Do you tell the truth?
My current phone wallpaper reads: “No B.S. Tell the truth.”
Telling the truth to myself is hard.
I am the owner of a fully certified Complex PTSD brain, quite functional, yet still…
When you ask me, “What do you want?”, my trauma mind sometimes does sophisticated calculus to answer that question.
My logical, thinking mind sometimes does not know what is a “real” want.
Sometimes what I “want” is crafted by my scared trauma mind in order to keep me “safe.”
After all, “I want to stay inside alone for the rest of my life watching Hulu!” is probably not a genuine desire chosen to serve my highest human potential. But, dang, that is what I really, really want a lot.
I sometimes genuinely do not know how to tell the truth…even to myself.
I sometimes genuinely do not know what I want or what would be best for me.
And it’s shown up a thousand different ways as lies of omission in my relationships.
Including and especially in the relationship I have with myself.
Martha Beck did several podcast interviews as part of her book roadshow for “The Way of Integrity.”
I loved her interview with Marie Forleo. It introduced me to the following quote from the book:
“Integrity is the cure for unhappiness. Period.”
Integrity is being whole, complete, an integer instead of a set of fractions.
A whole damn thing.
I want to be a whole thing, a perfectly whole integer.
Since hearing that quote, I’ve been paying more attention to the truthiness of my life.
It’s often more uncomfortable than I expect.
To tell the truth, I have to know what’s a real desire for myself.
And then I have to decide to choose my desire or to say no to my desire.
And then I act knowing I have chosen with full, integral knowledge of what I am doing.
Have I found happiness in my quest for honest self-truth?
Well…right now it sucks. Telling the truth, the process of finding the truth, sucks a lot sometimes because it’s confusing.
Still, I am much less unhappy when I fully own my decisions.
Martha Beck’s advice is sound, and I’m committing to make it a habit.
When I am whole, I am not dissociated from my desire.
When I am whole, I am not trying to make another person happy so that I can have the illusion of safety.
This is a complex concept for a short article, I know.
Perhaps the encouragement here is to explore your own commitment to self-truth.
Do you show up in integrity, in your wholeness, in what you choose to be true for you?
Are there times when you are not truthful or whole?
And how do those choices impact your sense of happiness, presence, or unhappiness?
While the jury is out on my personal experiment with eXtreme truthfulness (ha!), I will wholeheartedly say this:
The experiment is worth every second of discomfort.
And I suppose that the sense of personal accomplishment is one beautiful way for me to enjoy happiness.
Enjoy exploring the truth of your own interior!
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