How honest is everyone with themselves? Honestly? I feel there is a big misconception about honesty and truth. I think this, since we all have personal truths..but maybe they don't include being truthful with ourselves. So long as we keep up appearances and laugh at the appropriate times, and get up and dress ourselves and complete a mundane list of "normal things" one does in their daily life then we don't need to look any deeper into what we're really doing or not doing.
When we blow up at our spouses/family members during a fight we're probably not likely going to look at our fault in the matter. Instead we're irrationally accusatory of the other party for holding ALL the blame. And maybe we even bully them into believing this is really the case. Or cry hard enough to make them feel as though they have fundamentally screwed up when we were nothing but perfect to them. This is obviously a lie we tell ourselves. No one is perfect. So why do people still behave this way? Not looking at our fault in sticky situations allows us to continue believing in our personal "truth" that we are "good" and that other people are "bad".
I've worked with children, and I've seen this happen with them..but now that I'm not working and only surrounded by my own children, I'm starting to notice that adults continue this behavior too. I'll give you a scenario you'll often find at any child care place: two children are arguing over a toy, or a game or a crayon or whatever it is. One child says they were using it first and then came along this mean kid and tried to take it away. So they hit them, and took it right back. Both come screaming crying to you that the other child was mean and selfish (okay maybe they don't say things like selfish- but still) and refuse to accept that anything they did in the matter was wrong.
It's so easy to rewrite that story with two adults fighting over some false sense of territory or sense of entitlement in a matter. Right?
I've done it. I've cried poor me, and how could this happen? And I didn't do anything to deserve this! And then I did the hardest thing I've ever done. I stopped crying and looked at my situation; a seeming betrayal by someone I cared about and decided that maybe I must have had some fault in it. So I wrote them down. And I was honest. Brutally honest. And things that sit quietly in the back of my mind as small, small truths came out. Things like.."I never really wanted any part in helping my friend with their issues." Or.."I wished none of this was real..and continued to act as if it wasn't." Looking back at my own lies and accusations that I wouldn't dare admit to someone else before, nonetheless to myself I realized just how big of a liar I had been all along.
Very rarely is anything "Out of the blue." Often there are telltale signs to any seemingly sudden occurrence, like an out of character move or an illness that creeps into your life. The problem is that we are too busy quieting that too-small voice in the back of our minds so that we can have lives than run smoothly. Once you tell that lie, then it's often a case of lying to yourself so that no one would even think that you could have seen any of these problems coming your way.
Because maybe we're ashamed. Or maybe, we don't want to be found out as such big fat liars of a different variety: lying to ourselves. Sure this story could also be placed in any alcoholic or drug abusers life, but maybe the issues don't have to be as severe. It could just be that we really hate our jobs, or we really wish we were with someone else most of the time; or that we're pretending to be okay with the fact that we never went back to school, or that we're afraid that we don't have the talents to do any of the things we really want to do in life. Whatever it is you're telling yourself or not, it's making a liar out of you.
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