Today, let’s talk about telling the truth in our relationships and why it is so super important. If you think you always tell the truth in your relationships, you might be surprised about what I’m going to talk about today so keep watching.
Let’s talk about truth in relationships.
First, let’s talk about telling the truth in general. We think we do this because we don’t outright lie, but sometimes we’re doing something that is sort of the same. That is omitting the truth. We keep it inside instead of saying it, because we are not directly asked.
In our relationships, sometimes something happens and we are feeling a certain way and not in a good way. The other person has hurt us somehow and it’s bothering us. But if we don’t talk about it, it’s not going to get off our chest.
We have something inside us that is a truth that we decide not to share, not to tell. I’m not going to call it lying, but I’m going to argue that it is really important that we do tell those truths.
Sometimes we actually lie. You might be saying, “No. I never lie.” But hold on. Sometimes our partner is very intuitive and knows something is wrong and asks us, “Hey, are you okay? Is something wrong?” And we say, “No, no. I’m fine. I’m fine.” Or they are even more intuitive than that and they say, “When I did this thing. Did that bother you?” And we hear come out of our mouths, “No, no, no. It’s fine.” So we’ve actually lied in that case.
How about when it’s not between you and your partner but a friend comes to you and says, “You know what? I did this thing and I’m just not sure. Do you think I handled it badly?” In our mind we’re screaming, “Yes!” But what we say is, “No, no, no, that’s fine. You did great.”
Those are instances where we are keeping the truth from other people. And why? Why do we do that?
One reason is that we don’t want to hurt their feelings. We worry that what we are going to say is going to upset them or make them feel bad. So we decide to just not say anything.
Sometimes we are worried about our own feelings. We’re scared that if we tell this truth, the reaction that comes back to us might be an unpleasant one that we don’t want to go through. We don’t want to experience that, so we just keep that to ourselves.
Sometimes we don’t want to rock the boat. We don’t want anything to change. We fear that this truth that we have within us would just change everything and we don’t want to challenge the status quo. We want things to stay the way that are and so we don’t want to go through those experiences. And we keep it to ourselves.
But what is the result of doing that? What is happening is that you’re not living an authentic life. You’re not being the authentic you. Your relationships are going to be limited by that, because you are not totally showing up as who you really are, in the truth of who you are.
When you keep doing that, you prevent relationships from having depth to them. They have to stay in a shallow, surface way, because you are not willing to open yourself up to that connection.
When we do this over and over, it becomes a habit that we are strengthening. Now, maybe we’re just doing it in this one particular relationship. But if you’re doing this in one relationships, you are probably doing it in a lot of relationships, in your friendships, in your family, in your romantic relationships. I am speaking from experience.
What happens is that you’ve got these surface-based friendships and relationships that don’t have that deep love connection that comes from telling your truth to other people. And then you end up with a lot of secrets that you are housing inside. They’re in your inner world and you’re keeping them, and they’re not going anywhere. They are in there energetically.
The truths that you are feeling about your relationships ARE affecting your relationships. It’s just that the other person doesn’t know yet. Because you start to protect yourself in an effort to not feel those feelings again and you’re pulling back and pulling back and pulling back.
Then you might start to feel like, “Gosh, this person doesn’t even know me.” And they might start to say to you, “I feel like I don’t even know you.”
In my case, I had a very new friend who just wasn’t going to tolerate it. She started asking me challenging questions about how easy I was to get to know and about what my friendships were like. And I realized that nobody knows me. And then I remembered how often people have said to me, “You are really hard to get to know, Stacy.” That was true. And a lot of it was because I hadn’t been willing to tell my truth. I hadn’t been willing to risk hurting someone’s feelings so that I was telling the truth. I hadn’t been willing to upset the balance in order to be who I really was.
When you start telling the truth, you realize a couple of things. One thing you realize is that the important relationships that really matter, those can weather it. Not only do they weather those experiences but they come out stronger on the other side. Because now you are connecting on a deeper level and really knowing each other, who you are and all your truths, even the messy ones.
That’s a very happy result. The other thing is that you start to get really uncomfortable when you know you’re keeping a secret, a secret truth that you need to say. That starts to become very uncomfortable and you start to have to tell your truths all the time. Which is a wonderful thing because as uncomfortable as it is, on the other side of this new habit of telling the truth are authentic relationships and deep relationships. And a love connection between you and other people which is really what we all want as humans and is a magical and beautiful thing.
But you have to be willing to take the first scary step. You have to be willing to start telling your truth. It’s not easy but everybody can do it, and the more you do it, the more you strengthen that new habit of telling the truth, the richer your life becomes. You start to remove the blocks that keep love from coming to you, in the relationships you already have and in new relationships. You start really living a love-based life. That’s what we all want and that’s what I want for you, too.