The truth hurts sometimes, but trying to keep an obvious truth hidden inside yourself can hurt even more. Making excuses doesn’t help, rationalizing doesn’t help, yelling doesn’t help. Bringing yourself to a painful but honest realization will actually do you more good.
When some of my clients have been avoiding a problem and struggling with reality, I have often said something like this, “You can think that way about your problem if you like, pretend it isn’t there. Or you can face the truth and acknowledge its existence. Either way, the reality of your problem will still be there. You just have more power to make your situation better if you face it.”
This has usually gotten a knowing look from the people I’ve worked with. By that point, they have usually been struggling with some key issues for long enough that the whole reason they are in counseling is because they can’t manage it the same way anymore. The old excuses and rationalizations aren’t enough to keep the emotional pain in check. Reality is trying come to the surface anyway, and yet they keep trying to stuff it down.
Take a person with an alcohol addiction. The truth is, they cannot drink alcohol for the rest of their life. The risk for relapse is high given their history. If they continue to associate good times and stress management with having a drink, they will struggle to accept this reality. Even when they relapse and start thinking addiction thoughts, they keep fighting to ignore the truth.
They can try to pretend their addiction really “isn’t that bad” or that they know how to control their drinking now, but the addiction is still there. Period. Trying to justify alcohol use will cause the same problems they came to counseling with. The only way to be free of this bondage is to face the reality of the addiction and make different choices.
A very useful activity when you have an ongoing struggle like this is to check your expectations. Are they realistic? Do I have evidence that this situation will likely keep turning out the same each time? Is much of the solution out of my hands? Do I really want to create this much misery for myself trying to pretend or make this problem be something it can’t be? Am I harming a relationship because my expectations have been inflexible or unreasonable?
The person with alcoholism may have expectations that they can get over the worst of their problem and then resume some occasional drinking. In all likelihood, this will result in relapse and more life problems. Their expectation is unrealistic and they probably have much evidence to support the most likely outcome of resumed drinking. The solution is in their hands – sobriety – but they will need to be honest with themselves to have the best quality of life. They may very well be creating misery for themselves and important relationships by trying to shove reality under the rug. All of this comes down to accepting the ugly but ever-present truth.
Usually, facing the truth of a difficult situation is a shorter-term pain than most people anticipate. It can hurt like a sucker punch, but then the best part comes. You get the chance to move forward with your life, leaving behind a clunky, dirty piece of baggage that you’ve been dragging around behind you. As long as you keep trying to dress up that piece of baggage and keep it with you, it’s going to keep weighing you down. Call it out for what it is, dump it, and get on to the best part of life: Living with honesty.
6 comments
“if you want to get better, take a pill, but if you want to get it right, then face the truth.”
A line in a show heard over a year ago that is now on a wall in every office I work in.
Hence why people need to be in therapy, but, of late, seems few agree with that assumption.
While I believe that medication has a place in helping people get better, medication doesn’t do the real cognitive work. Facing the truth is only something that can be done by a courageous willing human being.
In my book “Emotional Honesty & Self-Acceptance” the central theme is healing emotional wounds by “attending to them” vs. ignoring and harboring the pain inside. I draw an analogy: If we ignore the fact that we have a physical wound that cuts through the skin, we run the risk of infection, and possibly death. By “attending” to our emotional pain we actually learn to be honest with what is going on inside. That is the first step in healing and getting over these wounds. “Talk therapy” such as cognitive behavioral work is successful largely because we can “name” it in order to “tame it.” Neuroscience is also discovering how our brain can learn to cope with emotional upsets and stress by taking these wounds out of the dark chamber of sub-cortical instincts and up to our rational, thinking brain (neocortex). If we leave the wounds deep inside primitive brain areas outside of consciousness, we will never learn to own our feelings as part of us. If we own the hurt, we’ll eventually heal it since unattended emotional wounds often make us feel there is something (mysteriously) “wrong with me.” We can even teach 9-12 year olds the simple process of “naming, claiming, taming & reframing” each wound when it occurs. “Reframing” is simply questioning why a particular experience is so painful. The answer is that emotional wounds tell us what we really care about and need — the opposite of what happened to cause such distress, anger or sadness. This process is now explained in a free, interactive “Name that Upset” game and lessons on “The Coping Brain” — part of a new public health education program available free on the Internet: http://www.copingskills4kids.net. In little over a year, over 30,800 pre-teens, their parents, educators and counselors have accessed these open-access resources from every state in the U.S. plus 150 countries.
Over the years, I have become quite frustrated with the limits of ‘talk therapy’, especially in a setting of individual therapy.
(this is more in response to the last comment than the article itself)
Especially the limitations I see with ‘being motivated to change, and really feeling energized to change) I don’t think talking ‘cuts it’. The insight has to hit you in the gut, not merely the brain.
I have become to more and more appreciate for that reason ‘action methods’ in addition to intellectual understanding.
Experiential therapy, like Psychodrama.
PS: I have always disliked the name; doesn’t do the seriousness of it justice.
To face truth one must surrender one’s denial, and that’s a hard thing to do. Denial is a constructive and successful coping mechanism most people rely on through out their lives. We deny to ourselves the eventual loss and death of all we love. Most of us act as if we’ll never die because on some level that’s what we believe. To ask that someone give up his or her denial is to ask that person to achieve an astounding magnitude of spiritual growth.