You can be honest and discerning; authenticity should not sacrifice your safety.
Speaking the truth—your truth—for many women can feel like an unwise and even dangerous choice. If you’ve grown up in this culture, you’ve likely been conditioned by strong narratives, storylines that have taught you how to think about authenticity in your relationships and saying what you actually feel, want, and need—not just the watered-down, sweetened version of your experience. From the time you’re born, you’ve been marinating in powerful beliefs about what will happen to you if you’re honest, what telling the truth will lead to in your life, and also, what it will imply about the kind of person you are.
Often without realizing it, you’ve bought into these cultural narratives and as a result, have learned to deny and abandon your truth, stay silent, and focus on making your truth work for the greatest peace in your relationships. The myths you’ve learned about the truth-telling process have kept you inauthentic and, often, feeling unknown, unheard, and unfulfilled in even your most intimate relationships.
When it comes to the specific myths you may have accepted as truth, the four that follow are prime perpetrators in keeping people quiet, inauthentic, and ultimately less than who they are. And therefore, they are the four that most need to be illuminated, challenged, and changed.
Myth #1: You Are a ‘My Way or the Highway’ Person
The first myth about speaking your truth out loud (to other people) is this: if you dare to tell your truth, it will mean that you’re a “my way or the highway” person. In a nutshell, that you don’t care about what anyone else thinks, feels, or needs—you are “Teflon” to everyone else’s experience. The cautionary tale you’re told from the time you’re born is that if you’re honest about your experience, then you become someone who does things your way no matter what—an emotional bully who’s OK with hurting and alienating people, and who has no interest in how your truth impacts other people. And furthermore, that you’re just fine without relationships—if that’s the cost.
Seen through the lens of this faulty narrative, your truth is a confrontation, an aggression, something you do to another person—as opposed to something you give to yourself, the other person, and to the relationship itself. Your truth is an ending as opposed to a beginning, a “this is my truth so deal with it” event as opposed to a “this is how it is for me, and how is it for you?” conversation.
Myth #2: Truth Is a One-Shot Deal—Anything Less Is a Failing
The second false narrative you’re likely taught is that the truth is an all-or-nothing event, something that has to be delivered in one all-inclusive go. Your honesty must arrive fully complete and can’t be titrated, adjusted, rolled out over time, and strategically managed. At the same time, you’re taught that anything less than the whole truth, told in its fullest form, is a failing on your part. Presenting your feelings, wants, and needs slowly, cautiously, strategically—in parts and maybe never in their complete self-known form, is seen as a form of lying or withholding. It’s seen as something less than and not really the truth.
Myth #3: Truth Should Be Shared Regardless of the Consequences to Your Safety and Well-Being
In this false cultural myth, telling your truth in relationship, this “vomiting up” of everything you ever felt or needed, happens in a relational vacuum, disconnected from whom you’re sharing it with and unrelated to the potential consequences that might come from it. In order to be a truthful person, to not be inauthentic and a fraud, you have to say everything you feel in its entirety no matter the consequences to your own well-being, happiness, and safety—whether psychological, emotional, or physical.
Punishment, conflict, emotional retaliation, withdrawal, abandonment, financial repercussion, loss of home, ground, and opportunity, destabilization of family—all of these potential realities are supposed to be irrelevant if you are going to be an authentic person. If you factor in your actual reality in deciding how, when, and if you tell the whole truth or any part of it, then you’re, by default, being dishonest or worse, a coward. Your loyalty must be to the truth above all else, but not to yourself.
Myth #4: If You Tell the Truth, You Will End Up Alone
Rounding out the most common myths that many people have been spoon-fed about speaking your truth is the one that’s hardest to shake, most fundamental, and deeply ingrained. The story is this: being honest about how you feel and what you need will leave you rejected and abandoned. Being real means being alone. As one woman put it, “If I’m honest, I’ll end up dying alone in a house full of cats.” The cultural narrative teaches you that being real and being related are incompatible realities.
This narrative is false and worse than false, it’s often responsible for keeping you silent and invisible, inauthentic, disempowered, self-critical, and ultimately, committed to being pleasing. This myth is responsible for keeping you locked in the gilded cage of likability, terrified of bringing yourself more wholly into your own life. You’ve learned to believe that showing up as who you really are will render you isolated, abandoned, and existentially alone.
Women, by nature, are typically relationally oriented and connected creatures. The prospect of living (and dying) alone is often seen as a fate worse than anything, and certainly worse than inauthenticity or self-abandonment. That said, you unknowingly abandon yourself in an effort to take care of yourself.
So, I want to take these myths apart, one by one—challenge them and shed light on their inherent mendacity and hypocrisy, to clarify what’s actually true. Because the story you’ve been told about speaking your truth is positively not true. Stay tuned… more to come in Part 2.
