Human Fallibility
No one is perfect. Everyone has flaws and makes mistakes.
Since everyone is imperfect, it’s acceptable to have flaws and make mistakes.
The best we can do is try to avoid making mistakes, so it helps if other people let us know when we make them.
Human Response to Fallibility
It is natural to feel bad when other people let us know when we make a mistake, because we try to not make any, and because sometimes people mock us for making mistakes.
This leads to a very bad feeling when someone tries to help us by informing us about what we did wrong.
It can make one feel inferior, broken, insufficient, hated, or alone.
Guilt is a natural response to having done something wrong. It is not pleasant to feel, but it is required because it is the sign that we care about doing good. Without guilt, we become worse people.
Processing Negative Emotions
Accepting these feelings and moving past them is healthy, and lets us avoid and prevent feeling these things again.
We cannot always handle the emotional pain that comes with processing these feelings, especially if we never learned how.
We should not force people to process emotional pain if it does too much harm to them. Instead, we should make it easier for them, and teach them to be able to process those emotions on their own, without so much harm.
When we do not receive the help we need to do this healthily, we might instead resort to coping mechanisms.
Coping mechanisms are mental tools that the subconscious mind uses when it realises that emotional pain is coming. These mental tools prevent the pain as quickly as possible by distorting one’s perception of reality.
Coping Mechanisms
Incapability of Making Mistakes
One coping mechanism is persuading ourselves that we could not have made a mistake. For this to work, we must believe that we are incapable of making mistakes. Since this is not true, this coping mechanism persuades ourselves of a lie. While this prevents emotional pain, it also gives us a false impression of ourselves and our abilities, leading us to make even more mistakes.
When this coping mechanism is used, we might be offended that we were accused of something that we believe is beneath us. We might blame the other person for even suggesting it, which shifts the blame and focus of the conversation to them. Instead of us being wrong, the offender is wrong for having suggested anything of the sort. By doing this, we avoid feeling bad.
Avoidance
Another coping mechanism is refusing to acknowledge that we might be wrong, by avoiding the topic.
This could be done by simply changing the topic of the conversation, and hoping the other person does not object.
It can also be done by stopping the conversation. This can be done by saying that we are tired, or busy, or that this is not a good time. Sometimes these are true, and the conversation might be best saved for another time. Other times, this coping mechanism will use the fact that we are tired as an excuse to stop the conversation, even if we are only slightly tired and still able to have the conversation. This puts the conversation on hold indefinitely, and the other person is unlikely to remember to continue it. This means that we will potentially never have to acknowledge that we made a mistake.
Another method of avoidance is attacking the person who has suggested that we did something wrong. This might happen by accusing the person of hypocrisy. While they may indeed be a hypocrite, that does not mean that what they said about us is wrong. The coping mechanism will make sure that we only focus on the hypocrisy, and never on if their statement about us are right, so we can avoid acknowledging our mistake.
We might instead attack the person by fixating on something the person said incorrectly when they told us about the mistake we made. Rather than try to understand what they mean, we might pedantically insist that they are wrong because their mistake in speech invalidates their point. Sometimes their mistake might give us the wrong impression, so we have a good reason to point it out and ask for it to be resolved, so we can better understand what they mean. Other times, these sorts of mistakes in speech can usually be overlooked, or accepted and moved past, so that the true meaning of what they said can be understood. When we choose to ignore what they mean and instead focus on what they say, we are avoiding the truth about the mistake they are trying to inform us about. This derails the conversation by spending a lot of time on a single part of the topic, therefore never allowing us to get to the important part of the topic.
Surrendering
This coping mechanism involves verbally accepting the other person’s claim, but not mentally accepting it. This is usually done in an exasperated and defeated way, to emphasise that the other person has made us feel bad. This shifts the blame to the other person for having pointed out our mistake.
This might make us feel like the victim that deserves pity, and it makes us feel self-righteous. Since we have shifted the blame, we do not feel obligated to accept the consequences of our mistake, even if we verbally admitted to making it. Our subconscious said the words, but it shields our mind from the internal consequences of accepting our mistake. Instead, it focuses on how we have been wronged. The other person might be too confused, or feel too guilty, or also feel defeated, so they are more likely to end the conversation.
Changing Our Views
An extreme example of a coping mechanism goes to the root of the negative emotions. We feel bad about making mistakes (and particularly about hurting others) because we care about doing good things, and we want others to be happy. When we do something that goes against these things we want, we not only feel bad for the people affected, but we feel even worse because we feel guilty for having done so ourselves.
This coping mechanism involves a self-righteous response to realising our mistake. We mentally accept that we did it, but we cannot handle the feelings resulting from it. Since those negative feelings happen due to our beliefs, we decide to subconsciously change our beliefs.
For example, if we feel guilty because we hurt someone, that happens because we believe that hurting others is unethical. To avoid feeling guilty, we change our ethics, so now we believe that it is acceptable to hurt others (at least in the circumstances we had). This is usually accompanied by saying that we do not care, and that we have to look out for ourselves, because no one else will. This is a self-fulfilling prophecy; to help ourselves we stop helping others, which means that we are the ones making it such that people do not look out for each other. There are plenty of people who will look out for us, and we can look out for others. Anyone can decide to help others, which means that everyone can.
The reason that not everyone does help each other is not based on human nature. There are plenty of studies that make such claims, and plenty that make opposite claims. Many of these studies have been debunked for being poorly conducted and having results that are not justified.
Some selfishness can happen naturally, but real selfishness is learned. We teach others to help by showing them that helping is good, and by making sure that they do not fall pretty to the coping mechanisms that make people selfish. We teach others to be selfish by hurting them and refusing to help them. They are forced to be selfish, in order to survive, or at least to avoid pain.
Avoiding Coping Mechanisms
Most people tell us about our mistakes because they care about us, and want us to be the best people we can be. Part of being better is accepting our mistakes, correcting them when we can, being aware of them in the future, and avoiding making those mistakes again. It is natural to feel offended or guilty, but it does more harm than good when we rely on coping mechanisms instead of facing what we have done. There is no shame in making mistakes, so long as you want to improve.
Some of us need help to process our emotions, or we need to learn how. There is no shame in this either, and it should be taught to all children as they grow. Unfortunately, many children are taught the opposite, to “deal with it” by repressing and never processing negative emotions. This leads to those emotions festering and creating further issues, which leads to a change in beliefs, and a cycle of negative emotions being taught to others. Such people view processing emotions as weakness, because there is sadness and guilty involved, and because it takes time to process. They mistakenly view the absence of these things as a sign of strength, because those things get in the way of doing things. This is the result of coping mechanisms, as they have persuaded themselves that their delusions are strength, and strength is ethical; and that this is the only way it can be. In reality, such people lack the strength to face their emotions, as they avoid sadness, grief, and guilt entirely. This leads to them eventually breaking down, or going mad with coping beliefs that twist their perception of reality until they are clearly irrational.
Coping mechanisms can be necessary in the short term for people who would suffer unduly because they cannot process their negative emotions. However, coping mechanisms do not naturally go away with time. They linger indefinitely until they are recognised and removed, because the subconscious only reacts to triggers; it does not have the awareness to change by itself. This is facilitated by the nature of coping mechanisms; they function by avoiding an issue at all costs, so they are incapable of realizing that there are issues, so they are incapable of correcting issues. This means that coping mechanisms ensure that we keep our issues, and add more to them. They offer us an escape from feeling bad, at the expense of anything else. And those expenses inevitably end up harming someone else, or ourselves.
This is a delusion, and an escape from reality. The illusion of not having an issue means we will continue to make the same mistakes over and over. We and those around us will have to suffer from those mistakes until we stop relying on coping mechanisms. This can escalate and become increasingly problematic, to the point of being dangerous. Our refusal to accept reality can lead us to blame whatever is most convenient to satisfy our delusions. We might even look for other people to blame for our mistakes, or we might blame others for bad conditions that we cannot even control. If we dislike someone, we may subconsciously blame them for things they didn’t do, since that gives us an outlet for our anger. We blame, berate, and punish that person, because it lets us feel like we are solving a problem, when in reality we are hurting others to feel good ourselves.
Coping mechanisms are by their nature, a rejection of reality. This means we cannot effectively interact and live in reality. This leads to problems that get increasingly worse, and it leads us to be unable to realise that we have problems, and that we are doing harm.
When we have truth as a virtue, we are less sad as we have learned how to handle our emotions. We avoid making mistakes as we learn and try to be better.