Let me start by saying I physically cringe when people use the word “delulu”. I’m not trying to shame anyone for hopping on the trend. I just think the word delusional is perfectly sufficient, and “delulu” gives me goosebumps in a bad way. That being said, “delulu” is all over the place lately and I’ve been wondering why.

I knew I had written something about delusions once, and I unearthed it from the disturbing repository that is my phone notes: some takeaways I had written down from the pivotal year of 2020.

They were about the ways people delude themselves for the sake of self preservation, the key ones for me that year being:

• by engaging in all or nothing thinking;
• by shedding responsibility (rationalizing being self centered);
• through an inflated ego (lying to themselves about their role, particularly in relation to others);
• and through religious thinking (lying to themselves about whatever!).

These delusions are all troubling and triggering in different ways, and their abrupt emergence in my social circle during the pandemic got me wondering if people can come back from their delusions as quickly as they dive into them.

I didn’t do the good work of checking in with folks to find out… I’m afraid to go there in most cases.

But in theory, I suspect coming back from a delusion depends on whether one is willing to unravel the crazy looking sweater they’ve knit around whatever they’re protecting.

I should be more specific. I’ll start with the most prolific and consuming form of delusion a person can shroud themselves in, which I think is safe to say is narcissism. It’s the most extreme form of the inflated ego. It’s entirely unapologetic main character syndrome. It’s a person who gaslights but truly believes their own gaslighting. It’s zero accountability. It’s really an inability to see oneself as others do, or to even want to, because their own view of themself is satisfying (safe?) enough.

Since 2020 or maybe since 2016, it seems that widespread psychoanalysis of narcissism has been in vogue, or at least on my radar more than ever before (gee I wonder why). There are lots of psychobabble memes and some of them completely miss the nail head in terms of what narcissism is, but they still inspire people to accuse their exes or their parents or their bosses of being narcissists. But the fascination with narcissism is evident not just in the meme world, also in the clinical depths. Both my therapist and our couple’s therapist have dedicated time to framing people around us as narcissists and helping us understand how to deal with them, or at least how to reduce our expectations of them.

Narcissism might be the most difficult psychological malady to “deal with”—or maybe I mean the easiest to meet with intolerance and avoidance—because in the end we’re talking about a pathologically self centered person who is very likely (perhaps deliberately) blind to your needs. Who wants to put up with that?

But when you see narcissism as a self protection mechanism, you can potentially start to feel sorry for the narcissist and whatever happened to them as a young child. “The greater the ego, the greater the wound”—a snippet from my 2020 notes that I probably read on a meme. That doesn’t mean you should excuse or permit a narcissist’s behavior, but just understanding the root of the delusion can lead to insights.

When it comes to dealing with a big ego, I’ve come to think the only way is through (or, turning and walking away forever!). If you try to run around the three-headed dog, one of those heads will turn and bite you in the butt. But if you learn what the beast is guarding, you might be able to negotiate. You might be able to expose the delusion: hey, you don’t need to bare such big teeth to protect that soft underbelly. I’m not going to go for your underbelly unless you like being tickled.

In other words, there is always something very weak and frightened underneath a massive ego. This seems well established. We characterize narcissists as unfixable and evil beyond repair. But isn’t it actually the case that their soft parts are just so fragile that their ego has had to project something blinding and larger than life in order to feel safe?

I’m not saying I know the way through a narcissist. I haven’t figured out how to negotiate with that level of delusion in my own life, nor do I want to (seems like a tough gig). But I do wonder, if we could wrap our heads around the protective power of delusion and all the forms it can take, would we be better able to at least predict if not empathize with a narcissist’s next move?

Back to my 2020 notes, which at the time I titled as “things I learned this year” (lol and what a year it was).

The first hard lesson was about why people delude themselves with “all or nothing thinking”. Unlike narcissism, it’s a super common form of self delusion that I’m convinced we’re all guilty of pretty often, yet it’s far less of a star in the meme world.

I regularly need my therapist to talk me down from various cognitive distortions, and “all or nothing” thinking is one of them. It’s something we can and should question and resist, but some people will continue to choose this delusion over and over, even when it doesn’t serve them. One of the most toxic ways, which I think has serious sociopolitical ramifications, is by choosing simplicity over complexity, or rejecting nuance.

I get it, simplicity is far easier on the brain cells. You see it all the time with the “logic” of conspiracy theories or unscientific explanations that people cling to. Nuance requires detailed explanation and critical thinking. Simplicity gives you an answer you can run with. But when an answer is presented as simple fact, with no openly disclosed caveats and then also deemed unquestionable, I’m very wary.

I’m not saying people who reject complex explanations of our shared reality are simple-minded. I don’t think the ability to delude oneself correlates to intelligence, actually. Sometimes the most classically intelligent (high IQ, intellectually nimble) people can be the most delusional. High brain power doesn’t make you less susceptible to the snare of simplicity simply serving you.

Sometimes, and very often in 2020, the delusion of the most convenient explanation or the simpler worldview just serves to aid the next delusion: absolution. Letting yourself off the hook because it’s “not your responsibility”. This one is particularly triggering to me as an eldest sister and people pleaser with an overly inflated sense of responsibility.

During the pandemic, I struggled to accept those people who used all or nothing thinking to shed themselves of responsibility from taking public health measures. The way I came to wrap my head around it: they were avoiding fear. If you accept the nuance and complexity of decisions that have to be made during a pandemic, you are probably going to get overwhelmed by all of the things that have to be considered in order to protect not only yourself but also people directly around you and people in your wider community. Some people could cope with this overwhelm and make choices informed by complex information that was, most inconveniently, emerging (and not in a straightforward way) over time, that cruel mistress. Other people really couldn’t cope and chose the “all” or, infuriatingly to me, the “nothing”.

At the time I was inclined to feel we were on different teams, and they were everything that is wrong with human society. But looking back, I have to admit those people weren’t simply evil (that would be a delusion by definition). They just likely have a more cut and dry way of protecting themselves from fear and stress. (And if I’m being fair, even us hyper-responsible folks were protecting ourselves through our own approach to the pandemic—in a literal physical sense and also maybe because we subconsciously believe we have to take care of other people in order to be worthy of existence. A delusion that the narcissists are definitely free from.)

The final delusion on my list is religious thinking, yet another form of self protection. I’m not talking about religion but about religious thinking, which can be applied in many ways regardless of spiritual beliefs. Religious is the adjective, it’s the type of thinking that’s the problem. Religion has famously been described as the opiate of the masses and I think religious thinking serves the same purpose in modern times, even for those who don’t ascribe to an organized religion.

It’s basically just the opposite of scientific thinking. It’s not based on evidence or proof, but on faith-based tenets that cannot be questioned. Once those foundational thought pillars are accepted and prove unshakable, watch as so many delusions unfold!

I was sitting here thinking about how this delusion is so frustrating and problematic in our society and is harder for me to relate to because I had a severe break with religion and religious thinking as a tween (see my first post for more context).

But then I had to step off my high horse because I remembered… astrology! Astrology relies on religious thinking, and I’m totally guilty of engaging with it. I simply believe that the people in my life are well represented by the information in their astrological birth charts. It’s a belief I accepted long ago, and it’s impossible to argue with because it’s not based on reason, just on my highly subjective observations and interpretations. I see stuff that I can’t unsee.

As my dear friend, mentor, and former astrologist J.P. Harpignies would explain to validate my delusion: astrology is just a language we use to make sense of ourselves and the personalities around us. If it serves you in some way, then it’s worth exploring. Of course it’s not objectively true, and of course there can be no scientific proof around the “evidence”.

So I’m able to extend this generous framing in order to accept my delusional belief in astrology. But then I struggle so much with other people’s religious thinking.

I think it’s because, from what I’ve seen, religious thinking enables toxic behaviors like spiritual bypassing, and gaslighting, and conspiracy theories, and other forms of total disregard or actual oppression of people who don’t follow the same formula or belief.

To be clear, religious thinking is not spirituality by any means. Spirituality brings us home to ourselves so that we can be more attuned to the way things are (mindfulness), so we can cultivate self-compassion and subsequently generate more compassion for the world around us.

Conversely, religious thinking usually breeds separation: those who abide by the thinking and those who don’t. It aims to give simple answers and explanations where there may not be any (see: inability to deal with nuance). It provides a false sense of security, and in our time it takes many forms, as traditional religions splinter and the internet spews all sorts of bullshit…

It’s a bit terrifying that this type of thinking doesn’t actually require one to commit to a religious way of life. Anyone can take up religious thinking. You get to subscribe independently and apply it in versatile ways. Some examples:

“Oh, don’t worry, they will break up because karma is going to get her!”

“If you manifest it, the right job will come your way.”

“A mother’s intuition is always right.”

“Your newborn can sense you are depressed, that’s why he’s not sleeping.”

“That’s not going to happen to you. The universe is good.”

“Everything happens for a reason.”

These kinds of statements are actually kind of ubiquitous in my milieu but they absolutely lack logic. They rely on superstition or beliefs in unprovable concepts.

But just like all of the other delusions, religious thinking is also probably doing the dirty work of protecting the inner child. At some point, a mystical and unprovable (but also not disprovable) explanation comforted you from a traumatic situation you experienced, and you learned to apply that same explanation (or variations of it) wherever you see fit.

So maybe attempting to understand myself and the personalities around me has been traumatic (looking at you, loved ones!), and astrology is my delusional response.

I’m kind of serious. I don’t mean to belittle or minimize anyone’s serious trauma by comparing it to my processing of people’s quirks and tendencies. As my therapist says, there is Big Trauma and little trauma. All of it shapes us. Trauma is ongoing, for everyone.

I love etymology, so I looked up the origin of the word trauma: it’s Greek for “wound”. A wound is how a child learns. We are quite literally born of trauma (childbirth is a trauma for at least two people, every time!).

Getting wounded prepares us to protect ourselves better in the future. They say what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger (though to be fair that sounds like convenient all or nothing thinking to me). But really, trauma is learning the hard way, which has no substitute. And depending on how you respond to it, it can indeed make you stronger.

Even the most privileged and pampered and protected person in the world will at some point have an event that causes them to experience fear or insecurity, to perceive a wound or the threat of a wound, and then to choose a response to that situation that they’ll likely choose again in the future. It’s the chosen response, or what we do after our trauma, that matters.

So I think to better understand the delusions around us, we have to broaden our definition of the word trauma. We have to understand the wounds and the myriad self protective delusions that can follow them. I think this one method for cultivating compassion for people with vastly different life experiences and creeds of living than our own.

That being said, it’s easier said than done, so I’ll be over here with my trusted inner circle avoiding narcissists at all costs.