What It Takes to Trust The Truth
Growing up, we are taught to fear honesty. As women, we are taught to align ourselves with a tribe and cherish when tribe accepts us as one of their own. When I say tribe, I mean everything from our family, our church, or the women's group we attend every Tuesday night.
But what happens when we are different than the group we want to belong to? What happens when we outgrow the parameters of the group? What happens when our expectations of ourselves or the group become larger than the group accepts? What happens when we feel like an outsider?
Who will we choose to become?
Cultural conditioning teaches women to accept to what they've got—don't tempt fate, for it could be worse. So we learn to live with an unspoken fear of what’s possible if we’re honest. Will what we have be taken away?
Even if we really desperately want to be honest so we live an honest life, and some of us really do, we tell ourselves stories that we don’t know how. So we spend a lifetime seeking to find the strategy of how to be honest instead of simply being honest.
This isn’t a fault with you or me; this is a systemic process that we are taught to live our lives from. After all, culture values honest women who tell “white” lies to be polite, to be approved of, or — my personal favourite — to not hurt their feelings.
It never occurs to us to consider that it’s not their feelings we are trying to spare, it’s our own. We simply don’t want to reveal or maybe we believe we can’t. We don’t want to be caught in a conversation that might evoke our internal sense of shame, disapproval, exclusion or abandonment. Because when those sensations are exposed, it feels like death.
And in many ways, it is. It’s the death of the culturally conditioned context we’re living from: secrecy.
When we live our lives in secrecy, everyone walks on eggshells. Everyone becomes careful about what they say, what they ask, and what they reveal. Everyone is building a life on bricks of dishonesty, wishing and hoping for intimacy. But you cannot have intimacy without vulnerability. You cannot have intimacy with another until you become intimate with yourSelf.
In my 39 years of life on this planet, I have never been disappointed by telling the truth. Yet I find myself perpetually disappointed in the presence of dishonesty.
Given what I do and the declarations of the paradigm of the world I operate from, I know: Every response is an intelligent response: there are no exceptions!
We don’t avoid the conversations that matter because we’re stupid; we avoiding them as a self-protective strategy rooted in a belief system—aka a context—that says revealing the truth will hurt me.
Instead, we struggle, trying to massage the truth to fit the context of untruth. The problem is, no matter how hard you try, you cannot change the truth — you can either accept it for what it is and make a choice from it, or you can avoid it and build your life under false pretenses. Either choice has consequences. Either choice will impact the quality of your life.
This stuff hurts. I know it does. We fight so hard to avoid the truth because don’t want to feel alone. We don’t want to feel ashamed. We don’t want to feel denied, dismissed, defeated. So we make up stories, tell “white” lies, and create whole worlds inside our mind where the truth isn’t what it is.
Enter, the endless distractions. To do lists and projects. Difficult people and clients. Self-help books and glasses overflowing with wine. All in a misguided effort to avoid the conversations that will make the difference.
A long time ago, Louise LeBrun unpacked the six fundamentals of transformation (read the blog or you can sign up for the complimentary email course here). One of the key foundational practices she identified is: Stay in the tough conversations - with yourself and others.
The toughest conversation you’ll ever have to stay in is the one with yourself. When you consider that there are only two things going on in the world – the conversations you have with yourself, and the conversations you have with another human being (i.e. chats, email, reports, etc); and when you consider that you can’t change the one you have with another person unless and until you’re both willing and able to change the one you have with yourself, staying in that tough conversation with YOU will determine the quality of your life! It will also determine your capacity for intimacy and connection to another human being because if you can’t stay connected to you in a meaningful way, how can you ever connect to someone else in a meaningful way?
Logical levels reveal that our structure of reality is first created in our thoughts. If the context of revealing the truth feels “unsafe,” we will never give ourselves permission to bring voice to the truth, even to ourselves. In other words, it is not the content that we seek to avoid, but the perceived implications of having revealed our truth. When we experience intimacy with ourselves, we come to trust ourselves. And from that trust, there is no conversation we believe we cannot have.
This is why it is critical to shift the context of the conversations we avoid, from unsafe to safe. This shift can only emerge from you. If your body does not discover how to feel safe in the presence of the truth, it will do everything in it’s power to protect you from having to know it. You will manifest migraines, back aches, or jaw grinding — this will depend on which strategies you picked up as safe growing up.
Truth is not to be feared, but embraced. It is not to be hidden, but liberated. It is not to be kept secret, but revealed. When we trust the truth, we stop having to protect ourselves from the secret. Perhaps, that is what finally frees us to trust ourselves enough and engage in the conversations we avoid.
If you want to find away to live comfortably in the presence of truth rather than turning yourself inside to not know the truth, start here.
If what we shared with you here was meaningful to explore, invite us into your inbox to continue with an honest conversation with yourself, about yourself.
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Conversations in the context of safety transform us.