From “The Soulwork of Justice: Four Movements for Contemplative Action” by Wesley Granberg-Michaelson.
Here’s what happens. Our self-sufficiency, which works well because we are smart and talented, keeps us from vulnerable commitments to others, pushing us into lonely emptiness and isolation. Our certainty, reinforced through a thirst for psychic security, becomes rigid and judgmental, repressing life experience and fresh revelations that finally will devastate us. Our grandiosity, which begins simply as pride, habitually starts selling a story of ourselves that shades the truth and tolerates deceit, eventually leaving us exposed and desolate. Our control becomes obsessive, trampling the gifts of others even as life reveals the futility of our vain attempts at mastery. In all this, our growing self-deception blinds us to what is happening within.