Why tell the truth?

Telling the truth is not about being a good or bad person, about being right or wrong, fear of being found out. rewards or punishments.

We all know that on some level. Otherwise we’d have different people in power and a different type of superyacht owner.

No, telling the truth is neither about worldly winnings, nor being worthy. It doesn’t exclude those things either.

It is, however, a huge asset in getting more of what our heart truly desires.

Truth and connection

In nature, everything is connected and that is how it lives harmoniously and sustainably

Telling the truth is more about how much you choose to value connection.

Connection with yourself, connection with reality, and connection with others (it’s hard to have one without influencing all three - connection is connection) and creating something true from that place.

It’s easier to know what you want if you can connect with yourself. And it’s easier to enjoy it too.

But still, that may sound quite nebulous an attraction.

So let me present the opposite. Lies/untruth leads to…

Disconnection from yourself, disconnection from reality, and disconnection in relationships.

This feels like loss, loneliness, alienation, confusion, scrambling power dynamics, drama. That is, essentially, what delusion, denial and lying cause.

They aren’t the only reasons these things show up, but they are a good place to start your investigation. Might not even be your lie, might be someone else’s lie, or the environment you are in. But when this happens, there is some disconnection going on. And dis-ease and lack of health is not far behind.

Reality always snaps back

This is my ‘beautiful untrue promise’ face. I think. I stopped doing that. You would not believe the level of drama that creates. Not Number 10 Downing Street level. But still.

But it’s not terminal - disconnection is temporary, and in many senses, also illusory.

Because no matter how good you are at avoiding, distracting, rationalising, colluding, dismissing, manipulating and denying that all of these are happening, the forces of the universe will only tolerate fantasy and avoidance for so long. Reality always snaps back.

And the length that you’ve stretched and avoided reality to ‘make things work’ determines the strength of its ricochet. It’s doing you a favour really. Telling the truth is smart. In particular telling yourself the truth.

Truth is good pals with compassion and acceptance

I was in the middle of a really rough month there, not gonna lie. That day was OK though.

Commiting to telling the truth is not always easy (although it’s actually a lot easier in the long run), not always pain free (but you were kicking the can down the road anyway) not even always possible (so no blame, no fail, just try again) - it can be a process.

We need to cultive a lot of love in our system or around us to help us accept and act in line with what we feel is true.

A lot of compassion for how human it is to avoid pain, take a short cut, snip a bit, cheat a bit, people please, paper over the cracks. A lot of acceptance that these activities are not personal, and we aren’t alone in our experience of them, and we are still worthy of our own love, understanding and acceptance even if we acted out of line with what we would have preferred.

Sometimes denial and lying is actually all we can do or know how to do to stay safe. Sometimes we grew up in situations where we had no choice but this way of life. We were taught to mix up our yes and no, to deny what we wanted or didn’t want. This was modelled for us. We didn’t know to do anything but this. Sometimes we’ve lost so much trust in the world, we don’t want to risk telling the truth. It hurt too much last time. That’s very human.

Sometimes fogging ourselves or others is automatic - our body selects that for us as a protection before we even know what’s happening. I’ve been there.

When we know better and want something different then we can set about doing that.

And sometimes unlearning things takes time and patience.

Lies are like vaseline

It gets harder and harder to feel what’s true

So it’s hard. But I tell the truth because once I start fibbing I start losing connection with what truth feels like for me. I’m foggy and I can’t get a sense of it. I’ve smeared Vaseline all over my lens. Everything may look softer and smoother but I have no idea what’s real anymore.

Or I’m feeding a shonky pattern. I think I have to lie to be accepted. I think I can’t tolerate someone disagreeing with me or misunderstanding me. I think I have to be something gold-plated to be worth hanging out with.

These patterns are no longer needed and feed into a general internal smeariness about what’s really the case. And that means I have duff information for navigating the world.

I can lie to myself and avoid myself without knowing I’m doing it. And people can do the same to me. It becomes familiar. Maybe I feel like no one knows me. But I don’t know me. The gap between my insides and outsides has become chasmic.

People can tell me something is true and I have no internal barometer for checking whether it’s true for me. I’ve lost connection and I’m stuck there until reality snaps back enough to wake me up. And that usually looks like things starting to go wrong, not work, feel off, even big fat chaos smash bang wallop crisis.

A baby note on truth

( I’m talking a lot about ‘truth’ in quite a conversational way. However the kind of truths I am talking about are relative truths - true for me in any moment on any given day - what’s there for me right now and what’s happening or has happened in my reality, including my opinions. It’s not absolute truth, and therefore I don’t need to absolutely compel other people to accept my ‘truth’ as an absolute - they have their own. This article is obviously relative truth too)

THE OTHER TRAP

The other trap is when we lie about how shit we are.

I got absolutely stuck here for a while.

I knew about the danger of lying to make ourselves or our relationships or jobs seem better, to inflate and shape things into looking good.

But I missed how easy it is to lie to about being less than, not enough, inferior. To shrink ourselves.

Commiting to truth is also about recognising our own worth. To elevate, honour and acknowledge our talents and capability as a practice. To choose to see how much people appreciate us or are willing to support us.

And sometimes that is immensely hard.

There might be a gap between what we see and recognise and what we feel some days. And that’s OK. It’s part of the process.

We can hold the truth of our feelings and what is in front of us in both hands. If it doesn’t feel good, it doesn’t feel good. That’s how it feels.

And yet we may slowly begin to recognise our lens is a little off here too, a little too High Definition and filmed from a distorting angle.

Fear and anxiety and shame warps the truth of our own ability to resolve things or be creative or take a risk and tolerate a mistake. It says it’s not safe, that we can’t, that we don’t have the power. It tries to have us disown our ability to heal, declares things hopeless.

When something goes right, it dismisses, rationalises away, or avoids the things we did well. It says that it’s all our fault. That we are the worst in the world. Now that’s just not true.

There’s loads more I could say on that pattern and how to untangle it, but for the sake of this article, the point I want to make is, we can also lose sight of the truth through negative scrutiny. Then things feel painful, stuck and frustrating. Because somewhere some part of us knows that that ‘smallness’ isn’t true.

I can, I will, I shall, I am

Just for me, I can, I will, I shall and I am here for all of what’s true and that involves acknowledging what is light and bright and beautiful and expansive and hopeful and full of peace and joy. Of which there is much in this world and in myself and in you too, because that is what it means to be human.

If you want to see if coaching is for you, I am doing free video call exploratories to see if it might be a fit for some slots I have coming up over the next month.

Pop me an email or message me on social at felicitymorsecoaching@gmail.com