A previous post suggested making up a fake past for yourself to cover up for failures, but I think on some level, you ought to know it’s a lie, but just not care that it is.
I suppose when you make up a fake successful history for yourself and convince yourself that your true past is the fake history and not your true history, but that sounds like it’s getting pathological.
Yet I think many people do this anyway. You would be stunned at how many ridiculous and insane completely false fake ideas people have about what really happened in their lives.
I know a guy who has convinced himself that is stepson is his son, except that the son was actually fathered by his future wife and his own father three months before he even met her! She gave birth to a full-term baby about six months after she met him, so she was three months down the line when she met the guy. Nevertheless, he insists that he fathered the kid somehow, possibly by time travel I guess.
I know quite a few other people who have convinced themselves of many a crazy and easily disproven thing. Attempts to disabuse them of these comfortable delusions are often met with rage or even possibly violence because you are really chipping away at an elaborate defensive fortification here, and people don’t enjoy having their Defensive Fortresses fired on with heavy weaponry. That’s the reason for the near-violent response. You are hitting the rawest of nerves, the biggest lies of them all.
People will defend the lies they live their lives by with extreme ferocity. They feel that they need these falsehoods to make it through life because they think if they themselves the truth instead of the lies, they will collapse in self-hatred. They probably won’t, and secure people do this all the time with little to no problems, but good luck convincing them of that. Actually a not uncommon response is for the person to say that if his lies are taken away from them and the truth is accepted as real, they will have to kill themselves. So their lies are like life-saving medication to them, or so they see it.
Technically these are delusions, but studies show that an astonishing 14% of Americans have a diagnosable delusion at any given time, so going deliberately nuts must be pretty popular. One of my psychologists told me that they only diagnose psychosis if the delusion is causing you some sort of serious problems in your life. If you can live your life smoothly, I suppose you can go ahead and believe all sorts of crazy things. Knock yourself out.
