Honesty is a muscle we have to exercise, or we lose it. It takes work to be honest because many factors work against honesty as a default response. Being honest especially requires emotional resilience, because what’s true is often not easy to stomach.
In this context, a deeper possibility arises, vis a vis our original love wounds:
Childhood wounds are arguably our most foundational. They set the stage for so much of our lives, as science shows. These wounds are also the most painful to acknowledge, therefore requiring the most courageous honesty.
My hypothesis is this: the degree to which we are honest about our core wounds is the degree to which we build our honesty muscle that we apply to the rest of life. The logic is that when we live with a fundamental disavowal, a denial of our most fundamental hurt, we learn to live dishonestly, perhaps from a young age.
Healing the love-dishonesty-wound requires becoming courageous enough to face the truth of how we feel and what happened to us — and to work through that pain. From experience, I can tell you that healing developmental trauma requires brutal honesty — it builds the honesty muscle in earnest. And because you face the most emotionally challenging dynamic of your life, you then become resilient to tolerate other uncomfortable and excruciating truths.
In other words, walking around with wounds you may not even know about may be a significant factor in determining your distress tolerance to be honest later in life — to acknowledge that you voted for a fraud, that your ethnic tribe is committing horrible crimes against humanity which were done unto them not too long ago, to appreciate that not all pharmaceutical drugs are bad for you and can indeed save your life, that you really are being abusive to your partner, etc.
When we are honest about the most fundamental building blocks in the architecture of our personality, we stand to be honest about the mansion of our lives. Because we don’t harbor the fearful emotional bias of feeling terrible about what we discover, we are freer to be honest.
I don’t think this is the case for everybody; some seem able to be comfortable with painful truths — some anyway — even if they haven’t done core emotional work. Yet, there seems to be a correlation between unresolved trauma and both intellectual and emotional dishonesty. Reciprocally, the brutal honesty of emotional inner work and honesty across other domains of living also seem to correlate.
Pro tip: it’s never too late to be honest about the past or the present. The longer you wait, the more difficult because you have to reckon with a lifetime of lies and the cumulative, exponential effects of how far from your essence they have taken you. This is why nervous breakdowns can be breakthroughs.
Pro tip #2: It feels really good to be honest — to be able to be honest — and to learn the epistemology for both subjective and objective truth-finding. Dishonesty that matters most eats away at the soul. Honesty, though often a bitter pill at first, begins to heal our fractures.
