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

by Martha Beck

Dante’s metaphor is right on track. Our own purgatory requires leaving duplicity behind, adjusting our outward behavior to match new inner truths. This is hardest as we begin.

The instruction for your next step is the ultimate self-help strategy, the one practice that could end all your suffering and get you all the way to happiness:

Stop lying.

All cultures do this by threatening or inflicting what psychiatrist Mario Martinez calls the three archetypal wounds: abandonment, betrayal, and shame.

If your purgatory is a difficult one, you’ll need your own “pinions of immense desire.” Many times, I’ve doubted that clients like Gina or Janice would ever find the courage to speak and act in total integrity. But more often than I would have thought possible, I’ve watched them grow wings right there in front of me. Their longing to be whole became steadily more intense until it overwhelmed every inner obstacle, all their worst fears.

This exercise is a bit like those tire-rippers placed on the road to keep drivers from backing up. When you move forward into your longing for truth, you’ll feel yourself gaining momentum. When you try to reverse back into the situation where you don’t feel free, everything will fight you.

Now, for Mormons, the worst possible sin anyone could commit—the only unforgivable sin—is to leave the religion. It’s considered worse than murder.

Radical truth-telling rocks a lot of boats, so other people may be reacting badly to your no-lie challenge. This isn’t fun, but it’s actually a good sign. If you’ve really stopped lying, with both words and actions, resistance from others is often evidence you’re on the right track.

Cultures rely on consensus—if everyone agrees, there’s no pressure on the system. Any dissent, like the child shouting that the emperor has no clothes, could bring down the whole social order.

This chapter is designed to help you through whatever pushback you encounter on your way toward integrity. This requires becoming a kind of mental martial artist, able to turn the energy of opposition in your favor. It’s the most heroic adventure you could undertake. And like so many heroic adventures, it begins with a wave of reluctance.

Contemplating integrity as a way of life is like deciding to leave your homeland and become a citizen of a new country: it involves a major identity shift. Even if we deeply feel that this transition will bring us happiness, health, and purpose, it can be almost too huge to contemplate.

We must give our psychological and physiological systems time to adjust. We do this by allowing something that neuroscientist and cultural anthropologist Mario Martinez calls “mourning the known misery.”

If you start honoring your true nature and find yourself missing your old culture, don’t panic. Be kind to yourself. Allow yourself time and space to grieve. Confide in loved ones. If they don’t understand, find a coach or therapist. But don’t think that missing your old life means you should go back to it.

Some people become therapy or seminar addicts, constantly seeking environments where they can be themselves without upsetting any apple carts. They may wander around ante-purgatory for years, not really in hell anymore, but definitely not in heaven.

Take your time, and listen to your inner teacher about how much of your truth to reveal in any given setting.

Find safe people to confide in about next steps. Keep toggling back and forth between the feeling of self-protective lying and the feelings you might have if you could live as your truest self.

Your loved ones may shame and blame you for disobeying the cultural rules of your relationship. They may try to manipulate you with displays of neediness, anger, or straight-up aggression. If you’re in an oppressive system, you could get arrested or physically threatened.

When you commit to honoring your true nature over every false habit, change-back attacks may come from anywhere. But don’t despair. This is all going to turn out better than you expect.

My Catholic-school-educated readers may recall there are seven “deadly sins”: sloth, gluttony, greed, lust, pride, envy, and wrath. In Dante’s theology, the first four don’t hurt anyone but the sinner, but the last three are violent. They make people attack each other. Pride doesn’t just say “I am good,” it says “I’m better than someone else.” Envy doesn’t just make us want stuff, it makes us want at least as much stuff as someone else. Wrath isn’t random; it’s targeted at someone else. When we lock into errors of righteousness, we invariably point at someone else and turn them into what therapist Bill Eddy calls “targets of blame.”

Whenever we follow our true nature away from a cultural norm, we’re demonstrating that social consensus is arbitrary and fragile.

In order to cleanse away mistaken beliefs, we must get them into the foreground of our minds where you can observe and question them. So how do you get a clear view of something you can’t see?

You don’t. You have people who do that for you.

Even when we’re feeling hurt and angry, we can follow the basic integrity process: (1) observe what’s happening inside us, then (2) question our thoughts. This will show us if we’re stuck in the same violent, righteous mindset others are using to attack us. Our own blind rage will rise into clear view. Then choose to either stay on the path of violence or (3) move away from the ranting righteous mind and follow the way of integrity.

To stay on the path of integrity and avoid getting stuck in repetitive cycles of violence, we must refuse to join our change-back attackers in their sense of victimhood.

A drama triangle develops when we feel small and weak (as we all are during childhood). Other people may seem large and menacing (again, plenty of people are) and still others may appear to be our protectors (right again). But even as adults, many humans have a tendency to lock in this triangle as a way of viewing everyone, in every situation. Life becomes a play with only three possible roles: victim, persecutor, and rescuer.

People stuck in the victim role always have targets of blame, people they see as persecutors. They often turn to others for help and support. These are their rescuers, who play the final role in the drama triangle.

This is not to say that there are no real victims who genuinely need rescue. I’ve had many clients whose health, race, gender, or economic situations made it hard for them to leave terrible relationships or jobs. European Jews needed help to resist the Nazis. People of color in America need support from white allies to break patterns of oppression. But as we’ll see in a moment, even people who get caught in such horrific situations can avoid getting stuck in endless, fruitless Karpman conflicts.

The strange logic of the drama triangle means that whoever acts most victimized triggers a “rescuer” response, even in someone who has just attacked a loved one, or, stranger still, in the person they’ve just attacked.

Remember, creativity is the opposite of violence, which is pure destruction. If we can find any way to see ourselves as creators, no matter what our situation, we can turn drama triangles into empowerment dynamics. Instead of getting trapped in violence and hatred, we can use relationship dynamics to reach higher and higher levels of integrity.

This exercise does more than shift perspective from victimization to empowerment. It gives you clear instructions about your next best steps up the mountain of purgatory.

I know a psychologist who sums up the way of integrity with this succinct prescription: “Know what you really know, feel what you really feel, say what you really mean, and do what you really want.”

Let’s recap: as we embarked on the way of integrity, our task was to see through the fog of culture that blinded us to our true nature.

At the next stage, the inferno, we started removing cultural blinders, burning up beliefs that were untrue for us at a deep level.

If you’ve done all that, your next step on the way of integrity is to start spending your time doing what you really want. Ultimately, all your time.

Once we commit to being our true selves in every word and action, we emanate the love that is our essence.

Now, I have something scary to tell you: you don’t have much time left to live. Whether it’s five years or fifty-five, it’s not all that long. You have no time to waste on suffering, no time to keep torturing your nature to serve your culture. The time for integrity is now.

positive transformation happens more quickly when we do it in small steps rather than heroic leaps.

Repeatedly putting a little less time into what you don’t love, and a little more into what you do love, is your next step on the way of integrity.

Shift your schedule by a few minutes each day, spending a little less time doing things that don’t appeal to you, and a little more doing what you love.

“Practice doesn’t necessarily make perfect,” he’d say. “Practice makes permanent.”

Neurologists tell us that the more times we repeat any action, the more we wire it into our neural circuits.

By repeatedly choosing the way of integrity, we unwire ourselves for cultural compliance and rewire ourselves for honesty and happiness.

Giving doesn’t impoverish us; it makes us richer.

Everything that truly makes us happy is limitless and multiplicative, not scarce and divisive.

All these “sins” are actually based in love. Sloth, greed, gluttony, and lust are simply unbalanced relationships with rest, abundance, nourishment, and sex. We can err by either compulsively indulging or rigidly repressing our natural relationship with these things. This lack of balance doesn’t come when we allow union with our true nature, but when we split ourselves away from it. It’s misguided thinking, not natural behavior, that causes us to stray from our innocence.

Repeat it a thousand times, by the numbers: notice the dark wood of error symptom, track the false belief that drives it, question the belief, tune into your true nature, and respond creatively according to your real values. Each time, you’ll get better at it. A stumble isn’t the end of the world.

First, he finds himself in a forest so lovely and harmonious he immediately recognizes it as the Garden of Eden. Second, he encounters Beatrice, his first love, who died very young. She flat-out orders him to wake up, saying she wants him to stop thinking and speaking like “one who dreams.” Third, Dante gets dunked in two sides of a perfectly clear river. The first side makes him forget everything he’s ever done wrong, while the second makes him remember everything he’s ever done right. The last step in purgatory, for all of us, is to return to Eden and regain our lost innocence.

The most dangerous places for creating change are also the ones where it’s most desperately needed.

As Marianne Williamson wrote, “Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us.”

Remember, culture imbues almost all of us with the “primal shame” that tells us our true nature is somehow bad. So we hide parts of ourselves, even from ourselves. Then we feel desperately alone, yearning to be truly seen and loved as we are.