Here’s the thing about inner work: in order to heal, you have to be brutally honest with yourself. You have to follow the subtle cues of your body. You have to decipher what lies within and behind sensations. You have to notice the whispers. You have to acknowledge what happened to you in the past and how it shows up in the present.
This is all really tough work and requires gradually loosening your defenses to let your pain rise to the surface. Then you get to be present with it, to feel what you haven’t had access to, to release what you’ve been carrying around for years and decades, and may not even have known it.
This is to be humbled, at your core, in contrast with trying to act humble.
Profound humility of this kind is not so much linear, but paradoxical. You then end up becoming potently honest enough to hold space for others to crack open, which undoing is to feel bad for a time in order to feel enduringly better. If someone is not ready, and is defensive, they may report that you make them feel bad about themselves. As long as you aren’t being an asshole, you are merely mirroring their pain for them.
As Jung said, when you show someone their darkness, you show them their light. But they have to be willing to go through the death and rebirth paradox.
Deep, honest therapy prepares you to be honest in the rest of your life, especially in intimate relationships. It equips you to recognize when others are likely dishonest, don’t own their shit, defend, and project their shadow onto you—because you developed this barometer from intimately working on yourself. Your body will alert you, in the same way it alerted you when you were in your own trenches, to the truth, supported by evidence. The same way you came up against your own resistance, and let yourself break open instead of defend.
Who has not initiated to radical self-honesty, and has no interest in doing so, will continue to defend against the truth of their being. They will gaslight and attack you to protect their pain, the same pain you chose to face and work through to liberate yourself. They will unnecessarily hurt others. Your depth of presence confronts them with their own hidden shadow. Ironically, they might feel “attacked” or “upset” when you’ve actually given them the opposite—a gift to open and heal. But they must be willing.
There are no inroads into deeper honesty with those who have not chosen (consciously or not) to do the work. They don’t live in the same paradigm you do. They don’t have the tools or wisdom you do, because they haven’t taken this path less travelled.
This pivot—the decision to be painfully honest, to choose facing your pain instead of denying it—makes all the difference and sets you apart from others who haven’t gotten to the gold at the other end of the transformational rainbow. This doesn’t make you superior, it makes you humble and compassionate, fortunate and hopeful that others can experience what you live.
Sometimes, the only hope is for their heart to break open to a degree they can’t turn away, and they finally have to face themselves. They can’t be forced or coerced. All we can do is support them if they ever plunge, or are tossed, into the flames of this crucible for strange salvation.
