The Trap of Internalizing a Lie

There is a particular kind of harm that does not stop at the person who receives it. It propagates. Someone who has been manipulated begins, without intending to, manipulating others. Someone who has had their boundaries violated starts violating boundaries in turn. The pattern replicates because it has been internalized—not as a conscious strategy, but as a distortion in how one perceives reality itself.

This is the trap of internalizing a lie.

The lie need not be a specific false statement. It can be a false framework: that love requires control, that truth must be forced on the unwilling, that one person can know what another needs better than they know themselves. Once this framework takes root, it begins producing behaviors that feel justified from the inside. The person acting from distortion does not experience themselves as doing harm. They experience themselves as helping.

The clearest symptom is the substitution of NEED for WANT. To respect what someone wants is to recognize them as a sovereign being capable of their own judgment. To impose what you believe they need is to position yourself above them—as the authority on their own life. The shift feels subtle but its consequences are not. Relationships built on "I know what you need" inevitably become relationships of control. People withdraw. Trust erodes. And the person doing the imposing cannot understand why, because from inside the distortion, they were only trying to help.

The deeper damage is to one's capacity for truth itself. A lens that has been warped does not transmit clearly, even when pointed at genuine light. Someone operating from an internalized lie will distort even true things in the telling—not through malice, but through the shape of the instrument. They become unreliable narrators of reality, and the tragedy is that they cannot see it. The distortion is the water they swim in.

The path out begins with recognition: that the patterns one is enacting were first enacted upon oneself. This is not an excuse. It is a diagnosis. Understanding the origin of the distortion does not justify its propagation, but it does make correction possible. What was learned can be unlearned. What was bent can be straightened.

The test is simple. When you find yourself certain that someone needs to hear what you have to say—when their willingness becomes secondary to your conviction—stop. That certainty is the distortion speaking. Truth that must be forced is not being transmitted. It is being imposed. And imposition, however well-intentioned, is not love.

To clear the lens is to return to a simpler posture: attending to what others actually want, trusting their capacity to receive what they are ready for, and accepting that your role is not to be the source of truth but merely one of its many vessels.

The lie makes truth feel unsafe. So you start trying to control it. And in controlling it, you become the distortion. And from that single distortion, all the rest spirals.

So a challenge to you who is reading this: ask yourself, have I internalized any lies that I am unaware of?

Here are some that hide in plain sight:

These lies share a structure: they take something done to you and make it something wrong with you. They convert external harm into internal defect. And once internalized, they no longer feel like lies. They feel like self-knowledge.