The Lawyer in Your Head

A month after enrolling in the course, Lina had begun summing up her whole week in a single word. Then her friend asked a question she had no answer for.

They sat at a small table. Her friend set her glass back on its saucer. “I called you on two different days.” Lina said, “Circumstances.” She opened her calendar to show her Thursday’s work and the Wednesday lesson she had missed. Her finger passed over Saturday’s square, but she did not open it. There was an hour for her father there, still unmarked.

Her friend said, “If I gave you the same excuse, would you believe it?” Lina turned her phone facedown. She asked about her friend’s work. Her friend answered and did not return to the question.

She went home. She put her bag by the desk and took out the registration sheet from when she started the course. Her calendar showed two empty hours on Wednesday morning. She could have done Thursday’s work then, but they did not show up when she displayed the whole week at once. She zoomed in on the day and saw two hours with no label. She heard a key in the door. Her husband asked, “Has the lesson started?” She replied, “It’s been an exhausting week,” and switched back to the whole week. The two hours disappeared.

And “circumstances” is not just Lina’s phrase.

You close the book lying open in front of you. You decide not to study tonight. Within two seconds, the excuse is ready: it’s hot, it’s been a difficult week, and there’s plenty of time tomorrow. It arrives fully formed, as though someone prepared it in advance.

Who put that excuse together so quickly?

A skilled lawyer lives in your head. His job is to make you look innocent to yourself. He does not change what you did. He changes the reason you give yourself for doing it. And he speaks in your own voice. You hear the truth, rather than a lawyer’s argument.

Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson describe this lawyer in “Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me)”: we think we see the truth clearly, while seeing it from an angle that makes us comfortable¹.

The Tension You Can’t Bear

When your actions conflict with your image of yourself, you feel an inner tension. You cannot live with it for long. Psychologists call this “cognitive dissonance”².

Your mind may resolve that tension by adjusting the image or explaining the action. That is quicker than changing the action. You stop exercising for a month and say, “This month is an exception. I’ll make up for it next week.” The image stays intact.

Leon Festinger and James Carlsmith asked participants to do monotonous manual tasks for an hour. They then asked some to tell the next participant that the work was enjoyable, in exchange for one dollar. Others were asked to tell the same lie for twenty dollars³.

Surprisingly, those paid one dollar ended up more convinced that the work had been enjoyable than those paid twenty.

Those who received twenty dollars had an external justification for lying: the money. Those who received one dollar did not find it enough, so they changed the explanation they gave themselves: the work must have been enjoyable. Otherwise, why had they said so?

Evidence in Search of Itself

When your mind wants a particular conclusion, it looks for reassuring evidence and ignores whatever unsettles it. It demands stronger proof for what it does not want to believe and accepts less for what it does. This is “motivated reasoning”⁴.

Julia Galef calls this the “soldier mindset”: it defends its position at any cost. She contrasts it with the “scout mindset,” whose only concern is to see the map as it is, rather than as you wish it were, even if the result is unsettling⁵.

Before the Excuse Is Complete

The Prophet ﷺ set out for Tabuk, and Ka‘b ibn Malik stayed behind. Ka‘b relates that he was neither weak nor short of money at the time. He had two riding camels. He would go out to prepare, then return having done nothing, telling himself, “I can do that.” The army left. He said he would prepare in a day or two and catch up with it. The same delay kept repeating until he missed the expedition.

When he heard that the Prophet ﷺ was returning, he began thinking of an excuse and sought advice from wise members of his family. Then he resolved to tell the truth. He came and mentioned his skill with words: “I have been bestowed with the power of speaking fluently and eloquently.” But he admitted that he had no excuse for staying behind⁶.

What stands out is that the story begins before the excuse, with a claim of ability followed by no preparation. In Ka‘b’s own account, an inability to put together an argument was not the problem. He could put one together. Then he chose to describe what he had done.

This is where the story and the tool meet: facts first, then interpretation. There is more to the story. We will return to it when we talk about coming back.

﴿بَلِ الْإِنْسَانُ عَلَى نَفْسِهِ بَصِيرَةٌ ۝ وَلَوْ أَلْقَى مَعَاذِيرَهُ﴾ Rather, man, against himself, will be a witness, Even if he presents his excuses. (Al-Qiyamah 75:14–15)⁷.

The Whole Sentence

Sometimes the lawyer picks out the words that make him comfortable. You may hear the phrase “Your Lord is the Lord of hearts.” There is no hadith with this wording. An authentic hadith says: “Verily Allah does not look to your faces and your wealth but He looks to your heart and to your deeds.” (Muslim 2564)⁸.

Hearts and deeds together. You do not need to have heard the popular phrase to recognize the pattern: we remember the part that fits our self-image and forget the part that calls us to act. Questioning the Lawyer begins by restoring the whole sentence.

Questioning the Lawyer

The lawyer cannot be dismissed. He is part of the way we all think. But sometimes he can be called as a witness who describes the facts, rather than an advocate who invents cover for them.

A Word Above Three Facts

Lina wrote “Circumstances” on a sheet of paper, with three words beneath it: “Work, exhaustion, errands.” Then she underlined “Circumstances,” as though the line would turn the phrase into evidence. She went back to Wednesday’s calendar and found that she had started Thursday’s work after dinner, at the very time of the lesson. She remembered her friend’s question and wanted to answer that her week was different. She opened an old message from her friend asking for a call. Just five words, asking for no great stretch of her time. She took out another sheet. She wrote a heading, “What happened,” and nothing beneath it yet. On her phone, beside her father’s name, was a missed call from the night she enrolled. She still had not called him back.

Lina wrote, “I missed Wednesday’s lesson. I started Thursday’s work late.” Beneath it: “I didn’t spend Saturday’s hour with my father. I left no room for it.” She paused, then added, “I haven’t told my father I enrolled.”

Her phone chimed with a work message, and she put the sheet back in the drawer. The following Wednesday, she remembered the lesson when half of it had already passed. This time she did not write “Circumstances.” She described what she had missed as it was: half a lesson, rather than the whole course. She closed the file she was working on and opened the remaining half. On Thursday morning, she went back to the lesson recording and wrote her question in the notebook’s margin.

Two days later, she called her friend. Seven minutes. Her friend said, “I thought you’d forgotten me.” Lina replied, “I kept saying ‘circumstances’ instead of saying what I’d done.” They were silent for a moment. Then she asked her friend about her day.

She put down the phone and wrote the time of the call beside the facts. As for the line about her father, she had done nothing about it yet.

An Honest Testimony

What one word sums up all your excuses, as “circumstances” does for Lina?

Excuses get you nowhere.

On Monday morning, month-end closing week began at Lina’s company. She found the department’s tallest stack of files on her desk. She put her bag on the floor and opened the first file while still standing.