The main reason why some people are the opposite of what they say.
And no, it’s not ignorance. (Pills of Wisdom #1)
I’m going to kick-start a new series today, an informal one, because I’ve no idea how many articles it will end up with: Pills of Wisdom. They will be short articles offering bitesize wisdom about a variety of topics, without lengthy explanations. You’re very welcome to discuss in the comments.
Ever met a religious leader, guru or service provider who can’t spend a full 24h without preaching about humility… And it turned out this person was the most competitive, jealous, arrogant and THE LEAST humble ever?
What about the wholesome feminist who claimed to have found an answer to woman-on-woman hate… And it turned out she was THE BIGGEST gossiper all along, full of jealousy and (yes!) patriarchal bullshit?
Maybe you know a natural medicine enthusiast who made her whole personality about helping and healing others selflessly. She claimed she wouldn’t hurt a fly… Then turns around AND HURTS YOU in retaliation for having revealed one of her unaddressed shadows?
Or perhaps, that ambitious guy with an impressive career who prides himself in being so very mature, so adult, capable of dealing with any adversity at work… And it turned out he couldn’t handle AT ALL getting one of his ideas rejected, so he goes on a downward emotional spiral about it and tries to take you with him?
All of the above, and more, are fairly common in the world. You can invert the genders and add non-binary too. The narratives are the same.
The scenarios described (and whichever other ones you might have recalled inside your head, reading this article) all point to a psychological defense mechanism called “overcompensation”.
It’s an easy enough concept to understand: overcompensation is the defense we come up with when faced with the realisation that we really, really, really don’t have something that is of value to us.
Yes, I’m emphasising the “not having”. The lack. The opposite of abundance, if you will.
Since it can be utterly painful to face this feeling of lack head-on, some of us resort to burying this lack under an illusion of “having too much” of that very thing. And how exactly do we do that? Well, we achieve an illusion of excess by practising overcompensation.
Chances are, if you’re guilty of overcompensation, you don’t realise you’re doing it. You think you’re actually addressing a problem, actually working on developing the skill or acquiring the things or virtues or whatever it is you feel you’re lacking… When in fact you’re just overcompensating.
It’s like bypassing the actual work. Because in order to do the work, you need to face your feeling of lack, head-on. And that’s painful. We run away from pain, don’t we? Immediate solutions are very attractive — no matter how flawed or incomplete.
I said in the subtitle above that “no, it’s not ignorance”. Allow me to explain: indeed, overcompensation does not, and cannot, arise from ignorance. It always, necessarily, comes from an overwhelming awareness of a legit problem we have, which does in fact need addressing. Overcompensation is not to be demonised, so if the shoe fit, don’t panic. It’s a well-meaning defense mechanism! It’s better than running away from a problem entirely, isn’t it? With overcompensation, at least we can say there was an attempt at addressing it.
The problem here lies in impatience. “I want this problem to go away, RIGHT NOW, AND COMPLETELY, because I said so” — that’s what overcompensation would say, if it was honest. Can you feel the impatience and the immaturity behind it? Aye. And it’s a specific kind of impatience: it’s shame-bound impatience. The reason we want to overcompensate, in order to be extremely fast at this problem-solving, is because we feel ashamed for having detected this problem in us, don’t want others to see it too, so we won’t wait around sitting with the feeling of lack just in case someone will see what’s going on.
This is why overcompensation is a common thing with people who realise they lack a virtue that society would consider essential today (or “a real shame” not to have), such as kindness, humility, or maturity. We feel as though we will be judged very harshly by the world in case we get open and honest about this lack — so we attempt to address it in the quickest possible way, without drawing ANY external attention to the existence of the lack.
In doing so, we end up overcompensating instead of getting to the root of the problem and actually addressing it.
In my view (and views differ! Feel free to offer yours), there are at least two keys to tackle this shame which drives people’s overcompensation: first, breaking free from “the hero complex”, and learning that it’s ok to have villainesque flaws every once in a while, because they’re not to blame on the individual — often, they stem from social conditioning, from things we grew up observing and emulating when we were too young and didn’t know better.
The second important key is learning that nobody is perfect, so nobody can realistically expect perfection (or “excellence”) out of you. I know it sounds obvious on a cognitive level, but we need to internalise this important understanding on an emotional level as well. Nobody is perfect. We’re all here to learn, grow, and fall on our arses once in a while. It’s okay. We get up again, don’t we? All part of the process. How boring would life be if we were already born flawless!
