It is not uncommon that we work with people who, for one reason or another, are not able to live or speak their truth in important situations in their lives.
For instance, one person we are working with is being continually judged, humiliated, and patronized by her boss but she is too scared to say or do anything about it.
Another client is concerned because whenever he comes close to a woman he feels that he loses his freedom. He is not in touch with his own needs but instead becomes totally focused on her wants and needs.
Another man we are working with is married but secretly hides that he is gay and is unable to share this with his wife or tell her that he is in love with a colleague at work.
Still another client is in a job she hates, having a painful and unfulfilling affair with her boss who is married but she cannot make a move to change her life situation.
Not being able to live or speak our truth is one of the most significant causes of our suffering, anger, or depression and yet quite often we find ourselves unable to move toward truth because of profound fears.
Very often, the challenge to live or speak our truth brings us up against our deepest fears and the thought of going against them can be terrifying.
Furthermore, these fears most often have deep roots in our childhood. To act in a new way can bring up of fears of having to separate from family and friends and also to face our own inner judge that does not want us to step out of the image we have constructed of ourselves.
Often, we minimize and numb ourselves to the pain of living a lie and compromising our life energy or we may even find many excuses to justify how we are living so that we do don’t have to face the fear.
The first step toward living in truth is to come out of denial and feel the pain of betraying ourselves. And then to slowly begin to acknowledge, embrace, and accept our fears with understanding and compassion.
Let’s explore some of these examples in more depth.
The woman who is being abused by her boss, we will call her Angela, goes into total shock whenever he even comes close. The idea of actually saying something to him about the way he treats her is the furthest thing from her mind. Her boss reminds her of her choleric father who physically and emotionally abused her, and her nervous system responds the same way as she did with her father – to freeze and dissociate. But now when she talks about it, she begins to feel rage toward both her boss and her father and it is a good start for her to be able to eventually stand up for herself.
The client whose pattern is to lose himself when he comes close to a woman, we’ll call him Alan, does so because his mother was emotionally dependent on him as a child and gave him the impression that it was his duty to make her feel happy. Even though he knows intellectually that it is not his responsibility to make a woman happy, he does not feel that a woman would have any reason to love him if he didn’t take care of her needs. But now as he has matured, he has reached the point where he no longer is willing to lose himself, and he is ready to discover a new way of relating intimately. He understands that no intimacy is possible if he is not true to himself.
The man who is secretly gay, we will call him Peter, had a strong Christian conditioning, was taught that homosexuality was a sin, and hid his sexual preference since his teenage years. He married a woman to please his parents, and sincerely believed that he could manage to have a normal family life. He knows that if he comes out of the closet, he will have to destroy his marriage and family life as he knows it and will be very harshly judged by his parents and extended family all of whom are devout Christians. However, the pain of living a lie is becoming too hard to bear and he is becoming self-destructive.
Finally, the woman, we’ll call her Sybille, who hates her job and is in a secret affair with her boss has so little self-esteem that she cannot imagine that a man could love only her. She feels lucky that he even wants to spend time with her and the thought of ending the affair makes her scared that she will be alone forever. This kind of deep shame is not easy to penetrate. It takes committed self-work to realize that it is the wound of shame and to slowly begin to gain some perspective from it.
As facilitators, it is always a challenge for us to find a middle road between validating the people’s fear, teaching them to be gentle, loving, and patient with themselves while at the same time, inspiring and guiding them to move toward truth.
We know that on the road to dignity and fulfillment, it is important that we learn to speak and live our truth, and this is one of the purposes of doing therapy.
But it can bring up so much fear that we have to work toward this end patiently and compassionately. All of us will have to confront deep fears whenever we are faced with a conflict between keeping harmony or risking living in more truth, freedom, and aliveness.
On the journey, we will have to fully face how we are betraying ourselves, feel the fear, and find the courage and energy to move toward truth.
In The Learning Love Work, we teach a simple and practical method for learning to move from fear to truth.
• The first step is coming out of denial and admitting the fear that holds us back from living in truth. This includes feeling and connecting with the pain of how living in compromise is affecting our life and our energy. Sometimes, we need help to understand how our anger, depression, and general lack of energy in our lives is coming from living in compromise. Then, we may need to be guided to connect deeper with the fears and understand where they are coming from.
• The second step is to begin to imagine our life when we are beginning to move toward truth and consider how our relationships, energy, and attitudes toward life would change. We can practice with the help from a therapist or a friend to feel how our life would change if we begin to behave differently. We can even practice in a session confronting someone who might be disrespecting us or being honest with someone that we have withheld a secret.
• The third step is to take small risks that do not directly involve having to confront our deepest fears. As an example, this can be mobilizing our life energy by moving our body and bringing more passion into our life with hobbies and activities that help us to feel more positive and alive.
• Finally, when ready, we can take a small step in our life toward truth knowing that our therapist or friends will support us to deal with the fears, judgments, rejection, hostility, or disruption that may follow. Understanding that when we take this risk, the fear and shame will naturally get stronger as well for a while as we raise the level of our life energy. Being prepared to face and feel that fact is essential.
When we come out of denial, take steps to deal with our fears, feel them and embrace them, and gradually start to come out of living as robots in compromise, our life changes.
Moving from compromise and fear to truth and aliveness is a huge and a very important step in our life and inner growth. It moves us from having a shame self-identity to feeling proud of ourselves and our life.
This movement is very simple, natural, and practical and can motivate us to commit to inner work with a trusted guide or therapist, and to persevere until we can see and feel concrete change in our life.