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

“In [our] rush to conform, we often end up ignoring or overruling our genuine feelings—even intense ones, like longing or anguish—to please our cultures. At that point, we’re divided against ourselves. We aren’t in integrity (one thing) but in duplicity (two things).”

This quote from the Introduction offers a helpful overview of Beck’s view of both integrity and of culture, terms that she uses in a slightly different way from their broader general usage. Integrity is presented here as a sense of inner unity or wholeness—being undivided within oneself. Culture, for its part, is a source of pressures toward conformity that push us to compromise our own deepest values.

“Integrity is the cure for unhappiness. Period.”

This brief line, essentially an opening thesis statement for the book as a whole, presents integrity as being the means toward emotional healing and wholeness, which becomes a major theme within the book. Beck intends for integrity to be understood both as an inner state of unity with oneself (thus as an end goal for the journey) as well as a practical methodology by which one moves toward that goal.

“It’s simple logic: if you don’t walk your true path, you don’t find your true people. You end up in places you don’t like, learning skills that don’t fulfill you, adopting values and customs that feel wrong.”

Here we see Beck’s relativistic use of the idea of “truth” as being a subjective and personal reality, not an objective and universal one. This ties in with Beck’s view of culture, which she sees not as a system of practical embodiments of universal truths and/or values within a community, but rather as an arbitrary system of relative values that, if applied to entire populations, will act as a source of repression on individuals who are geared toward different values.