This is Part 2 of my journey through Kristina Mӓnd-Lakhiani’s From Awesome to Flawesome program on Mindvalley. This time, I’m revisiting what I thought I knew and uncovering the self-deception hiding in plain sight.
“What is really true?” asks Kristina.
There’s a question that’ll make you ponder.
Because there’s so much of life that is absolutely true. Like, the Earth is round, gravity pulls things down, and (most) leaves are green.
But these are obviously not the truths Kristina is talking about. What she’s referring to are those that are shaped by culture, family, trauma, emotions, and whatnot (and yet, we believe them like they’re laws of the universe).
These are the…
- “Love always hurts,”
- “Money is hard to earn,” or
- “I need to fix myself before I’m lovable.”
Even when it comes to cancer, it’s all the “I’ll never feel normal again” or “My body’s too damaged to do much of anything.”
While some of these beliefs may be our brain’s way of keeping us safe, they’re not the same as the self-honesty I mentioned in Part 1. Instead, they’re rehearsed lines, shaped by what we’ve been told is “normal.”
And the deeper the self-deception, the harder it is to tell where survival ends and performance begins.
We’re all living in curated self-deception
Many of us were taught to keep it together from a young age. Don’t cry loudly; don’t lose our sh*t in public; and, for the love of God, definitely don’t answer “How are you?” with anything other than “I’m fine.”
It’s the version of ourselves that’s the most socially acceptable. However, it’s also the version that’s the most edited.
They’re not done out of maliciousness, of course. Rather, they just make life easier by smoothing over tension, avoiding conflict, and, in some cases, even saving lives.
It’s like that episode of The Big Bang Theory where Sheldon tries to point out that he’s smarter than everyone else. His mom, Mary, however, shuts it down with a simple “Because people don’t like it.”
That’s the thing. According to research, we’re lied to anywhere from six to 200 times a day. And no one bats an eye.
But people lying is just one part of it. The other? The lies we absorb and start repeating…until we think they’re our own.
When the lies sound like our own voice
There’s this woman I know, who’s two years clear of breast cancer, has been avoiding going in for her blood test. She said she didn’t want to hear bad news.
I get that, but this “ignorance is bliss” attitude is the kind of lie she tells herself to feel safe. It’s subtle and quiet, but it feels like truth.
But that’s how convincing self-deception can be. Not some big dramatic lie, but something subtle, familiar, and even comforting.
Take, for instance, the study Kristina shares in From Awesome to Flawesome. Researchers told people stories from their childhood, took them to a location that supposedly matched the memory, and asked them to recall the experience.
At first, they couldn’t. But after a while, the participants started filling in details, emotions, specifics… Except the whole thing was made up. And still, their brains made it real anyway.
That just goes to show how convincing our inner storytelling can be.
The quiet undoing of self-deception
Anyone who’s gone through cancer is probably familiar with the confounded self-talk: “I don’t know if I’ll ever feel whole again,” “My body’s too damaged for [insert anything remotely life-affirming here],” and so on and so forth.
The self-deception is only exacerbated by health professionals saying things like, “If you don’t start this treatment now, the cancer will only get more aggressive” or “You won’t be able to have children.”
But, like Kristina asks in her program, “What is really true?”
There are plenty of stories out there of people who’ve overcome the so-called impossible.
Case in point: Marisa Peer, who’s Men’s Health’s “Best British Therapist” and trainer of Mindvalley’s Rapid Transformational Hypnotherapy for Abundance program.
She was diagnosed with womb cancer and, later, again with colon cancer. Both times, she refused to let the diagnosis define her.
“I heard a voice in my head say, ‘Don’t let that in,’” she says in an interview on The Mindvalley Podcast. “And that voice has been such a great friend to me.”
Another person I know (the one I mentioned in Part 1 of this series) also defied what doctors told her. She was given three months to live but told herself she’ll live beyond that. She’s now 25 years cancer-free.
What’s incredible is that both women were told that they wouldn’t ever have children. But Marisa went on to have a daughter, and the other lady has a son.
And the thing is, science shows that belief alone can spark measurable changes in the body: pain relief, boosted immunity, and symptom reduction. It’s what scientists call the placebo effect.
So when I look at women like Marisa and the cancer-free lady, I can’t help but wonder: how much of healing is belief dressed up as biology?
This is where the unlearning begins
I, too, had a similar experience. The way the doctors spoke when I was diagnosed, you’d think I was going to drop dead the next day. That’s how hard they pushed for me to start radiation and chemo immediately.
Looking back now, I can see the ways self-deception crept in without me even knowing it:
- I didn’t allow myself the time to really consider my options for treatments.
- I let the urgency drown out my questions.
- I didn’t push back when the doctors skipped over the option of saving my eggs.
- I reluctantly agreed to go ahead with brachytherapy (essentially, it’s a rod they stick up your vagina to emit radiation to the site of the cancer cells) after radiation and chemo, even though it didn’t sit right with me.
- I went along with checking into the hospital for the first brachytherapy appointment even though I had a cold.
That’s the thing, right? Cancer sucks already, and to add on to it, my brain was already too fried to make any decisions. It was just: Go. Now. But all I really wanted to do was live.
Thankfully, somewhere midway through the radiation and chemo treatments, I really started being honest with myself about how I truly felt. And in doing so, I was able to make decisions that, I believe, helped me be cancer-free for five years now (and counting).
For instance, something about doing brachytherapy felt off. Call it women’s intuition, but I’ve had that feeling before. Whenever I would ignore it, things wouldn’t go smoothly for me. But when I listened in, things did. (Of course, the doctors weren’t too happy when I decided against the treatment.)
So going back to Kristina’s question: “What is really true?”
It sure isn’t the fear, the pressure, or that doctors always know best. But what really is true is what I believe to be true.
I’ve already overcome the “cancer will take over your life” belief. And when it comes to having children, even though I’m in “medically induced menopause”? Well, if Marisa and the cancer-free lady can do it, you best believe that I can, too.
And you?
Is there a lie you’ve told yourself so often it started sounding like the truth?
It could be small, like “I’m just tired.” Quiet, like “It’s not a big deal.” Or easy to miss, like “This is just how life is.”
Regardless of what it is, ask yourself, “Is that really true?” The more you do, the more you’ll see things for what they are. Maybe not all at once, but enough to make you pause.
That’s why I’m creating space for conversations like this. So if you’ve seen your own self-deception or even caught a glimpse of it, drop a comment.
Because the reality is, we don’t heal by hiding. We heal by being heard. And I’d love to hear from you.