The Way of Integrity: Finding the Path to Your True Self

Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2021

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Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Introduction-Stage 1, Chapter 2

Stage 1, Chapters 3-4

Stage 2, Chapters 5-6

Stage 2, Chapters 7-8

Stage 3, Chapters 9-10

Stage 3, Chapters 11-12

Stage 4, Chapters 13-15

Key Figures

Themes

Index of Terms

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Tools

Beta

Discussion Questions

Stage 2, Chapters 7-8Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapter 7 Summary: “When Righteousness Goes Wrong”

After the sins of incontinence, Dante visits an area of hell characterized by anger and violence. Beck underscores the fact that anger is a natural reaction to threats and injustice, and so the impulse itself is not necessarily problematic. Much of our anger, however, stems from perceived threats to our ideals, values, and identity, and that perception is often little more than a veiled sense of fear at the prospect of changes: “Such things feel morally threatening, and we react to them by becoming almost reflexively resistant and oppositional” (131, emphasis in original). This reflexive self-righteousness can go to great lengths to defend its own ideals, even when they are relative constructions of one’s own culture. Self-righteousness adopts an air of simply knowing it is right, whatever evidence to the contrary may be presented. Such reactions, Beck says, “are psychological mistakes we make when our irrational rejection of the unfamiliar takes over our thinking” (133).

This perspective of “righteous error” leads to violence in three main ways: “by attacking other people, ourselves, or the way things are” (135). The temptation is to lash out at one of these three things for the reflexive threat we feel, pouring blame on another group of people, on our own perceived shortcomings, or on the things that happen to us. The method for growing beyond such errors is the same as that advised in previous chapters: observing our own thoughts, subjecting them to inquiry, and then moving on.

Once the deeply-held assumption which lies at the source of our threatened feelings is identified and questioned for accuracy and coherence, it can be replaced. Instead of the common pattern of blaming others, Beck advises that we focus on a simple verb-adverb phrase to describe our true values (something like “loving courageously”), which can then serve to guide us past the way our reflexive self-righteousness would otherwise want to lash out.

Chapter 8 Summary: “The End of Self-Betrayal”

The final stage of hell through which Dante travels is occupied by liars and traitors. Beck takes this as an indication of the way that our own lies underscore and permit all the other errors we may stumble into. In her analysis, Beck is not yet considering outward actions, but rather the lies we tell ourselves, which frame our inward psychological experiences.

These inward lies come in varying shades—black, white, and gray—but all are common in human experience, and all have deleterious effects on our interior life. The first two forms are commonly recognizable: “Black lies” are defined as “deliberate, premeditated deception” (152), while “white lies” are acts of side-stepping the truth in order to minimize social tension or avoid uncomfortable truths. “Gray lies,” meanwhile, are the lies we tell ourselves to help us feel better about problematic areas in our own behavior.

One example Beck offers for a gray lie is the way that people convince themselves that it is okay when others mistreat them. Against this, Beck proposes a rephrasing of the famous “Golden Rule” (resulting in a backwards version that she calls the “Elur Nedlog”): “Never allow others to treat you in ways you would never treat someone else” (157).

Lying carries a high physical and emotional price, and The Way of Integrity refers to several studies that show higher rates of serious physiological conditions associated with lying and keeping secrets. People decide to bear these costs, however, because they do not want to rock the boat or bring uncomfortable truths to light. Beck poignantly describes her own experience of challenging herself to live without lying for a whole year, which resulted in the rediscovery of her repressed memories of experiencing sexual assault as a child. She reacted against the experience of being compelled into unwanted behavior by rationalizing it and repressing it—mental tactics used both in cases of trauma, like hers, as well as in much more common experiences of unwanted compulsion.

Her rediscovery of this childhood trauma, occurring together with a medical emergency, culminated in a mystical experience during surgery, in which she encountered a light that assured her that she was valued and beloved. This pattern fits with the allegory of Dante’s emergence from hell, in which the act of climbing down Lucifer’s body—like rediscovering one’s darkest traumas—led to a sudden reversal, in which Dante and Virgil found that they were actually climbing upward while still going in the same direction.

Stage 2, Chapters 7-8 Analysis

The last two chapters in Stage 2 constitute the completion of Beck’s counsel on steps to take with regard to one’s interior life; subsequent sections will deal with external action that builds on those interior steps. Chapters 7 and 8 focus on addressing common areas in which errors and missteps can accumulate in one’s inner life, corresponding to the characteristic sins that are described in the various levels of hell through which Dante traverses.

The first of those two areas, addressed in Chapter 7, is “righteous error,” in which we should assess places in our lives where we feel a sense of moral outrage or threat, to see if those feelings arise from our true values or from relative cultural expectations. The second area, primarily addressed in Chapter 8, is that of lying, and especially of whether we might be lying to ourselves in the way we are living our lives.

The issue of lying ties in directly with the book’s overarching theme of Integrity as the Key to Emotional Healing. As Beck laid out in her Introduction, any duplicity necessarily means that we are inwardly divided, and thus cannot attain true integrity in our inner selves. Furthermore, she demonstrates that lying to ourselves actively works against emotional healing, covering up some wounds and deepening others. The practical action she advises, then, is simply to stop lying. At this stage, this recommendation is presented for reflection and internal consideration, but in the next stage, it will be expanded into the realm of concrete, external action.

The theme of Learning to Read Our Internal Signals also features prominently in this section, particularly in Chapter 7. Here Beck invites us to consider places in our lives where we feel anger, as this can be either a positive sign (a response to injustice) or a negative one (a reflexive attitude of threatened self-righteousness). Paying careful attention to what our anger is actually saying is important in diagnosing the areas of our lives that might require further attention and inquiry.

Since the book continues to follow the structure of a journey, the theme of Finding Meaningful Change Through Small Steps continues here. As has been the case throughout Stages 1 and 2, most of the actions that Beck advises are relatively small, careful exercises in self-reflection. By the end of Chapter 8, however, a shift is coming: Seeking change through small steps has attained a level where major transformations might actually be in view.

In Dante’s story, this is shown in the way the direction of his movement flips as he moves down Lucifer’s body, only to find that he is now climbing up toward the slopes of Mount Purgatory. For Beck’s readers, the implicit promise is that all the small steps of self-reflection that they have been working on might now be close to reaching a point where everything changes, and major gains toward integrity might begin to be made.