Your vices are the leading line to your healing.
“Why nobody confesses his defects? Because they are still fully immersed in them.” In what age do you believe they have written this sentence? We will tell it later, now let us reflect for a moment on its teaching. It is the consciousness, the distancing from oneself, the look from the outside, stopping the flow of the usual things, and so on, which reveal our shortcomings. When you are completely immersed in the things you do or you are, you do not see their flaws.
“It is proper to those who are awake to fully tell the dream they had” if you are living in your dream you can not tell it: only when you wake up you can do it. This analogy makes explicit the meaning of the opening sentence: by our awakening we realize our shortcomings.
We can then answer the initial question: people do not confess their weaknesses because they are asleep and not awake.
“But only philosophy can wake you up, it alone can rise us from our deep sleep.”
How then philosophy will carry out this task? Through an examination of your life under the light of reason. Simple enough, right? “You must catch yourself in a lie, before you can correct yourself” [deprehendas te oportet antequam emendes, Ep, 28, 9].
“Being aware of our faults is the first step towards salvation,” Epicurus quoted by Seneca.
If you consider your vices as virtues, you will not search for a remedy.
Many people fail to take seriously the examination of themselves because, if they did, they should confess sins or vices or intentions they could not bear; these people will never wake up from sleep in which they are sunk. For them, every self-examination turns into a joke, in sarcasm, an escape into the joke. If you recognize these people, you’ll see they are those who have pre-established roles, they are those people who are the walls that imprison you.
The quotations are by Seneca, Letters to Lucilius.
Let’s conclude with a thought by Epictetus: If the evil they say about you is true, correct yourself, if it’s false then laugh!