In everything from personal injury law to divorce law to criminal law, how you tell the story matters. As a legal content writer I often encounter scenarios where the nuances of language matter. Tenbrunsel and Messick show how euphemistic language like the idea of “collateral damage” in military campaigns, obscures the moral impact of what’s really taking place: civilian deaths and they show how business terminology like “right sizing” to describe layoffs obscures the human cost. We believe our stories and thus believe that we are objective about ourselves.” One of the ways in which language and storytelling can shape moral behavior is through the use of euphemisms. Messick in “ Ethical Fading: The Role of Self-Deception in Unethical Behavior” write that self deception “involves an avoidance of the truth, the lies that we tell to, and the secrets we keep from, ourselves… We are creative narrators of stories that tend to allow us to do what we want and that justify what we have done. Self-deception may be one of the more important forms of deception when it comes to white collar crime, and other types of criminal behavior. Nicole LePera, in her new book, How to Do the Work finds a new language to describe the same problem.

Look no further than Hamlet to see a character weaving a web of self-deception in figurative language.

The problems of self-deception, honesty with oneself, and self-betrayal are as old as time and literature. “Most of our platitudes notwithstanding, self-deception remains the most difficult deception,” wrote Joan Didion in her luminous essay, “On Self-Respect” (available here in its glorious entirety at Vogue).

How to do the work by nicole lepera