The Way of Integrity: Finding the Path to Your True Self

by Martha Beck

Many “inexplicable” feelings of depression, rage, and anxiety are actually reactions to hidden false beliefs.

Whatever our uninvestigated false beliefs, they cause pain. And we often try to cope with that pain by doing things we don’t want, don’t understand, and can’t control. These actions—these errors of innocence—may break every promise we’ve made to ourselves. Yet, bafflingly, we can’t stop. Welcome to the inferno!

Doing things that so blatantly contradict our own intentions is a sign that somewhere inside us, a civil war is in progress. My clients often tell me they feel as if they have an alter ego working against them.

It can’t stop the pain that drives most self-sabotage, because the duplicity comes from an unrecognized split in our belief system.

The phrase “walk back the cat” comes from the world of espionage. Intelligence specialists use this technique to analyze what went wrong in everything from a bungled undercover operation to a failed coup. To do it, you reconstruct an event chronologically moving backward, starting with the most recent events and moving further and further into the past.

As I picture a “snapshot” of each moment, I’ll try to remember: (1) what was happening around me at that precise time, (2) what I was doing, (3) what I was feeling, and (4) what I was thinking. Here’s how it goes in my case:

Now I recognize that the moment in the apartment when I didn’t take a rest as the point where I left my integrity. I can feel it. And feeling it, really zooming in on the moment we split from our truth, is the third step in our exercise.

The reason I ignored all these signals and kept working was that I’m strongly attached to a belief that’s very common in our culture: continuing to work is always more virtuous than stopping to rest.

Each choice against our sense of truth, no matter how trivial, makes us more likely to self-sabotage. It’s as if, by splitting ourselves, we launch the alter ego that destroys our best intentions.

Happily, the same tool that forges our chains—the mind—can be used to break them. Once you’ve observed the beliefs that caused your self-sabotage, the next step is to question them.

My favorite way of freeing myself from my own inferno comes from a spiritual teacher named Byron Katie, whose books and online videos I strongly recommend. Katie (the name she uses) encourages us to locate beliefs that cause suffering, then break their hold on us using a method she calls “Inquiry.” First, Katie asks the simple question “Is that thought true?” Then she follows up with slightly different wording: “Can you absolutely know that thought is true?”

Getting out of hell doesn’t mean picking up a new set of chains, a new set of absolute beliefs. It means replacing rigid convictions with curious openness, to your own sense of truth in every moment.

I had picked up two sets of cultural beliefs that contradicted each other. My error of innocence lay in not seeing this contradiction, and trying to fulfill both sides of two mutually exclusive codes for living.

conflicted. I knew it was impossible to do everything society told me I should do. But that didn’t mean I stopped feeling social pressure. I was a person, after all, and people orient their lives by obeying social standards. I saw no escape from my miserable condition—that is, until I met a soul teacher.

As you walk back the cat on your own errors of innocence, you too may find that many of your untrue beliefs are built into your culture. It can be frightening to let go of such beliefs. Won’t people think you’re wrong? Won’t they judge you?

You’re entering the part of the inferno where you’ll learn to cope with judgment—yours, and other people’s. Things are about to get radical.

Every professor at BYU, from geologists to historians to artists, risked expulsion from their jobs and community if they contradicted the church’s doctrines. Few people outside Utah even noticed all this—I hadn’t noticed it from Massachusetts—but trust me: in my home state it was huge news.

All these horrors, like everything else going on in Dante’s inferno, are contrapassos—tortures designed to resemble the sins they punish. Everyone in the seventh circle is being continuously attacked, because the act of attack, with the sole purpose of causing suffering and destruction, is the essence of all violence.

At this point I want to make it very clear that violence and anger are very different things. Anger is a normal, healthy response to injustice or ill-treatment. Violence, according to the Oxford Dictionary, is intended to “hurt, damage, or kill someone or something.”

It takes wisdom and maturity to use anger for positive change without becoming mindlessly violent.

This is because part of our hardwiring makes us enjoy destroying anything that threatens us. That’s just good evolutionary policy.

We’re especially leery of people or ideas that might shake us out of our cultural assumptions and preconceptions. Such things feel morally threatening, and we react to them by becoming almost reflexively resistant and oppositional. This is the mindset from which all violence is born.

People in the grip of their righteous minds generally believe that their personal moral codes are logical, rational, and universally true. But research shows that such judgments actually come from emotional reactions, shaped by specific cultures. This means that the violent mind literally can’t hear reason. It shuts down our ability to make thoughtful judgments.

When our righteous mind is in control, we lose the way of integrity and become weirdly, obviously self-contradictory, like proponents of world peace who advocate war against anyone who disagrees with them.

Humans depend for survival on belonging to close-knit groups of cooperating individuals. Because of that, we’re biologically programmed to identify with the people who look, act, dress, talk, and think the way we do. The downside of this is a universal human tendency to mistrust anyone who seems different from our in-groups.

Righteous error attacks for vague, ill-defined, or contradictory reasons, and doesn’t change with circumstances. It passes judgment, often without evidence. Healthy anger makes judgments, discerning what is fair and what isn’t. Here’s a chart to help you tell them apart.

This metaphor reflects the three most common ways we can get stuck in errors of righteousness: by attacking other people, ourselves, or the way things are.

Joking aside, the fury that rises when groups share righteous rage leads directly to mob frenzies, hate crimes, and genocides.

Allowing yourself to stand up against unfairness is healthy. Staying in constant righteous attack mode isn’t. It will give you dark wood of error symptoms just like any other departure from integrity.

When errors of righteousness run into each other, they lead to vicious cycles of mutual destruction.

When we’re attacked—even with the very words we use to attack others—we feel confused, scared, misjudged, angry, rigid, and intensely inclined to lash back. As Friedrich Nietzsche wrote, “Beware that, when fighting monsters, you yourself do not become a monster.”

Fighting has its place, but by itself violence never fixes, heals, or mends anything. Its essence is destruction, never creation.

The desire to destroy others is fundamentally hypocritical, because no one, especially an attacker, wants to be destroyed. Juicy as violence feels to the righteous mind, it’s internally divisive, incompatible with integrity.

We can see evil, recognize it for what it is, and address it without falling back into errors of righteousness. How? By turning our attention away from arguing and moralizing, and focusing instead on our integrity, our deepest inner truth.

Simply shifting our attention from attacking our enemies to defining our values can “reduce physiological stress responses, buffer the impact from negative judgments of others, reduce our defensiveness, and help us be more receptive to information that may be hard to accept.”

The verb-adverb phrase that best describes my core value is:

The moment you begin any creative activity, you leave the realm of violence, which knows only destruction.

A closed mind is like a weapon whose only function is to harm. It grips the thought “I exist in continuous violent reaction to whatever is threatening.” By addressing problems with core values and creativity, we choose a different mode de vie: “I exist in continuous creative response to whatever is present.” Sacrificing our reflexive tendency toward destruction gives us access to a much greater power: creation.

Research shows that the majority of people lie multiple times in a typical ten-minute conversation, tossing out fibs like “I’m doing great, thanks” and “I was just going to call you” and “I love your shoes.” Is this really worse than, say, plotting terrorism?

This chapter is meant to help you simply notice occasions when you cheat, lie, and betray. It’s important to know that you may be doing these things to others. But it’s absolutely crucial to see where you’re doing them to yourself.

There are two questions that will help you differentiate between a white lie and a gray one. First, could you be blackmailed by someone threatening to tell the truth you’re hiding? If so, that lie ain’t white; it’s gray. Second, are you following the Golden Rule (“Do unto others as you would have them do to you”)?

If someone in your life consistently hurts you, ask yourself if you would treat anyone else the way you’re letting yourself be treated. If the answer is no, then to stay in integrity you must start thinking of ways to change the situation.

Lying and keeping secrets have been linked to heart disease, certain cancers, and a host of emotional symptoms like depression, anxiety, and free-floating hostility.

Don’t go public immediately. Just notice for yourself where, why, and to whom you lie. If you’re stuck in a society where people are oppressing you, or you’re trapped by a psychopath, go ahead and keep lying to these dangerous people, at least for now. But stop lying to yourself.

But whatever your lies are, digging through them will eventually take you to the center of your inferno. There you’ll encounter three major aspects of your own psyche: the monster, the betrayer, and the betrayed.

Accepting responsibility is honest, but blaming ourselves when we did nothing wrong is cruel, deceptive, and devastating.

All their cheating, all their fudging, all their repressing, all their fraud and betrayal, is driven by some version of one single lie: I am not loved.

But bad things happening to powerless people are uncomfortable for everyone. It’s always easier to go along with the system—white privilege, domestic violence, animal abuse, as well as child molestation—than to stand up for those it has harmed.

Here it is: You are infinitely worthy. You are infinitely precious. You have always been enough. You will always be enough. There is no place you don’t belong. You are lovable. You are loved. You are love.

Something similar happens in our hearts when we finally acknowledge every place we’ve been lying. The relief that comes when we’re fully honest with ourselves can take us from seemingly intransigent suffering to calm and peace, even before we’ve changed a thing in our outer lives. From here on, everything gets better. “So we came forth,” as Dante says, “and again beheld the stars.”