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

by Martha Beck

The word integrity has taken on a slightly prim, judgmental nuance in modern English, but the word comes from the Latin integer, which simply means “intact.” To be in integrity is to be one thing, whole and undivided. When a plane is in integrity, all its millions of parts work together smoothly and cooperatively. If it loses integrity, it may stall, falter, or crash. There’s no judgment here. Just physics.

When you experience unity of intention, fascination, and purpose, you live like a bloodhound on a scent, joyfully doing what feels truest in each moment.

Tragically, many people go their whole lives without ever learning this, never experiencing the joyful ease that comes with full integrity. Some of these folks are massively misaligned, their lives an endless string of failures and crushed dreams.

But honestly, it’s fine. You don’t feel bad, just vaguely anxious, uncomfortable, and disappointed. And it’s perfectly normal that your mind tends to linger on regrets about plans that didn’t work out and doubts that your dreams will ever come true.

But your nature is forever colliding with a force that can tear it apart: culture.

In this rush to conform, we often end up ignoring or overruling our genuine feelings—even intense ones, like longing or anguish—to please our cultures. At that point, we’re divided against ourselves. We aren’t in integrity (one thing) but in duplicity (two things). Or we may try to fit in with a number of different groups, living in multiplicity (many things). We abandon our true nature and become pawns of our culture: smiling politely, sitting attentively, wearing the “perfect” uncomfortable clothes.

You’re trying to act in ways that don’t feel right to you at the deepest level. Whenever we do this, our lives begin to go pear-shaped. Emotionally, we feel grumpy, sad, or numb. Physically, our immune systems and muscles weaken; we might get sick, and even if we don’t, our energy flattens. Mentally, we lose focus and clarity. That’s how it feels to be out of integrity.

All these inner reactions affect our outer lives. Since we can’t concentrate, our work suffers. Irritability and gloominess make us bad company, weakening our relationships. Everything in and around us is negatively affected when we lose integrity. And because our true nature is serious about restoring us to wholeness, it hauls out the one tool that reliably gets our attention: suffering.

Physical pain comes from events. Psychological suffering comes from the way we deal with those events.

Whenever my nature and my culture disagreed, I’d sell out my nature, and hard. It worked! I got all kinds of approval! On the other hand, I could barely tolerate things like, you know, being alive. In hindsight I’m grateful for this. It gave me an early start in struggling against suffering with every resource at my disposal.

Integrity is the cure for unhappiness. Period. Of all the strategies and skills I’ve ever learned, the ones that actually work are those that help people see where they’ve abandoned their own deep sense of truth and followed some other set of directives.

This split from integrity is almost always unconscious. The people I know who experience it aren’t wicked; in fact, most of them are perfectly lovely. They strive to cooperate with every rule for living they’ve learned from their respective cultures. Which is a terrific way to run your life if you like to look good and feel bad.

Your quest for integrity will begin in “the dark wood of error,” a place where we feel lost, exhausted, troubled, and unsure. This is Dante’s metaphor for the misalignment in which most of us live. In some ways—possibly all ways—we feel that our lives aren’t what they’re meant to be.

Our next stage is Dante’s famous “inferno.” Passing through it, we’ll find the parts of you that are suffering—the parts trapped in your inner hell—and set them free.

You’ll see that psychological suffering always comes from internal splits between what your encultured mind believes and what feels deeply true to you. The way of integrity will help you heal these divisions. You’ll start to experience more wholeness than ever before. The relief, most likely, will be tangible and immediate.

Once your inner life begins to heal, it’s on to a form of Dante’s “purgatory.” This word simply means “cleansing.” (I like to go on “integrity cleanses,” by which I don’t mean cleansing away integrity, but cleansing away everything else.) In this stage of your quest, you’ll shift your external behavior ...

Finally, as your inner and outer lives approach complete integrity, you’ll find yourself in metaphorical “paradise.” There’s no more work to do here, unless you count enjoying a life where everything—y...

In The Divine Comedy, Dante goes down into a huge pit (the inferno), then up a mountain (purgatory). He grows stronger and walks with less and less effort as he reaches the mountain’s summit. Then, to his amazement, he finds himself rising upward. Flying. That’s what happens when the misaligned parts of a human life come into integrity. Dante uses flight as a metaphor for a life that feels unlimited, literally heavenly.

This is because part of our hardwiring makes us enjoy destroying anything that threatens us. That’s just good evolutionary policy. Any creature that lacked the will to fight when threatened would soon be dead and gone. But unlike animals, humans don’t just attack clear and present physical threats.

We’re also unique in that we’re frightened not only by powerful creatures that want to eat us, but by anyone or anything that may potentially change us. We’re especially leery of people or ideas that might shake us out of our cultural assumptions and preconceptions.

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.

Healthy anger motivates discernment. It focuses on specific problems. It works toward changing conditions, and when those conditions change, it subsides. Righteous error attacks for vague, ill-defined, or contradictory reasons, and doesn’t change with circumstances. It passes judgment, often without evidence.

Healthy Discernment Righteous Error (Making judgments) (Passing judgment) Compels actions that reduce anger Compels actions that increase anger Sees all people as connected Sees all people as “us versus them” Seeks new information Avoids new information Learns about many topics Focuses obsessively on a few topics Is able to imagine other perspectives Imagines only its own perspective Sees shades of gray Sees everything as black and white Acknowledges it is fallible Insists on its own infallibility If we’re serious about integrity, we need to take a close look at that right-hand column.

I’ve seen all three types of psychological violence in my practice. I once had a client I’ll call Edna who looked like a sweet granny but sustained continuous, simmering mental violence. She thought constantly about the ways she wanted to hurt everyone from her neighbors, whom she envied, to world leaders, whom she despised, to entire cultures, whose customs she found subhuman. She spent hours each day writing blog posts about this to her three online followers, all of whom were bots.

All these people were using an obsession with judgment to avoid various hellgate issues. Most of us do this. The surge of pleasure our egos get from attacking others is a great emotional painkiller.

Constantly fussing about everything absorbed her attention so she never had to. I doubt you hang out in Circle Seven as persistently as these folks, but you may well spend some of your time in the realm of violence. You may engage in a constant inner monologue, stating and restating your moral positions, revving up a payload of destructive rage against your enemies. You may spend all night tweeting to tell the world how bad those enemies really are.

Notice how different this is from the clarity of people who voice their anger from a place of integrity. For example, in his bestseller How to Be an Antiracist, Ibram X. Kendi freely expresses his anger at racial oppression. But he also methodically, logically, and consistently requires of himself the same fair-mindedness and wisdom he wishes to see in all people. He cautions against the righteous high that “avoids the mirror.”

To go from “righteous mind” to genuine fairness, we actually have to change brain states, go from the intoxication of violence to a clear, calm mind.

EXERCISE: Fighting monsters Step one: Pick your issue. Start by thinking of a controversial social issue you really care about. It might be gun control, immigration, capital punishment, animal rights—any issue will do, as long as you have a strong opinion about it, and you know there are people who strongly hold the opposite opinion. Write it here: Step two: Name the “others.” Focus for a moment on the people who disagree with you. Imagine them en masse, marching in the streets, posting on Twitter, denouncing things you care about. Maybe you already have a phrase to describe them, like “less-informed voters” or “misguided children of God” or “knuckle-dragging, scum-sucking, pea-brained morons.” But here and now, let’s just call them “monsters.” Step three: Let your blood boil. Think for a moment about the way your monsters behave, the damage they do. Really feel all the anger and outrage this creates. Once your blood is boiling, fill in the following blanks as if you were writing your monsters an anonymous letter. This is for your eyes only, so don’t hold back. Write what you think in your most politically incorrect moments. Don’t try to make your words pretty or polite. Use a separate sheet of paper if you need more space. To My Monsters: Let me be frank. Here’s what I don’t like about you: Here’s what you do that’s just plain wrong: Here’s what would happen to the world if you and your kind had control of it: Here’s what I hope happens to limit your power...

If you’re like most people, though, this exercise may have helped you see that while delivering righteous judgment feels fabulous, receiving it feels awful. 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.” When we go to war on something that we see as a war on us, the ultimate winner isn’t either side of the conflict, but war itself.

Living in errors of righteousness wears us out and drags us down. I wish I could show you how exhausted and sick Edna felt after years of continuous anger. Brian’s continuous self-attack was another tar pit of paralysis and despair. Amelia felt utterly dejected, friendless, and alone. Once we get stuck in an error of righteousness, we suffer big time. The only path that leads away from all this misery is the way of integrity. To follow it out of the seventh circle, we’ll use the same steps you learned in the last chapter: (1) observe thoughts that cause suffering, (2) question them, and (3) move on.

But there’s only one massive lie that turns us toward violence. It is the fundamental belief of the righteous brain. It says, “I can fix everything that upsets me by destroying my enemies.”

But while you do these things, maintain a discerning mind that’s open to new information and new ideas. When I studied martial arts, I learned over and over that we can fight most effectively when we aren’t locked into a mental position of blind attack. Fighting has its place, but by itself violence never fixes, heals, or mends anything. Its essence is destruction, never creation.

Think about the previous exercise, your letter to your monsters. Recall the issue you chose for that exercise. Go into your righteous mind and feel what it does to you. Watch your body tense, your anger rise, your mind start circling like an MMA fighter in a cage. Notice that while the adrenaline surge might be intoxicating, this state of body and mind quickly is dominated by fury and discontent. Is this really the place from which anyone can increase justice, love, or peace?

Now consider this thought: “I can fix everything that upsets me by destroying my enemies.” Write the thought down, if you like. Then put it under the microscope. Ask the questions you learned in the last chapter for puncturing any mental error: Are you sure you can fix this situation by destroying your enemies? Can you absolutely know that thought (“I can fix this by destroying my enemies”) is true? If you remember how defensive you felt about receiving your very own letter to your “monsters,” you’ll see that just attacking, with no other intention, can only escalate mental and perhaps physical violence. You may notice the irony of attack, of your hope that people will end up agreeing with you because you’re trying to hurt them. The desire to destroy others...

But when we clear our minds of that righteous urge to destroy, our perceptions of wrongdoing remain clear. 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. Psychologist Steven Hayes calls this connecting with our “core values.” His research shows that focusing on values has an almost magical ability to accomplish the very things we think we’ll get by attacking our enemies. 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.”

Here’s an exercise based on a technique Hayes uses to help clients escape destructive anger. Start by thinking of a verb and an adverb that combine to describe the way you want to live your life. It will be a phrase like “teaching compassionately,” “loving courageously,” or “serving honorably.” Think for a few minutes about what verb-adverb combination best sums up your core values. If you could always live this way, you’d feel that you’d lived an honest and meaningful life. Got it? Write your value here: The verb-adverb phrase that best describes my core value is: Just focusing on this phrase (“learning joyfully,” “caring generously,” “creating unabashedly,” or whatever) will change your internal state. Feel how different it is from moral outrage, how it settles and relaxes your body, mind, heart, soul.

Now, with your core value in focus, you’re ready for a next step on the way of integrity. Try this one: EXERCISE: Going to the mountain Step one: Imagine yourself in a peaceful natural landscape. You may be on a beach, in a forest, or in a meadow (I like to imagine going to the mountains). You’re alone, but everything is beautiful, calm, and completely safe. Step two: Connect with your inner teacher. You can use the “Meeting Your Inner Teacher” exercise in Chapter 3, meditate on the thought “I am meant to live in peace,” or simply focus on the word peace as you breathe in and out. When you feel the quiet, calm place at your center, continue. Step three: Recall your core values. You can write your verb-adverb combination here as a reminder: Step four: Think of an issue that upsets you. You can use the same topic you wrote about in your “monster” letter or think of a different issue. Write it here: Step five: Answer this question: In regard to the issue I’ve just cited, acting in accordance with the core values ...

Maybe you’ll feel motivated to read a book, plant a tree, make a bold statement online, or back off an argument. Maybe the action step that occurs to you will seem too small, or too odd. Take it anyway. The moment you begin any creative activity, you leave the realm of violence, which knows only destruction. Shifting from righteous self-defense into creativity can catalyze life-changing, even world-changing action. I think that’s why famous moral leaders are often creative in small ways as well as large. Gandhi not only modeled civil disobedience but also made his own clothes, right down to weaving the cloth. Harriet Tubman, a multitalented genius, not only helped people escape slavery but also started her own restaurant, where she taught freed women to get paying jobs providing goods and services for the Union Army. Eunice Kennedy Shriver, heartsick about the lack of opportunities for people with intellectual disabilities, started a sports camp for children at her home that later grew into the Special Olympics. These people stood up against injustice without violence, and they were always creating things, even small things: cotton clothes, delicious food, a foot race.

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.