The Liar Believing Their Denial
It's encouraging when one finally can confess what they were doing is wrong
You know how it goes, some people reside in the land of denial when it comes to their exploitative behavior. They know what they did and they know it’s not right. On rare occasion they can show their best side even if it is only after their feet are held to the flame.
I’m not talking about people’s mere, inaccurate perceptions of wrongdoing. That’s an entirely different thing. I’m talking about known, objectively egregious behavior.
"I was absolutely in denial that any of these accusations were real," said Jen Shah, a ‘reality TV star “ whom prosecutors said defrauded hundreds of victims, many of them elderly, over almost a decade,” writes Raechal Shewfelt, the editor at Yahoo Entertainment.
It took Shah a while but she came to the clear-minded conclusion that she was not only denying that she was responsible but that she was “absolutely” in the wrong. Rare is it, regardless of facts and evidence, that corrupt-character people verbalize or otherwise communicate truth. They don’t have the strength and honor to do it.
Let’s go deeper, if we may. Why did Shah not initially feel she was guilty of terrible behavior and exploiting others?
“Because I'm like, I'm not a bad person,” she says. “No. I've helped so many people. I'm a good person. I would never do these things. I truly... I believed that. I really believed that."
Alrighty then. This is the type of defense mechanism that predators and other unsavory types can develop and practice to deny and move through their lives.
In the case of Shah, how did she come to realize she is who she is and not who she wanted to be and portrayed herself to be? Well, Shewfelt tells us.
“It was seeing the evidence at trial that made Shah have a change of heart,” she writes.
"The biggest thing for me was seeing an actual list of victim names,” Shah says. “It became a reality for me at that point, that there were actually people hurt from this. Because prior to that, I kept thinking, 'Well, I've never talked to a victim myself,' so I’m thinking that I couldn’t have done any of those things."
Notice the evasive-natured thinking and not wanting to see, admit and correct what is transpiring and one’s involvement in exploiting others. The regret, empathy, remorse and compassion, all absent.
Shah, like many others, was quite willing to assume the risk, believing that “midnight” by getting caught and hit with consequences and punishment will never come.
"My actions caused harm to people,” she now says. “I did not want to accept that at all. I was lying to myself and telling myself what I wanted to hear.”
That’s not an attorney communicating that or anything else she mentioned above. That’s her, finally having her moral sight restored and understanding what she did, to whom, how it hurt them and who she was as a person.
Notice too that Shah realizes that she was not only lying to a multitude of people, she was lying to herself and programming her mind by telling herself what she wanted to hear. That allowed her to act as she wanted, not as she should.
This is not an article however about Jen Shah. It’s about those people very similar to her operating in the world around us, who conduct their lives without compunction.
It’s difficult to do the “right” thing when you feel no guilt for what you are about to do, are doing or have done. Since such people won’t self-police themselves, those around them have to assertively step in and help course correct or report them to authority which is trustworthy and will put the brakes on the misbehavior.
In the movie Date Night, Tina Fey’s character, Claire Foster, says it well in a moment of danger and frustration, “This sh*t ends now!”
That has to become the mentality when thoughts of wrongdoing are becoming an impulse. If it’s too late for that, then it has to happen very early in the misconduct.
Michael Toebe is a reputation consultant, advisor and communications specialist at Reputation Quality, assisting individuals and organizations with further building reputation as an asset or ethically protecting, restoring or reconstructing it.
He is also the writer and publisher of the Reputation Notes newsletter on the Substack and LinkedIn platforms.
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It’s an open question for kinder souls, and while I think I’m an honest, even sometimes generous spirit when disappointed, there is nothing my decades of life observations that can persuade me that she’s truthful in her sudden realization of fault. That said, i am grateful that kinder souls exist, like you, praying to god or gamer (or some electrical charge that created all of this accidentally) that we evolve into better, moral beings and the world my grandchildren inhabit as they grow is less destructive than ours.
I’ve been thinking about this largely because I found her defense so outrageous, and her moment of epiphany even more so. Truths we believe in, especially those we tell ourselves are not relative.
Harming anyone is deliberate. She’s lying - or don’t you think so?