How to develop discernment
Why discernment is necessary to save us from ourselves
I published an earlier version of this a few years ago. I decided it was time to refresh it and focus on discernment and why it matters to effectively navigate the constant bombardment of information that carries an emotional charge that makes us susceptible to being influenced and manipulated.
This piece is an update to my earlier writing on how denying your inner authority - your moral compass - especially in the face of betrayal and shifting realities, can keep you stuck in outdated worldviews and stagnating relationships. I introduced the Liberation Cycle: DISRUPT → EXTRACT → RELEASE, a process of reclaiming inner authority after placing undue trust in external ones. It also extends my earlier exploration of how the collapse of legitimate authority has led many to confuse attention metrics with wisdom, and how this confusion makes it harder for people to grow the emotional and moral capacity to think critically and stand by their own principles — especially when doing so means questioning a popular and trendy narrative, setting boundaries with a charismatic leader, or refusing to comply with an unspoken rule that feels morally wrong.
Real leadership today has been replaced with a type of performance where being loud is conflated with wisdom, outrage with moral principles, and public visibility as proof of credibility. People are constantly exposed to emotional and psychic contamination in the form of projections, ideological scripts, and unprocessed trauma masquerading as moral authority. In this intense environment, the qualities that are required for our emotional and moral development, like reflection, nuance, emotional regulation, and tolerance for complexity, are bypassed in favour of certainty and sanctimony.
This broader cultural drift has been observed by others as well, includingDr Simon Rogoff. He explores how Western culture has shifted from valuing character rooted in moral responsibility and integrity to rewarding personality, where performance, charisma, and influence matter more. He argues this shift has normalised narcissistic traits in leadership and public life, eroding our collective ability to recognise or expect emotional maturity and accountability.
We have been in a cultural moment where truth is denied, edited, and revised to suit the philosophy and ideology of those who benefit from its distortion. Confusion, usually a byproduct of change, is now an intentional design feature of belief systems built on inversion. Language is weaponised, roles are reversed, and guilt, along with internalised shame, are pre-installed to prevent dissent.
Anticipatory guilt is an insidious force that competes with fear of conflict or betrayal to keep people stuck in one way of seeing their world. Anticipatory guilt arises before you say or do anything that might disrupt a socially sanctioned narrative. This form of guilt keeps people silent, compliant, and emotionally shutdown before the cost of truth-telling has even presented itself.
This guilt functions as a defence mechanism to shield the psyche from inconvenient truths that might lead to loss, rejection, or internal collapse.
Guilt, like most emotions, rarely operates in isolation. In my experience, it often works alongside shame as a conditioned response that functions like a hijacked internal warning system, rather than a moral compass. Rather than guiding someone back to their own moral principles, this form of shame tends to reinforce compliance with external value systems, such as those imposed by another person or institutional authority.
This shame response in this context is not an expression of integrity, but a survival adaptation within dominance-based hierarchies. People confuse their feeling of shame for wrongdoing when they are actually experiencing the consequences of breaking social rules that were never theirs from the start. Shame intolerance, which is the impulse to soothe, placate, or self-abandon, keeps them from leaving, questioning, or telling the truth. Thus, shame becomes the emotional anchor that locks anticipatory guilt in place. In other words, people are increasingly trained to abandon discernment in advance, as a pre-emptive act of social self-preservation.
Where the earlier article explored this phenomenon at the interpersonal level, this piece expands into the broader cultural landscape where self-anointed authorities (governments, media, activist gatekeepers, institutional voices) edit reality to preserve power, bypass accountability, and construct a sense of moral superiority designed to suppress doubt and critical thinking.
Discernment is the ability to perceive what is true even when it is inconvenient, complex, or obscured by emotional intensity or social pressure. It involves distinguishing between what appears to be true and what coheres on a deeper level, beyond immediate reaction or consensus. Discernment is not quick judgment or certainty; it is a process of recognising dissonance, pausing to reflect, and choosing a response that aligns with reality rather than conditioning.
Whether you see this as an inner capacity, divine guidance, or both, discernment is what allows you to recognise what is true beyond conditioning or pressure.
Discernment is a developmental capacity, cultivated through painful experiences of disillusionment, betrayal, and the struggle to navigate moral ambiguity. For example, noticing a pattern of manipulation in a group or realising that a trusted leader's actions contradict the moral principles they publicly claim to uphold both require discernment to recognise and respond in a way that aligns with your own moral principles. In a culture that prioritises superficial performance over the pursuit of truth, the conditions needed for real discernment are often denied, ridiculed, or framed as dangerous.
A current challenge of discernment
In recent conversations within the therapeutic community, it has become clear how much the training of therapists has shifted away from fostering genuine therapeutic skill and toward enforcing ideological compliance. Students and interns now face a dual curriculum: what they must learn and perform to satisfy training bodies, and what they must quietly seek out in order to practice ethically and effectively.
For those with discernment, this creates a constant act of compartmentalisation in knowing what is real, what is required, and what must be hidden to avoid professional backlash. For those without discernment, the ideological framing becomes their entire lens, leaving them unable to recognise when they’re serving a system rather than a client. It’s a profound fracture in the integrity of the profession that mirrors the larger cultural pressure to abandon critical thought for sanctioned narratives.
This dynamic isn’t limited to therapy. Similar fractures appear anywhere systems reward conformity and moral grandstanding, mistaking ideological performance for genuine competence.
Naomi Epps Best is a whistleblower who exposed the rot in graduate counselling psychology training at her uni and continues to speak out about the questionable ‘education’. You can find her Substack Clinically Incorrect here. Her story also reveals the personal cost of discernment: refusing to comply with a corrupted system can mean facing isolation, professional backlash, and resistance from those invested in maintaining the status quo.
This is where the psychological process of discernment begins.
When something feels off: the first signs of discernment
The DISRUPT stage begins with a moment, whether quiet or disruptive, when something no longer sits right. You might witness a contradiction between someone’s stated beliefs and their behaviour, hear a justification full of holes, or feel a subtle sense that you’re being asked or subtly persuaded to ignore what you know to be true. This is where discernment begins, but the signal is often suppressed by external pressure and internal defences.
A shock disturbs the status quo. It might be a confrontation with hypocrisy or a trusted institution contradicting itself that pierces your worldview. Whether it’s subtle or dramatic, you feel a destabilisation that you register in your gut before your mind.
Sense-making begins. You experience an emotional reaction and scramble to explain it, often trying to neutralise the feeling. The psyche doesn’t like cognitive dissonance, so it reaches for explanations that preserve the known reality. "Maybe I misunderstood. Maybe it’s not that bad." You might also seek reassurance from others who reinforce the status quo to subdue the feeling that you’re going crazy.
Anticipatory guilt kicks in. This is the moment you begin to sense that there might be consequences if you question what just happened. So you talk yourself out of questioning too deeply. You feel guilty for even considering that something might be off. This guilt is about what you might realise, say, or have to lose.
Denial and doubt flood in. You enter a psychological holding pattern whereby you second-guess your perception. You search for comforting narratives that explain the dissonance without disrupting your place in the system. Truth becomes negotiable, or even a construct. You conclude that doubt is easier to live with than conflict.
Fear of implications settles over you. Acknowledging the truth requires sometimes drastic change. It could mean exiting relationships, careers or identities. It might also mean discarding a belief system. The fear of what that would cost makes you cling harder to the palatable, edited version of events.
Emotional suppression and role maintenance. You bury the conflict to preserve harmony, protect your identity, or remain in good standing with the dominant narrative. You convince yourself it’s not the time to speak, or that someone else will do it. Your role is preserved, but your vitality is not.
A crisis of discernment. If you’ve made it this far, you're now hovering between collusion and awakening. You either submit to an externally-authored reality, or start drawing from your inner authority. At this point, many people look for replacement authorities, like shiny new ideologies or gurus that seem to offer instant resolution and the promise of relief from discomfort.
The trap is to outsource your discernment yet again, handing it over to another external authority, replacing one external authority with another that promises certainty without the work of truly seeing.
Practicing discernment in the DISRUPT phase
Discernment starts by noticing what unsettles you and staying with it long enough to understand why. In this early stage, you don’t need to act or explain. You only need to stay connected to the discomfort you’re tempted to override.
Ask yourself:
What am I pretending not to know?
What fear arises when I question this dynamic, belief, or authority?
What would I feel guilty for seeing?
What do I think will happen if I stop agreeing?
Your task is to remain present to the tension and resist the impulse to resolve it. The discomfort itself is data, and discernment begins by learning to interpret it without rushing to alleviate or explain it away.
Discernment is a practice, not a destination. Your discernment muscle strengthens each time you resist the temptation to be led by guilt, emotionally charged narratives, or another person’s version of what they believe is truth.
Discernment also requires wisdom to know how to implement what you see in a way that truly liberates you from the situation. You can read more about these later stages of the process in my articles on EXTRACT and RELEASE.
Why discernment is underdeveloped and where to from here
Discernment has not disappeared; it remains underdeveloped. What we see as its absence is, in part, a reflection of the wider emotional and moral immaturity within our culture. Leadership and authority figures, whether in politics, media, or institutions, frequently reinforce this by rewarding compliance and discouraging independent thought, punishing independent thought, which makes it harder for people to trust their own judgment.
In a time of curated identities and emotionally charged group narratives, questioning can easily be framed as divisive or disloyal. Even pausing to think more deeply can feel risky when disagreement or hesitation brings the threat of exclusion or hostility. Over time, it becomes easier to look away or to convince yourself you never saw the problem in the first place.
Much of our judgment has been quietly outsourced to algorithms, headlines, influencers, and institutions that deliver ready-made narratives. What was once an internal process of wrestling with ideas and holding moral tension is replaced by the comfort of aligning with what feels safe and already resolved.
In another excellent piece, Dr Simon Rogoff explores how ideas have been separated from the emotional and relational maturity of those who present them, creating space for narcissistic personalities to dominate public life. He raises the question of what is lost when we stop vetting for character, and how our inability to discern the messenger ultimately affects our trust in the message.
Individually, the work begins by noticing when guilt speaks louder than conscience and when you wait for someone else to give permission to see what you already know.
Collectively, reclaiming discernment means rebuilding our capacity to tolerate moral and intellectual ambiguity and stepping back from the need for immediate resolution. It asks for openness to uncertainty, engaging with uncertainty with curiosity, even when the answers might complicate what you think you know.
Discernment is not a luxury; it is a discipline. In this cultural moment it might be the most radical practice we have left to keep us honest with ourselves.
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I believe that a common threat to our individual and collective thriving is an addiction to power and control. This addiction fuels and is fuelled by greed - the desire to accumulate and control resources in social, information (and attention), economic, ecological, geographical and political systems.
While activists focus on fighting macro issues, I believe that activism also needs to focus on the micro issues - the narcissistic traits that pollute relationships between you and I, and between each other, without contributing to existing injustice. It’s not as exciting as fighting the Big Baddies yet hacking, resisting and overriding our tendencies to control others that also manifest as our macro issues is my full-time job.
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This really cut through the noise. The way you broke down anticipatory guilt and how it works alongside shame hit hard. That pattern of overriding what we know is off just to avoid rocking the boat—it’s so familiar it’s scary.
Discernment doesn’t get enough attention because it isn’t flashy. But reading this reminded me how much courage it actually takes to pause, question, and not immediately fold back into the comfort of what we’re told to believe.
Thanks for laying it out so clearly without falling into performance. This was solid.
This is nothing short of consciousness raising, and brings to mind a felt sense of the primal challenges and threat experienced when owning one's own emerging discernment. Another intelligent and profound post, Nathalie, thanks.