Honesty transforms hurt into healing

Honesty never hurt anything.  But the truth can certainly hurt.  Our pride.  Or, when the truth is a hurtful reality, like a betrayal.  Or, when it’s communicated without love.  But ordinarily, honesty is salt.  It cleanses, it purifies, it clarifies, it highlights what’s real.

Honesty from the start means there is no betrayal.  From the start, and throughout, what you see is what you get.  You’re under no false apprehension and assumptions don’t have ground to fester upon.  Yes, honesty requires moral courage.

Yet, we think it’s easier to save ourselves and/or the other person the pain of the truth.

A sad reality for us all is we can’t handle truth all the time in all circumstances.

Why?  It’s fear.  Of missing out.  Of not getting what we want.  Of someone getting what we want, and us feeling jealous.  Of our worst nightmares coming true.  Of getting what we don’t want, which is often just as hard to contemplate than missing out on what we do want.

But the truth can’t hurt us if we’re ready to embrace it.  The acceptance of truth will immediately deliver joy.  Yet, an acceptance that we do not yet accept the truth—that we’re still struggling to accept it—is just as much a thing to take us past our hurt into healing.

Grounding this topic in something hard but altogether healing, we all struggle with truths of others and ourselves.

In the blink of an eye, we’d have others and ourselves changed.  But we can impact only one of these—ourselves.

Others we cannot change, not our children, not our parents, not our friends, not our enemies, not even our employees or those we have direct influence over.  It’s folly to think we can.

When we accept this truth—I mean REALLY accept it, by our behaviour aligning with our attitude—we stop insisting on doing the impossible.  Then, with the impetus for hurt removed, as we decide to get out of the way, we and others begin to heal.

This is not about accepting what everyone does.  Sometimes it means that if people make decisions that affect us adversely, that reality forces us into making consequential decisions called boundaries or discipline or tough-loving action for the betterment of the other and ourselves.

We can’t shift what they do, but we can shift what we can do.

When the truth as it stands is accepted, more hopeful possibilities come into view.

But I know that for so many—all of us in fact—accepting truth is a journey, sometimes, in some situations, without destination.  Some truths are impossible to unknow or undo or redo.  Some truths are just very hard.  So there are exceptions to every rule.

Still, for most of life this truth remains: honesty will heal more than it hurts, and where it hurts it proves the straighter line to healing every time than deception ever could.

Truth is infinitely better than a lie.  Honesty heals, lies hurt.

Honesty transforms hurt into healing.

Photo by Madara Parma on Unsplash