By David Tian, Ph.D.
Private adviser to founders, senior leaders, and high achievers.Certified IFS Therapy Practitioner (Level 3). Brown University Certified Leadership & Performance Coach. Ph.D., University of Michigan, specializing in moral psychology and Asian philosophy. Former tenure-track professor of philosophy, National University of Singapore.

Most of us assume we should understand our own thoughts and feelings better than anyone else does.

But being close to something doesn’t necessarily make it easier to see.

Your eye can see almost everything in its field of view.
But it can’t see itself directly. To inspect itself, it needs a reflection.

The same problem shows up in the rest of life.

You can be very good at seeing what’s wrong with a company, a product, a technical system, or a friend’s bad relationship. If you give yourself enough information and a little distance, you could spot the problem pretty quickly.

Then something happens in your own life or self… and you’re baffled.

You can run a company, make difficult decisions, master subjects most people would struggle to understand, and stay disciplined for years.

Yet one relationship can affect you far more than you think it should.
Or you’re very attracted to someone at first, but once the relationship starts getting serious, you find yourself less and less attracted to them.
Or you say you want a serious relationship and a family while repeatedly making choices that make those outcomes less and less likely.

You know what’s happening.

But you don’t really know why it keeps happening.

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The Problem You Can See

Most of us try to solve the problem we can see.

If there’s a puddle on your kitchen floor, you get a mop.

Perfectly sensible.

But if the puddle comes back every morning, eventually you have to wonder whether the puddle is the problem.

Maybe there’s a pipe leaking behind the wall.

Now imagine that instead of checking the pipe, you become extremely good at mopping. You buy a better mop. You learn the proper technique. You get so efficient that you can clear the whole floor in ninety seconds.

You’ve become much better at dealing with the puddle.

But you still have a leak.

A lot of personal problems are like this.

You’re single, so you work harder at meeting potential partners.
Rejection affects you badly, so you try to become more confident.
You feel behind, so you achieve more.
You don’t know what you want, so you think about it harder.
You keep finding fault with people you date, so you refine your standards.

None of these responses is stupid on its own.

And that’s why people can stay stuck in them for years. Each response makes perfect sense if the thing you can see is the thing causing the problem.

And sometimes it is. Sometimes you really do need to meet more people. Sometimes your social skills aren’t very good yet. Sometimes you genuinely chose the wrong person. Sometimes you’ve spent six months thinking about a decision that could have been made in an afternoon, and the answer really is to decide and just act.

There’s no prize for finding a deep psychological explanation when the obvious explanation is correct.

But there’s another possibility.

You solve the visible problem, and some version of it comes back.

You finally meet someone you’re excited about, then become preoccupied with whether that person likes you. You become more confident, then discover that your confidence disappears whenever you really care about the outcome.

You reach the goal you thought would finally feel enough, and a few weeks later you’re already chasing the next one. You meet someone who seems to fit your checklist, but then discover you’ve got new standards.

At that point, it’s worth asking whether you’ve been mopping the floor while the pipe keeps leaking.

What makes this confusing is that we experience the end of the chain directly.

We feel lonely and think, “I need a relationship.”

We feel anxious after a date and think, “I need more confidence.”

We lose attraction and think, “This person isn’t right for me.”

We succeed and still feel dissatisfied, so we think, “I need a bigger goal.”

We notice a new flaw and think, “I need to be better.”

And sometimes that explanation is right.

But if the same kind of problem keeps coming back, there’s another question worth asking:

Why does this keep happening to me?

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The Same Problem Can Have Different Causes

Take four people who all say the same thing:

“I can’t find the right person.”

They may mean it sincerely and still have four different problems.

The first person may simply not meet many people he’d seriously consider dating. His life is mostly work, the gym, a few old friends, and home. If he starts spending more time in places where he’s likely to meet compatible people, the problem may disappear.

The second person meets plenty of potential partners. He likes her at first. Then, as soon as the relationship becomes a serious possibility, he starts noticing reasons she isn’t quite right.

She isn’t curious enough. Or ambitious enough. Or spontaneous enough. Or she doesn’t share enough of his interests.

Any one of those objections might be legitimate.

The odd part is that there’s always another objection.

The third person says he wants a relationship. But what he seems to want even more is the life he imagines he’ll have once he gets the relationship.

He’s lonely. His friendships have thinned out. He spends most of his waking hours working. Weekends feel empty.

So “finding the right person” has taken on a much larger job description.

A partner is supposed to be not only his lover and best friend, but also his social life, source of fun, emotional home, and proof that the years he spent building everything else were worth it.

His problem may still be that he’s single.

But finding a partner and expecting her to repair his empty life are different problems.

The fourth person has a remarkably detailed idea of whom he should marry.

He wants someone intelligent but not consumed by her career. Attractive but not too concerned with attention. Adventurous but stable. Independent but eager to build a life around the relationship. Sophisticated enough to fit into his world but untouched by the parts of that world he dislikes.

Again, none of these preferences is absurd by itself.

But when every promising person falls short in some new way, it’s worth asking whether the problem is really that he hasn’t met the right person… or that no actual person can truly match the one he has imagined.

Four different people can all say, “I can’t find the right person,” and actually be dealing with four different problems.

Only one of them may need the standard advice to meet more people.

That’s why the question, “What should a person with this problem do?” can only take you so far.

You first need to know what’s producing the specific underlying problem.

This matters even more when someone’s behavior stops making sense even to him.

He knows he wants a relationship, yet he keeps choosing people he already suspects won’t suit him.

He knows one rejection shouldn’t matter this much, yet three days later he’s still replaying a text conversation in his head.

He knows the person he’s dating is unusually compatible with him, yet the more serious the relationship becomes, the more faults he finds.

He knows he achieved the goal he spent five years pursuing, yet within a month he’s treating the next goal as an emergency.

At that point, “How do I make myself stop doing this?” may already be too far downstream.

A better question is:

What problem is this reaction really trying to solve?

Suppose someone keeps finding faults with every person who gets close.

From the outside, the obvious conclusion is that he’s too picky.

Maybe he is.

But suppose finding faults also gives him a reason never to make the decision he’s afraid of making.

Now the fault-finding has a logic to it. It protects him from choosing one person and giving up all the others.

Or suppose someone becomes intensely preoccupied after a person he likes loses interest.

He may tell himself he needs to become less needy.

Perhaps he does.

But if rejection means something much larger to him than “this particular person doesn’t want another date,” telling himself to stop caring so much doesn’t explain why this particular rejection has so much force.

A reaction that looks irrational can make perfect sense once you understand what it’s trying to accomplish.

Until you understand that logic, you can spend years trying to correct the wrong thing.

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Being Good at Hard Things Doesn’t Solve This

This can be especially confusing when you’re competent in most other parts of your life.

If you can manage people, build a company, understand complicated systems, make decisions with incomplete information, and keep going when other people quit, you get used to a certain relationship with problems.

You study the problem, gather more information, improve your skill, and try again.

Quite often, it works.

So when something in your personal life resists the same approach, the natural response is to apply more of what has worked everywhere else.

You analyze the relationship more carefully. You make a better list of what you want. You read more. You become more disciplined. You try to control your reaction or tell yourself to stop caring so much.

Again, none of this is foolish. It’s the response of someone who has learned that difficult problems usually get easier when you get more knowledge and get better at solving them.

But there’s a catch when the problem involves you. The person doing the analysis is also part of what needs to be analyzed.

Your assumptions affect what counts as evidence. Your desires affect which explanations feel persuasive. And the story you tell yourself about what happened may leave out the one fact that would make the situation look completely different.

Intelligence doesn’t solve that by itself.

In fact, intelligence can make the problem harder to notice because a smart person can produce very good explanations for what he’s already inclined to believe.

If he loses his attraction for her, he can explain exactly why she isn’t right for him.
If he can’t let go after a rejection, he can explain why this case is different.
If he keeps putting off commitment, he can explain why now isn’t quite the right time.
If he hits one big goal and almost immediately needs another to chase, he can explain exactly why the next one matters so much.

And he may be right.

That’s what makes self-deception difficult. The explanation doesn’t have to be ridiculous.

Usually it works better when it’s reasonable.

You don’t need to be irrational to misunderstand yourself.

That brings us back to the eye.

There’s nothing wrong with an eye just because it can’t look directly at itself. It sees by looking outward. To see itself, it needs a mirror.

We’re much the same.

You can be perceptive, intelligent, and remarkably good at understanding what’s happening around you while still missing something important about yourself.

The danger isn’t having a blind spot. We all have them.

The danger is assuming that just because an explanation makes sense from where you stand, it must be the whole explanation.

Sometimes the problem in front of you really is the problem.

And sometimes, the puddle is only the clue. The real problem is the leak.

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