Best Friends and Worst Enemies
It is often said at meetings that the words rationalization and justification can become our best friends and our worst enemies.
Rationalization, justification, minimization — they travel together and they serve one purpose: to keep me from seeing the truth. They are the tools of denial, and I learned to use them like a professional.
I didn't just lie to others. I built airtight cases for myself. Every excuse was technically true, which made it almost impossible to challenge. I wasn't avoiding home — the project really was important. I wasn't controlling — I was just helping. I wasn't falling apart — it wasn't that bad.
"It wasn't that bad" might be the most dangerous sentence in my vocabulary. Minimization shrank my pain until I couldn't justify asking for help. Rationalization gave my worst patterns a logical alibi. Justification made everything I did sound reasonable — even the things that were slowly destroying me.
Step Four asks me to set these old friends down and look at what they've been covering for.
When I hear myself explaining why something "isn't that bad" or building a case for why I had to do something, I can pause and ask: what am I protecting myself from seeing?
