Navigating Your Truth
“In the long run, the most unpleasant truth is a safer companion than a pleasant falsehood.”
– Theodore Roosevelt
In my many years working as a therapist and more recently as a coach, clients have often come to me saying “I am unhappy in my marriage/my relationship/my job. I don’t know what to do. I go back and forth about it all the time. I am SO stuck.”
What is my response?
I don’t buy that. It’s not that you don’t know what you want to do. It’s that you are scared to death to admit the truth about what you do know you want to do. Why? Because admitting that truth would require some level of discomfort. It would mean life would shift. Things would change. Being truthful to yourself would require vulnerability and as humans, we are programmed to maintain our safety because we are more likely to survive that way. To get to that truth is a process because you have probably become really good at pushing it aside and instead, focusing on playing the tape of the prettier version of things, over and over in your head and then repeating it to others, which just further enforces it.
Tape you say? Think about it this way. There are two versions of your story. You probably tell yourself (play the tape) little lies all the time: This is because they are essentially socially acceptable and each time you run the story or the tape through, you convince yourself a little more that this is the correct version of things.
Socially Acceptable Tape:
“I can just continue being a lawyer. It makes my mom/my spouse/my family happy. I make a great living. It provides me all I need. I know tomorrow it will be better and eventually I will just be fine with it.”
Raw Truth Tape:
“Being a criminal defense lawyer sucks a bit of my soul out of me every day. I hate listening to why people supposedly didn’t commit the crimes that I know they did. They disgust me and I cringe at the idea of having to listen to them tell me the details. If I have to listen to one more ridiculous story I am going to lose my shit. What I really want to do is be an interior decorator. That is where my passion lies. I feel energized when I think about it. But everyone is going to judge me and think less of me because I went to so many years of school and I have a good retirement plan at my firm and my mom loves introducing me as a ‘my daughter the lawyer’. I am going to disappoint everyone.”
Thing is, most mornings you wake up dreading your day and you know you were meant to do other things. But, you think, if you actually admitted to your mom/your spouse/your family that you don’t want to be a lawyer, they will think you are less than. They won’t be proud of you. So you tell yourself you are good at your job and that is enough. This is not the truth.
Lying to yourself, ignoring your truth, is a way to protect yourself. It is a way to avoid pain.
The real truth, the deeper one, the other story (tape), is not pretty. It does not sound polite. It is often raw and lurking in your subconscious. These are gut level truths hidden in your body disguised as back pain, fatigue, irritability, muscle pain etc. because they are ignored, pushed to the side, invalidated by your own socially acceptable tapes.
Socially Acceptable Tape:
“Everyone is unhappy in their marriage so, I am no different. I can put up with this, it is enough.”
Raw Truth Tape:
“There are days I really hate my spouse and can’t even stand the way s/he chews.I have been unhappy for most of my marriage and should not have ever succumbed to the pressure of my family to marry someone just because s/he fit the mold of what I was supposed to want.”
Most of us judge our own thoughts, and thus we stick with the safe, socially acceptable version. We sit in the uncomfortable fear that people will think we are bad, or not good, or not want to be our friend, or our partner, or not want to do business with us. Our fears about admitting the things that we think others will judge us about lead to emotional and physical pain. They lead to feeling stuck and exhausted and unfulfilled and not accomplishing what we want in life.
The first step to changing things is to admit the raw truth to yourself. The second step to changing things, is to admit the truth to others. This is why I named my coaching business Navigating Your Truth. It might be a giant cliche, but telling the truth, can actually set you free. “Your unpleasant truth is definitely a safer companion than a pleasant falsehood.”
It is alright to admit the fear that you are not good enough, that the pretty exterior, the successful exterior, might just not match up to what you truly feel inside. Want to focus on changing the tape, admitting the raw truth and breaking through to the other side – reaching your goals, changing your relationships, transforming your life? Reach out to me to talk about how we can work on this together.