Self-Honesty

A Spiritual Missing Link

If you could achieve clear and complete self-honesty today, your entire life would make sense tomorrow.

This is a difficult statement for most to process, both because life often seems hopelessly nonsensical and because we don’t lie to ourselves in the exact same way we lie to others. Nevertheless, it is the truth, so I’ll repeat it again for emphasis.

Self-honesty is the first and final key to spiritual understanding. The second you achieve a state of complete honesty about your thoughts/feelings/beliefs/motivations, everything will make total sense to you.

In having this discussion, it’s first important to note that dishonesty (especially as pertains to dishonesty with ourselves) is more often born out of self-preservation than it is out of malice. We all know what it’s like to lie intentionally — to say something we know is untrue for the express purpose of hiding the actual truth from somebody. Because we all define “dishonesty” as relating to this kind of intentional lying, we define “honesty” as dishonesty’s opposite; in any situation where we aren’t intentionally covering up something we know to be true, we say we’re being honest. Basically, if our intent is honest, we think we’re being honest.

Intent doesn’t tell the full story, though.

Dishonesty occurs whenever you address anything less than the full and complete truth of a situation. Whether or not your intentions are good isn’t relevant. Similarly, it isn’t relevant whether or not you intend to tell the truth — if you don’t tell the whole truth (again, even if you intend to), you’re being dishonest.

This can be a little tough to wrap your head around, so let’s jump to some examples.

How many times in your life has someone been mean to you, and instead of admitting to yourself that you’d been made to feel bad, you just got angry? How many people have poured themselves their 10th drink of the night while saying, “I just like having a good time!” because they didn’t want to acknowledge that they were struggling? How many genocides have occurred because people didn’t want to admit that they felt unstable, so they felt forced into saying, “We’re not unstable — those people are undermining our stability! In every case here, the people might genuinely believe they’re being honest.

This is the problem with self-honesty; it doesn’t work the same way as outward honesty. When we lie to someone else, we know we’re lying. When we lie to ourselves, we get very clever.

Because, on some level, we’re always aware of the whole truth of a situation, it’s not possible to outright deny that truth. What we can do, though, is dial the volume on different parts of the truth up or down. We ignore parts of the truth that we feel reflect poorly on us, and we hyper-fixate on parts of the truth that make us feel good and moral. We take all the facts of a situation, and then we assemble a narrative out of those facts that serve our own self-image.

In action, here’s how that looks:

Someone is “mean” to me, and that makes me feel bad — perhaps because whatever they said triggered an insecurity of mine, intentionally or not; I don’t like feeling insecure, so I tune down my feelings of insecurity. With my insecure feelings tuned way down, there’s an energetic imbalance in my situation — even if I’m not acknowledging my feelings of insecurity, I still feel the sting of them (I still know I feel bad) and thus have to recontextualize the stinging feeling. So, I hyper-fixate on the fact that the person “shouldn’t have said what they said,” and I get angry at them for having said it.

Notice how, despite there not being any outright “lies” told in this situation, by not addressing the complete truth of my situation, I’m still being dishonest.

Multiple things can be true at once — I can have an insecurity that makes me feel bad when it’s addressed, and someone can be socially insensitive in directly addressing it. But when I start playing the game of denying some parts of the truth and fixating on others, I lose perspective on my situation.

Because my experience has some specific “energetic intensity” (by this, I just mean because my experience triggers a certain degree of feeling), but I’m downplaying one of the factors responsible for that energy (in this case, I’m downplaying the role of my insecurity), I’m forced to over-ascribe meaning to the other part of the story — the person who triggered my insecurity, even if they didn’t intend to and no other person on earth would’ve deemed their statement mean or inappropriate, becomes a villain. Even if (from a third-person perspective) their comment may have been totally innocuous, because my insecurity is so painful and it leads to such an intense energetic response, I have to pin all the blame for that energy on the other person.

All problems arise in the distance between the truth of your life and the narrative you’re spinning about that truth.

When you start spinning narratives about your life that are dishonest because of the way you’ve weighted certain elements of the larger truth, your problems become unsolvable. The world ceases to make sense because the narrative through which you process the world doesn’t make sense — but the issue isn’t with the world; it’s with the way you’re choosing to deny or fixate on certain elements of your experience.

This kind of “spun narrative” dishonesty leads to spiritual self-sabotage. Situations that reflect the entire truth of your experience will arise over and over again, regardless of what narrative you’ve chosen to latch onto. Meaning, because you are aware of everything you’re feeling, you’ll continue creating physical expressions of your full slate of feelings, even if you’ve dialed certain factors up or down in an attempt to explain your feelings to yourself.

The solution to this is just to be honest with yourself. If the things you’ve been manifesting in your life don’t really make sense to you, scrap your narrative and look at the basic facts of your situation. What are you feeling? Is it possible that one emotion is shouldering the entire burden of your situation when really it’s only contributing slightly? Is the narrative you’ve been spinning a self-serving one? Once you break that narrative down into its component parts, can you reassemble those parts into other narratives? Perhaps ones that make you feel like you’re to blame for your current circumstances and not everyone else like you previously thought? Perhaps ones that make you feel you aren’t to blame but should be ashamed of the way you actually feel — as is the case with many people who develop feelings of guilt or self-hatred as an alternative to admitting they hate their parents/partner/child?

No narrative is the correct narrative. Our goal here isn’t to swap one story for another. It’s to see that narratives are distorted explanations of the way we actually feel. Society bullies us into dishonesty by telling us which feelings we are and aren’t allowed to address. Nobody will ever take on a narrative that acknowledges feelings that the world has deemed to be “wrong.” Nobody will ever admit, “Jeez, part of me really wishes my child were never born,” or “I love my wife and think she’s the most incredible person on the planet, but I think I love my coworker too.”

By not admitting to feelings like that, though, you pin yourself against a wall. Your child continues misbehaving in increasingly severe ways, and your anger at them (as well as your hatred of yourself) continues to be blown out of proportion. Your wife continues doing things that upset you and giving you reasons to justify any transgressions (“Sure, I had an affair, but if she’d treated me fairly, I wouldn’t have felt the need to.”).

I know it’s hard. I know admitting to the full scope of your feelings, especially when they’re feelings society has deemed reprehensible, probably makes you want to puke. But what alternative do you have? To deny those feelings forever while they continue manifesting in your life?

There’s no mental Gestapo coming to arrest you if you acknowledge feelings that, if you were to say them out loud, would make people angry at you. There’s no penalty for facing the things you don’t want to face in your own head.

It’s quite the opposite, actually. You’re rewarded for your willingness to face your own truths. You’re given the opportunity to let go of the feelings that have been holding you back for so long. Because at the end of the day, all the “releasing” we talk about is just another way of describing this self-honesty. That’s why I always say you don’t have to “do” anything to release beyond letting some previously unconscious or resisted feeling up into your conscious mind. The honest acknowledgment doesn’t precede the release; it is the release.

So when you acknowledge a tiny feeling that life would’ve been easier if your child had never been born, you can move on from it and let go of all your anger at the child and your feelings of being a bad parent. The child’s behavior will adjust spontaneously because in letting go of the limiting feeling, you’ll finally be able to love them the way they deserve to be loved. The situations you’re creating will change. When you admit to yourself that despite loving your wife, you also love someone else, you’ll stop creating situations that compel you to cheat — there’ll be a spontaneous shift in the nature of your relationship with your wife; you’ll stop encountering situations that lead into arguments and your relationship will strengthen. Similarly, your relationship with your coworker will change; there’ll be no compulsion on either end to advance things romantically, and you’ll be able to enjoy each other as good friends — plus, in the future, you’ll stop attracting people into your life who are interested in getting between you and your partner.

Honest is always the key, though. You can’t change how you’re creating until you acknowledge the truth.

As always, good luck.