People Tell You Who They Are
The question is: do you rationalize your way out of believing them?
We all want to believe the best about people we trust, but what happens when the signs are right in front of us—if only we’d notice?
I’m watching a show called Hollywood Demons. You might think it’s some kind of horror flick, and it is, in a way. It’s talking about the dark secrets that come out about people in the entertainment industry. This particular episode was about Stephen Collins, who played the wholesome Rev. Camden on the family show 7th Heaven. As you may remember, Collins got outed as a sexual predator against children a few years back due to a leaked therapy session recording where he confessed to multiple victims—after he just spent 11 seasons playing “America’s Dad” on TV.
Due to the statute of limitations, he was allowed to fade into some kind of stale notoriety. He supposedly moved back to Iowa and lives with a woman 40 years his junior.
What’s significant about this isn’t that a seemingly ‘good person’ ended up being an existential threat; it’s watching his peers process it. To some extent, the reactions of people who defend someone only to be proven dead wrong are universal, and we all know that feeling. It’s called shame.
The Shame/Validation Imbalance Dynamic in Real Time
Jeremy London, an actor who seemed to be in all of the shows that I was watching in the early 2000s, was interviewed for this show. The former heartthrob explains that he had heard about the allegations, but that he doesn’t really believe them. After all, he said, “saints” don’t do that sort of thing, and Collins “was a saint.”
“You’re messing with somebody that I love and care about, and to see anybody messing with him, it still makes my blood boil,” he asserted.
As the producer gently explains that Collins had admitted to these acts and then lets London hear the recorded confession, you can literally watch this man’s brain going through what looks like the following progression, written all over his face:
Wait. I gave him the benefit of the doubt. I defended him a few minutes ago.
He really did it.
How did I miss that?
What does that make me?
Do you see how the focus shifts from Collins to London’s internal horror? You can see London visibly recalibrating the world around him and his own worth within it. His shame/validation scale slips out of balance, and in that second, London’s top priority becomes restoring it—which means getting rid of the portion of shame that just got dumped on the scale for having defended an admitted child predator.
London finally blurts out that he “is a dad first,” above all else, and says with almost a tortured sort of resolve that Collins would be “a dead man” had one of his victims been London’s child.
This is how he resets his emotional balance. It doesn’t mean he is faking; there’s not a doubt in my mind that he is serious, and it’s because I recognize the sincerity, I also recognize that he NEEDED to say that, to himself as much as anyone else. In his brain, the only way to dump that crushing shame is to point out that if it were my child, Collins would be dead.
But let’s go back to that 4th question: How could I have been so wrong?
Would London still have defended him if he knew that Collins’ side gig was writing novels that depicted the victimization of children as an ‘erotic’ activity? Would London have caught the signs if he wasn’t already dealing with his own personal demons and legal trouble?
Unfortunately, humans (especially ones who are stressed, distracted, or making decisions out of trauma-based systems) use shortcuts. Once we apply a context to a person or situation, we tend to apply that same context to all new data that comes in.
We often call that confirmation bias, but what I’m talking about is a more layered, even nuanced type of process, and it happens in activism groups more than you think.
Confirmation bias is only part of it.
We’re all familiar with confirmation bias. It’s our tendency to look for, interpret, and hang on to information that confirms what we already believe or want to believe, while ignoring or trying to discredit anything that might prove us wrong.
The dynamic that plays out over and over in a variety of groups, however, isn’t just that. It’s a multilayered cake of mental shortcuts and self-defense mechanisms, many of which are rooted in systems that we’ve built as a result of trauma.
When we get evidence that clashes with our worldview, cognitive dissonance kicks in. That’s the name for the tension that’s between “this is who I am” and “this is wrong.” Let’s say that you come across an article written about your charismatic group leader that claims he lied about his military service. You know this guy. He’s a good person. You LIKE him. But this is all at odds with the very blatant information that says he’s a liar. So you reframe the information, you rationalize it, you might even put work into discrediting the person who wrote the article.
Next up to bat is belief perseverance, and that’s when we decide that no matter what, we are sticking to our guns about him being a good guy.
It sounds like a lot of work, but here’s why we do it: Because if we admit that we were wrong about them, we now have to deal with a perceived failure.
We failed to see the truth.
We failed to properly vet someone.
We failed to recognize the signs.
And perhaps most painful is the idea that if they also liked US, and thought we were worth something, but they’re liars…does that mean we aren’t worth what we thought? Can we even trust our own judgment?
For someone who already has their value tied to their membership in a group or cause they deeply believe in, that’s a rough road. At that point, we’re fighting for ourselves and our emotional need to matter, and if our source for that is external there is nothing we won’t do or believe to protect it.
How to Combat It
You can’t eliminate your mental shortcuts completely, but what we can do is take intentional steps to recognize when it’s occurring and stop it before it leads us down the wrong path. When you have someone trying to get into your group:
Force a ‘pre-mortem.’ Imagine all the ways you could be wrong about them. Be a devil’s advocate against yourself. Look for the reasons to disagree with your proposed conclusion.
Anchor yourself to protocols and explicit criteria, not feelings, dogma, or desires. Define for yourself the exact red flags that would make you reject them. Write them down; you’re creating preemptive protocols instead of working on the fly. Hold the person up to your new list; if they fail even one, it’s a no. And if you don’t have enough info to know if they fail yet, then you can’t make a decision.
Don’t accept other people’s “vouching.” It doesn’t matter who likes the new guy trying to get in. Likeability does not equal trustworthiness.
Use a trusted partner for these exercises; you need someone who is emotionally healthy enough to challenge your conclusions and stand their ground if you’re wrong.
Slow-think pause: There is no prospective member who cannot wait 48 hours for you to consider things before making a decision. Take longer if you need to.
Keep track of changes. Track when and why you change your positions. That will expose self-defense mechanisms.
People do tell you who they are—through actions, confessions, and patterns. The real question is whether you’ll rationalize your way out of believing them or face the uncomfortable truth head‑on.
A well needed reminder…..