Hello everyone and welcome to therapy in a nutshell. I'm Emma McAdam, a licensed marriage and family therapist.

And this is the podcast where I condense mental health skills into bite-sized nuggets of health.

Today we're going to talk about self-deception. Self-deception is the problem of not knowing that you have a problem. So if you don't know that you have a problem, is it possible to change it? Yes, you can. And in this video, I'll show you how. We're going to start with a story and then we're going to talk about what self-deception is, how to notice that you're doing it, and how to get out of self-deception so that you can start to see yourself and your problems clearly.

Let's start with a classic example from the book Leadership and Self-Deception.

At night, a husband and wife are sleeping. The baby in the other room starts to cry and the husband wakes up.

The husband's first thought is, I should get up and take care of the baby before he wakes my wife.

After all, she works so hard in the day and needs all the sleep she can get.

But then the husband's next thought is, I work hard too. I work all day, and I need to get up early for my meeting.

Why should I get up?

My responsibility in this family is to go to work and earn money so we can live.

I need all the sleep I can get so I can function at my job.

And I have a big project to complete tomorrow.

So he doesn't get up.

And then the baby keeps crying.

And the husband starts to think, why doesn't she get up and take care of the baby?

Doesn't she realize I need to get sleep?

Okay, I know she's awake now. She's just being lazy. So now he starts to feel upset and angry at her.

This is so unfair, he thinks. I work hard all day, and she can't even just take care of the kids so I can sleep.

So before long, the husband is really upset toward his wife.

If you asked him why he was feeling that way, he would probably say, because my wife wasn't

doing her job. And he started out this whole experience feeling completely differently. He started

out feeling a desire to help her, but he ended up feeling bitter, angry, and actually believing

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