I’ve come to realize something recently with my therapist, and that’s a strange belief I have. The thinking goes that If you believe yourself to be a good person, you’re likely to not be on guard for if you truly are. You become unaware of your actions, your thoughts, and your intentions. By thinking yourself a good person, you put in place systems that make you slowly become a bad person.

And by bad we can go with something like morally dubious, unaware, not-compassionate, toxic in relationships, manipulative, self-centered, emotionally abusive etc. It ranges from being a “Douche Bag Bro” to someone on twitter insulting or being condescending at everyone who has a different opinion.

It feels very sophomoric (seriously my favourite word recently) as a way of thinking really. It’s easy to find an example of someone with self confidence who is a good person. (for whatever metric of good you want) Just as it’s easy to find someone with no self confidence who is a bad person.

And yet, I have a hard time shaking it. Part of the problem with these kinds of thoughts is, they’ve gotten me this far, so clearly it can’t be that wrong, right? If I’m generally happy with what I’ve accomplished, why should I change. Now clearly that’s also questionable logic right there. It’s always possible to be better no matter how well our current thoughts, actions and beliefs have served us.

It’s very hard for me to admit that it might not be true in my case (As in I don’t worry about others being a good or a bad person in relation to their self esteem, this just applies to me). I’d love to have a good conclusion here, a wrap to the story, something to the effect that I’m working on it or that I’ve changed my thoughts or some shit like that. But I haven’t, at least not yet. But I do know what the problem is.