Being Honest With Yourself Can Change Your Relationships |

What lies do you tell yourself? Have you ever stopped to think that the difficulty of looking honestly at your inner wounds could be impacting your love life? If you experience relationship conflicts, with exchanges of accusations, it is worth investigating whether you are not taking out frustrations on the other instead of facing dissatisfactions that are within you.

Wounds from the past can bother you without you realizing it.

We carry in our mental, physical and emotional bodies many poorly healed emotional marks and wounds, in addition to open accounts with the past. In our unconscious reign several poorly elaborated memories, records and emotions that we avoid getting in touch with because they bring us pain and anguish.

In our unconscious reign several poorly elaborated memories, records and emotions that we avoid getting in touch with because they bring us pain and anguish.

However, our unconscious is active and guiding our actions and behavior much more than we imagine.

We react to many situations by virtue of the unconscious, encoding and meaning everything based on our past experiences. All circumstances in themselves are neutral, we are the ones who put the color in front of what we have recorded within us. Thus, we are at all times defending ourselves against old pain and also attracting repeated situations that make us revisit wounds that are still open. Everything that causes us discomfort and conflict has something to teach us and show us about ourselves. Have you stopped to reflect on this?

You have to face negative emotions head on.

We get distracted a lot by accusing the other for our unhappiness and we lose the chance to learn and mature in adversity.

We tell ourselves lies about what we are or are not feeling, about our role in each conflict, about how certain occasions affect us or not.

Back then, when the original wound appeared, it was very difficult to deal with and, therefore, it was poorly elaborated and left open. However, nowadays, we still run away from cleaning the wound with the fear of pain and deceive ourselves, pretending that nothing happens inside us and the problem is all outside.

Being honest with yourself is being able to admit to yourself what is going on internally and being aware of what you feel, project and think, no matter how difficult it is to admit it. The first step to any change is to become aware of where you are. You can only find yourself when you know you’re lost, just as you can only clean something up when you see the dirt. Honestly seeing your own dirt and admitting that it exists there allows you to take a cloth and clean it up.

Vulnerability can be a quality

Getting in touch with certain feelings or admitting that we have flaws, difficulties and weaknesses is often frightening. Seeing yourself vulnerable is something feared by many and avoided at all costs.

However, allowing yourself to be vulnerable is realizing that we are all in the process of maturation, growth and construction. We are unfinished pieces in constant improvement and we only become rigid and inflexible beings when we don’t admit and integrate our imperfections and pains.

Such self-contact defenses interfere with relationships and make communication and sincere exchange difficult. When we can understand and welcome ourselves, we open ourselves up to do the same with the other. If not, when conflicts arise, we relate on the defensive and dialogue becomes very difficult. We are stuck at the same point of accusation, as victims, unable to look at the distance to understand the other and also look at ourselves and understand how we got into that place. By looking at the situation honestly, we can also communicate more honestly and empathetically, admitting our difficulties, understanding the point that squeezed us and triggering our self-responsibility about that situation.

Try to be honest with yourself

How about an exercise? List what recently hurt and hurt you. What you accuse the other of being guilty of. Try, at that moment, to look at what hurt you and try to see only what you have to do with it. Even if there was indeed a mistake and injury on the part of another person, focus now on yourself. Investigate yourself.

Would that be a pattern repeat?

Is it something you’ve experienced before? Have you felt it before? Does it trigger known feelings? What about you made you feel that way? What in you could have attracted or created this situation? Does this situation mirror or reproduce something? Nothing comes to us without reason or purpose. What is it trying to show you about yourself?

And it is also worth, when pertinent, the questioning about your place when accusing the other: Who in you wants to hurt the other, leaving him in guilt? In this blaming game, who in you needs to feel superior? To defend what fragility you don’t want to get in touch with?

While one is projecting and accusing the other for their pain, relationships of defenses and friction are created. Fragile, unstable and superficial relationships, as going deeper in a relationship also involves going deeper within yourself. For this, it takes courage to look inside, assume what you feel and identify where, within you, this is being triggered. Sometimes the other really made a mistake, you were really hurt, but looking honestly at what this generates in you and what this situation can show you about yourself is an open door to healing this pain.

What bothers us can be a reflection of ourselves

Sometimes it hurts to look inside and see where we put ourselves. Sometimes, we even run the risk of realizing that what hurt us in the other is also our behavior. Or perhaps the re-edition of a dynamic of some family relationship or the reflection of our actions. Investigate.

Connect the dots. See what is still in need of healing in yourself. Search your relationship with your parents, your childhood, your patterns of relationships and behaviors. Go investigate. At some point you will find the spot to be healed. The other is just a mirror of ourselves.

Psychotherapy is a tool that helps in this awakening of self-awareness and in finding the path to resolution. Being able to look honestly at everything we carry with us and take more responsibility for our lives, we have the ability to transform what is needed. If the responsibility is always outside of us, we will continue to live in blame, dissatisfied and frustrated. The process of self-knowledge and personal development involves a deep and honest dive into oneself towards the blossoming of the changes we seek.