how you feel about them. This is the same faith that is a stickler about saying that being gay is a behavior – because if all you have are the feelings, those aren’t meaningful. Just throw them out, declare them not real because they don’t line up with God’s truth.
It would be easy to say that this is impossible, that eventually the truth of a person will shine forth, that no one can dissociate away from their own thoughts and feelings and perspective enough to truly make this work. But that’s what’s scary about it – you can.
When the foundation of yourself is built on a notion that playacting is different than lying it is easy to have within you a lot of various thoughts and feelings and identities that you disregard because they don’t line up with a particular set of beliefs. So much of yourself becomes floating pieces you are not allowed to integrate into your identity or you risk disobeying God.
The hard part isn’t forming a sense of self contrary to everything you feel and think and believe. The hard part is the day you wake up and realize that you’ve been burning yourself alive because you told yourself that the pain was a sin to feel, drinking bile you convinced yourself was fresh water, and tearing into your skin because you were taught you were just like a plant that needed pruning. The hard part is finally recognizing it as lies. They were all lies, lies sanctified, justified, and made righteous, because they were done in the name of serving God.
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