Inner Bonding

How Honest Are You in Your Relationships?

Episode Summary

Most of us like to think we are honest people, yet how often do you deny or withhold your truth to get approval or avoid conflict? Wouldn’t you rather know the truth, even if it's very painful, rather than be lied to? Isn't it even more painful to be lied to? Part of authentic love is being willing to tell the truth and receive the truth.

Episode Transcription

How often do you say yes when you really mean no - to please or avoid trouble? How do you feel when you do this?  Many of us have much difficulty speaking our truth to others, especially to important others such as parents, siblings, close friends, co-workers and a partner. We are afraid the other person will be angry or hurt by our truth, even when we state it without judgment or blame. So we say yes when we mean no, say things are okay when they aren't, avoid difficult topics of conversation, pretend to enjoy something - food, sex, a movie, the topic of conversation, the way we are spending time - to avoid upsetting another. We may continue to tolerate things that are intolerable to us to avoid a conflict.

When you yes when you really mean no, you are rejecting yourself. This is a form of self-abandonment that may feel safe for the moment when you get the approval or avoid the disapproval. But in the long run, your inner child is going to feel rejected, unloved and unimportant to you. When it is more important to you to get approval or avoid disapproval than it is to be honest, you will end up feeling badly. Is it really worth it?

How often do you avoid your truth in order to avoid hurting someone's feelings? How do you feel when you give yourself up because you are taking responsibility for another's feelings instead of your own? How can your inner child possibly feel important to you when you make another's feelings more important than yours?

Of course, in order to be honest about your own truth, you have to know your truth. If you are not being honest with yourself - if you are avoiding your feelings with various addictions or you are in denial about what you feel - then you can’t be honest with others.

How often do you do things you don't want to do - make love when you don’t want to, spend time with someone when you don't want to, eat something someone else cooked when you don't want to, see a movie that you don't want to see - to avoid conflict? How do you feel when you do this? How worthy and valued can you feel when you are ignoring your own truth?

How often do you agree with someone in order to be liked? How often do you keep your mouth shut in order to avoid disapproval? How often do you not take action - such as stepping in when someone is abusing a child or animal - to avoid the confrontation? How do you feel when you don’t act in integrity with your own truth?

Most of us like to think of ourselves as honest people, but are you being honest when trying to control getting approval, avoiding disapproval or rejection, and avoiding conflict is more important than being true to yourself?

Of course, it takes courage to be honest. It takes a strong, courageous loving adult to take the risk of other's anger, disapproval, ridicule or rejection. But if you look inside, you will discover that not being true to yourself has far greater consequences on how you feel about yourself than taking the risk of being honest.

The more you practice Inner Bonding, the easier it becomes to take the risk of honesty. The more you are defining your own worth internally rather than relying on others for your definition of yourself, the easier it is to not take others' disapproval and rejection personally. The more you know your own intrinsic goodness - which you can only know when you are connected with your spiritual guidance - the more you know that you deserve to have your own opinions and wants, and that no one else has the right to define what is okay for you to think, do or want.

Right now, take a few minutes to think about how honest you are with the people closest to you. Think about what you might be afraid of in saying no when you mean no, and yes only when you mean yes, and in taking loving action for yourself and with others.

You might want to take some time to examine the beliefs behind your fears of being honest, and look courageously at the consequences of not being true to yourself. Is it really more important to be willing to lose yourself rather than risk losing someone else?

But there’s another side to telling your truth. Your truth can both enhance or destroy a relationship, depending on your intent. Deciding whether or not you choose to speak your truth needs to come from your own honesty with yourself about why you would speak your truth.

There are times when telling your "truth" is unloving. For example, commenting on how someone looks can be very hurtful to them. I remember my judgmental aunt saying to me when I was in my early 20’s, “Your skin is nice but Shannon’s skin is amazing.” Shannon was her son’s girlfriend. That comparison felt awful to me. My aunt loved to compare people and offer her opinion, but opinions are generally judgments and rarely contribute to the good of a relationship. It is therefore very important to distinguish between opinions and truth. Too often, just because we think something is true, we assume that it is true. However, truth is a fact, not an opinion. If I am hungry, that is a fact, but how you look is my opinion.

There are times when someone might be having a hard time, and it is not easy to be around them. For example, your friend has lost a beloved person to death, and your friend is in mourning. It may not be easy for you to be around the grief, stress, and heartbreak, yet telling your friend that it’s hard to be around him or her would not be loving or supportive of your friend and would indicate a lack of empathy. It is very important, when telling our truth, to distinguish between being loving to ourselves and others - having our own highest good and the other's highest good at heart - and making another responsible for our feelings. 

Therefore, the important thing in telling the truth is to be honest with yourself about your own intent in telling your truth. Are you truly being loving to yourself and others, or are you using your truth to control another and make him or her responsible for you? Are you speaking your truth to enhance the relationship, or to get the other to change? 

But just as telling our truth can be a form of control, withholding our truth can also be a form of control. Often, I hear my clients say, when I encourage them to tell the truth, "I can't say that. He or she will get mad."

Yes, he or she might get hurt or mad. Yet courage may mean the willingness to speak your truth anyway and learn to deal with the other person's response. This is about practicing Inner Bonding and developing your loving adult - learning to not take the other person's behavior personally, learning to stay solid in your truth and allow the other person to go through whatever he or she has to go through in response to your truth without taking responsibility for the other's feelings. 

Do you have the courage to know the truth regarding another's caring?

Avoiding the other's hurt and anger is only one part of the challenge. The other part is that you may be unwilling to know the truth regarding whether or not that other person cares about what is important to you. If, for example, you tell your partner that you are unhappy with a particular aspect of your sex life, and your partner gets hurt or angry instead of wanting to understand, you might feel even worse. It feels awful to speak our truth and receive an uncaring response. The deeper feeling is one of gut-wrenching loneliness and heartbreak. It is deeply lonely and heartbreaking to share something that is important to us and receive an uncaring response.

So, not only may you be afraid of dealing with another's anger, but, if you have not practiced Inner Bonding and know how to manage the deeper existential feelings of life, such as loneliness, heartbreak, grief, and helplessness concerning others, you may be even more afraid of the feeling of being uncared for. Until you are willing to know the truth of whether or not the other person really does care about what is important to you, you may avoid speaking your truth.

However, when you withhold your truth to avoid conflict and avoid feeling uncared for by another, the consequence is that you may feel alone and maybe depressed because you are not caring about yourself. When you don't speak up for yourself, you may end up feeling unimportant, regardless of how others treat you. You cannot ignore yourself and feel good inside.

The question you need to ask yourself is, "Am I willing to give myself up to avoid losing others, or am I willing to lose others rather than lose myself?" I have found that losing myself is never worth it. If I lose others as a result of speaking my truth, then I have to accept the truth that those people never had my highest good at heart anyway. People who care about my highest good applaud me when I speak my truth that supports my highest good. People who care about me support me in living my truth. Those who just want to use me in some way will get angry or hurt at my truth, and that lets me know the truth about their caring.

So, you need to be willing to know another's truth regarding whether or not that person really cares about you in order to tell your heartfelt truth. Let's say that you say to your partner, "It is not tolerable for me to be around you when you are drinking. I feel shut out and disconnected from you when you drink. It is just too lonely to be with you when you are drinking." If alcohol is more important to your partner than you are, then the response is likely to be, "That's your problem, not mine. Stop blaming me for your feelings. Stop trying to control me!" If you are more important to your partner than alcohol, then your partner will address the issue and get some help with the problem. The question is, do you want to know the reality of the situation? Are you prepared to take loving action for yourself if you discover that your partner really doesn't care about the effect his or her behavior is having on you?

You will have the courage to speak your truth when you have the courage to know the truth about any given relationship. What if you say to your best friend, "I often feel judged by you and it doesn't feel good, and I'd like to understand what this is about for you," and your best friend gets defensive and tells you it's all your problem. What are you going to do if your best friend consistently responds in an uncaring way? Are you willing to lose someone who you have believed was your best friend, or are you going to avoid telling the truth to avoid knowing the truth? Are you willing to feel the loneliness and heartbreak if you find out that someone you thought cared about you really doesn't, or do you want to go on pretending that real caring exists?

It takes great courage to tell the truth and discover the truth. We often kid ourselves into thinking that avoiding others anger and hurt is a loving thing to do. We justify our behavior by telling ourselves that it's just that we don't want to hurt or upset others, or that we just don't want to deal with another's hurt or anger. Yet avoidance may not be loving to ourselves or others. Are you willing to sacrificing your own integrity to avoid the pain of conflict and loneliness? To me, nothing is worth a loss of integrity, not even the loss of another.

When you practice Inner Bonding and really tune into how you feel when you withhold your truth to protect yourself from conflict and loneliness, you will discover that honoring yourself by telling your truth, without blame or judgment, is deeply empowering. You will feel on top of the world when you finally have the courage to speak your heartfelt truth when your intent is to support your own and others highest good.

Truth is food for the soul. Martha Beck in Leaving the Saints, said thatNo matter how difficult and painful it may be, nothing sounds as good to the soul as the truth.”

How did we come to believe that it’s better not to tell the truth – that the truth hurts too much and that people can’t handle it?

Granted, the truth can be very painful. But not nearly as painful as finding out the truth too late to deal with it or finding out that you were lied to. 

Being told the truth is essential for trusting yourself.One of my clients, Rebecca, always felt that she somehow didn’t belong in her family. When she was 19 years old, her mother finally told her she was adopted. 

“I felt so many feelings at once that I was overwhelmed,” she said. I was enraged at not being told and believing all these years that there was something weird about me because I wasn’t like anyone in my family. I asked my mother when I was eight years old if I was adopted and she denied it. I felt betrayed that I was lied to, and I felt relief at finally knowing a truth that I had felt in my soul. I felt scared about what all this meant, and I felt so angry that my inner truth had been denied and discounted, which led to a lack of trust in myself. I felt excited about the prospect of finding my birth parents. I can’t tell you how much I wish I had been told the truth from the time I was little.”

My client, Matt, had always had a very hard time with his father. He couldn’t relate to him, and always felt that he was being treated differently than his younger siblings. Matt was 25 when his father died, and his mother finally told him that his father was not his biological father – that she had met his stepfather 16 months after Matt was born.

“Hearing the truth put so many pieces of the puzzle into place for me. My mother said she didn’t tell me because my father didn’t want her to, and because she didn’t want me to feel different than the other children. But not being told caused so much confusion for me. I would have given anything to have known the truth all along.” 

My experience with not being told the truth was one of the most painful experiences in my life.

My angry, narcissistic mother and I always had a difficult relationship. Nevertheless, my parents assured me that I, as their only child, was the primary beneficiary in their will and that I didn’t need to worry about saving for retirement. While they were not wealthy, they had worked hard and were well off, so there were substantial funds to be distributed.

My mother had always been angry at me for being me, but I thought in her later years she had mellowed. Unbeknownst to me, she continued to be angry, and as a final angry act, she essentially disowned me, leaving almost all the money to my children without telling me. To the end, she misrepresented that all was fine.

I found out about all of this only after she died. I was devastated - not by the fact that she gave the money to my children, as she had every right to give it to whomever she wanted - but that she lied to me. She knew that I hadn’t worried much about my retirement, because of having led me to believe I would receive their money for my retirement. At 65 years old, I had to start addressing an important part of my financial life, that I had believed was taken care of.

Even as I write this and speak this, I still feel the heartbreak and grief of being lied to. The truth would have been so much better.

Part of my job in working with people is to offer them the truth that comes through me from Spirit. It’s not always easy.

When I sit with someone at an intensive, or work with someone on the phone or on Skype or Zoom, information from Spirit is constantly flowing through to me. I don't censor the information that is coming, because I do not assume that I know what this person needs to know. I assume that Spirit knows what it is doing in bringing through the information.

No matter how gently I offer it, sometimes the information is very difficult for the person to hear, such as, "Right now, you are pulling on everyone for love and approval. You have handed your inner child to everyone around you to take care of you. There must be a good reason you are doing this. Are you open to exploring this?" or, "There must be a very good reason that there is no loving adult present here. There is just a wounded child. Are you willing to open to learning about this?" or "I cannot feel you when you cry like this. This pain is the pain of a victim, trying to get someone to take care of you. This is pain that you are causing by your own self-judgment and self-abandonment. This crying is a pull on others to take care of you. You hope others will feel sorry for you and have compassion for you because you have no compassion for yourself. There must be some very good reasons that you are abandoning yourself right now. Are you willing to open to learning about this?"

When I say these things to people, they are often furious with me. They think I am judging them rather than offering them a truth. They do not get that truth is love - authentic radical love. Without knowing the truth about their intention and their behavior, they cannot heal. The truth opens the door for them to start loving themselves instead of spending all their energy trying to get others to love them.

At one of my intensives, a few of the participants became angry at me. My assistant told them, "Margaret is an advocate for your inner child. She is being loving to you by standing up for your inner child, who needs your love and compassion and is not getting it from you." It was not easy for me to stay in the place of truth, but if I did not tell them the truth about their intention, where would they learn it? Everyone in their lives had been either caretaking them, getting angry at them, or resisting and withdrawing from them.

By the end of the intensive, they had moved past self-judgment and into self-acceptance. They were opening to Spirit and bringing love to themselves. They were laughing and playing and sharing love with everyone. The truth had set them free. 

Truth - authentic, radical love, is necessary for healing. If you find yourself angry with someone for telling you a truth, then you might want to notice that your intention is to get approval rather than to learn about loving yourself. If you respond to the truth as if it is a judgment, you might want to notice that you are not in the intent to learn. The loving adult hears information about oneself as a gift, while the wounded self hears information about oneself as an attack. If someone has the courage to offer you their truth about yourself, you may receive great benefit if you open as a loving adult with an intent to learn.

This does not mean that you need to agree with what the person is saying about you. When I offer what I am receiving from Spirit, I have no investment in the person accepting it. If it does not resonate with them, then we move on. People are often afraid to open to learning for fear of being controlled by another person or by Spirit. But the loving adult does not just accept everything as truth. If you are open to learning and have your inner loving adult present, you can go inside and see whether what is being offered feels right to you or not. But if your wounded self is in charge, you will just feel attacked or controlled by what is being offered, and you will defend or go into resistance, missing a wonderful opportunity to learn. Only if you have a spiritually connected, open-to-learning loving adult present inside will you know if what is being offered is really true about you, or if it is the other person's projection onto you and an attempt to control you.

Change occurs when you know the truth. If you think you are open and loving but are really pulling on others for love and approval, you will stay stuck in self-abandonment and may end up feeling empty or depressed. Even if you have done years of work on yourself, you might still be pulling on others if you have never been confronted with this and have never done the Inner Bonding work of developing your loving adult.

However, speaking your truth to your partner can be scary.

Mark sought my help because he was thinking of leaving his wife, Linda. He had not been feeling in love with her for a long time, but they had two children and he really didn't want to break up the family.

"Mark," I asked, "Were you ever in love with Linda?"

"Yes, at the beginning of our relationship."

"Then what happened?"

"Linda seemed to get really insecure once I started my new business and had long workdays. Even though I think I gave her a lot of attention on the weekends, she started getting angry pretty much every day. Then after our son was born, she seemed even more unhappy and irritable. She gets mean when she's angry and I just don't find that appealing. I don't feel close to her anymore."

"Have you said anything to her about this?" I asked.

"No," he replied. "She already seems so unhappy. I don't want to hurt her feelings."

"So how do you handle it?"

"I guess I just sort of shut down and pretend that everything is okay. But I'm spending more and more time at work because I don't like being at home, and recently I met another woman who I'm attracted to. I realize I've got to do something about this."

"Do you really think that leaving her will cause less hurt than telling her your truth?"

"Well, if I just leave then I don't have to deal with her hurt."

"Mark, that's a lack of courage and integrity. And you have two children to think about. You once loved Linda and it's possible that you could again, but only if you are willing to be honest. You need to give Linda a chance to deal with this. She has no idea what's going on. She might decide to deal with her anger, or she might not, but at least give her a chance to make that decision. And relationship problems are never one-sided. Perhaps she has things to say to you too."

Mark decided to tell Linda the truth, even though he was really scared. He told her that her anger was pushing him away, and that he didn't like being home anymore because he felt so blamed and controlled by her. He told her that he was attracted to another woman who was treating him with kindness and caring, and that he wanted this from Linda. He told her he had been thinking of leaving and had sought my help and that I told him to tell the truth. He asked her if she would join him in working with me.

Linda was shocked. She had no idea all this was going on with Mark. She thought she was the only one feeling so unloved in the relationship. At first, she reacted exactly as Mark feared, with anger, hurt, and blame. But he told her the truth about this too - that he had been afraid to be truthful with her because of this reaction, and that if she wanted the truth, she needed to be open to it rather than closed and angry. Finally, Linda heard him, and they were able to talk honestly for the first time in years. Linda was actually relieved at hearing the truth, once she got over the initial shock and they were able to talk. She agreed to work with me with hi.

In their work with me, Mark discovered that Linda also had been afraid to be honest with him, fearing that he would withdraw even more. She was just as afraid of his withdrawal as he was of her anger. They discovered that both of them had been protecting against their fears rather than being open to learning with each other. As they both devoted themselves to practicing Inner Bonding and opened to learning with themselves and each other, the love gradually came back into their relationship.

People often believe that they are withholding their truth to spare their partner pain, but their real intent is to protect themselves from the response they fear. Protecting against pain - with anger, withdrawal, and blame - will always bring about the very pain we fear, while opening to learning and speaking our truth can open the door to love.

Truth, which is a major part of authentic love, is one of the greatest gifts we can offer each other. I hope you have the courage to offer it to loved ones, and recognize it when it is offered to you, and receive it with an open and grateful heart.

You can find many resources for learning how to develop your loving adult and connect with your higher guidance at https://www.innerbonding.com

 

Join Dr. Margaret Paul for her 30-Day at-home Course: "Love Yourself: An Inner Bonding Experience to Heal Anxiety, Depression, Shame, Addictions and Relationships."

Heal your relationships with Dr. Margaret’s 30-Day online video relationship course: Wildly, Deeply, Joyously in Love.