DailyJim: The truth can hurt but it can also heal

Hello everyone, welcome to another Daily Gym. This is Monday, November 11th, 2024. Today I want to talk about how the truth can hurt, but also can heal. Maybe I'll change the title. This whole idea is that sometimes I think we're afraid of telling the truth or receiving the truth or just being really open and honest because it can really hurt. It can make us feel angry. It can make us feel sad. It can make us feel ashamed. It can make us feel afraid. So many other feelings that we often don't want to feel, even though I think we should want to feel them or be okay with them.

But the truth can also heal.

And the example that comes to mind is like taking medicine. Sometimes medicine hurts. Sometimes it's really annoying to get a shot in the arm or to be in an MRI machine and have all the sounds whirring around your head or to receive a diagnosis from a doctor or to tell a doctor about certain pains that we've been experiencing.

Because we don't want to admit it, we maybe feel embarrassed. We feel embarrassed of them looking at certain parts of our body. We feel embarrassed even thinking about parts of our body. We feel scared thinking about the frailty of life, fragility of life.

And yet when we do, it can help us heal. It can help us heal so much. So for example, taking that really annoying large pill, it may suck. But if we take the pill every single day when we're supposed to, the pill can help us overcome H. Pylori, so we don't have stomach ulcers anymore, can help us overcome malaria, can help us overcome lots of different diseases. Maybe those are more African relevant most of the time. But I think this also applies to conversations. Sometimes telling the truth or receiving the truth can really fucking hurt. It can make us confront things that we've been trying to avoid for a long time. It can make us think about things that we really didn't want to think about. It can make us feel a lot of things we don't want to feel. Maybe we don't want to feel sadness. and hearing the truth can bring up that sadness very fast.

But when we don't speak the truth, when we don't open up and honestly share what's going on, the conflicts just fester.

If you have a problem with your leg and you don't tell anyone, then your body will start to adjust when you're walking to overcompensate for the problem with the leg. And then you might start having problems with your hips. You might start having problems with your back as well. Because you didn't want to tell anyone you had a problem with the leg because maybe you were an athlete or maybe you weren't an athlete. Maybe you felt insecure that you weren't an athlete and so you're like, I'm a strong guy, I'm tough, I don't need this. But that can damage other parts of the body longer term. Same thing with infections. Infections can spread. Infections can open us up to other infections. Open wounds can, you know, be, can again fester and linger and create opportunities for other viruses or infections to get in. Um but again it's similar in conversations i i look at the election that happened recently and it's again somewhat surreal because i'm so far away but how many of us just haven't had real honest conversations about what's going on in our lives and the pains and the struggles and the shames and the insecurities and fears and the we just just not talking about the real things. And then how often does it manifest as a secondary tertiary like it's a quaternary, fourth level um wound and then we're like oh see it's this fourth level wound it's like well if you would have paid attention to the first level wound that may have stopped the fourth level wound but you're too afraid you didn't have the courage to be honest to either hurt yourself or hurt the other person or cause whatever feelings you didn't want and so therefore we're now on the fourth level conversation, which is so disconnected from where it actually came from, or maybe where the root that's actually powering it. And so I just, I don't know, I think sometimes we think, well, if I just tell them the truth, then it shouldn't hurt. No, it can hurt. Oh, I shouldn't have told you the truth. No, no, please, please keep telling me the truth. Please keep sharing the truth. Please keep wanting to hear the truth, or at least the honesty and the perspective from myself and others, because, then we can actually heal, then we can actually address, we can resolve conflicts or problems or build solutions together or reunite or whatever we want to call it if we just start being honest because the truth can hurt but so can when we say the opposite the untruth the deception the lies the hiding the secrets it can hurt in different ways it causes different emotions the challenge is it doesn't often heal as well so it's almost like we're gonna feel regardless of whether someone tells us the truth or doesn't tell us the truth. But telling the truth or being much more open and honest can lead more to healing, can lead more to cooperation and problem solving or whatnot. Whereas not telling the truth still can cause a lot of emotions. I'd argue maybe even more anxiety, more stress, more suspicion, some of these things.

But it really struggles to resolve problems because now there's so many unknown variables and it's very hard for people to coordinate. If we think about language, language is a coordination mechanism. I agree that agree means this. You also agree that agree means this. And so if I think agree means one thing and you think agree means another thing, we're having a problem. And if you don't tell me that you think agree means something else, maybe you know you think it means something else, but you're not going to tell me, then we can have an even bigger problem. And it can fester and manifest into different things. You know, the word agree is maybe not so contentious, but if we talk about vacation, or if we talk about good, or if we talk about.

Love, or if we talk about faith, or faithfulness, or loyalty, or if we talk about respect, or if we talk about some of these words that have some deep, deep emotional connotations for people, if we have different interpretations of them and we don't communicate then we're not coordinate coordinating very well and again sometimes these conversations about words or about situations or decisions or relationships or feelings or thoughts or beliefs or whatever can be really hard aka cause a lot of feelings but again not talking about these things can cause a lot of feelings too in both sides. The guilt of not saying something, the worry that one is going to get caught, the other person on the receiving side, the suspicion, the confusion at the behavioral change, maybe the awareness when they do find out, the fear when they do find out, the anger and, yeah I just think.

When we talk about things when we are more open and honest and transparent and clear and truthful or whatever you want to call it, then we can, we feel just like, we feel maybe to the same level, if not more, you know, I don't know if more or less, but we feel a lot, just like when we don't open up and share these things.

But at least we can maybe address the issue, the actual issue, and not spend so much time talking about third fourth fifth sixth seventh level bullshit that really doesn't have much to do with the base issue so yeah i just i appreciate it i like when people are really honest with me even if it hurts i really do and then sometimes people would be like but i told you the truth why are you so like angry it's like because the thing i'm not necessarily not going to feel angry, um but i can still be grateful you told me the truth and now we can figure out how to resolve a conflict together. Like at least we're communicating and trying to, like we have the same information. Um, when we have different information, it's really hard to work together. It tends to be more competition and competition can be really stressful. And again, doesn't, this is, I mean, there's lots of capitalist theory about how competition is the thing that builds the world. I don't think so. Um, I think a lot of it's cooperation and even competition that feels more cooperative competition than actual competitive competition, but that's a topic for another day. So anyways, um, yeah, just sitting with truth or at least being told the truth and people being honest with me and me being honest with others. And again, feeling a lot, but grateful for it because it feels like at least there's a kinship or a unity in it. And I just hope, like I'll pull back and talk about the election. I just hope that in the US and around the world, we just start talking about the real things. We just start opening up and sharing the real things with our friends and families, but ideally online as well. We start telling people real things. We We stop making up stuff. We stop lying. We stop puffing out our chests. We stop doing so much that just perpetuates or deepens conflict and deepens division. It's more division and distancing than even conflict, maybe. It's like unity versus division. So, yeah, maybe it's not that truth can hurt, but truth can unite. Maybe that's a better one, but I can talk about that another day. Um yeah i can say truth can heal and truth can you know truth can hurt and truth truth can also heal or unite yeah it's too wordy anyways i'm gonna go i'm at 10 minutes i hate you i went over 10 minutes all right talk to y'all tomorrow good night.