Your Truth Is Innocent
How often have you held back your truth with others? Perhaps you hid your truth in order to avoid hurting someone’s feelings? Maybe what’s true for you isn’t acceptable to others, so you keep it to yourself? Being made wrong for what is true for us is a common experience we have as children that can carry over into adulthood unless we find a way to honor our truth as innocent. We really did see that imaginary friend or feel terror at the monster in the closet even when our caregivers told us it’s not true – that we were ‘imagining’ it. At some point in our upbringing, most of us stop listening to our own truth and accept what others have told us as the truth. Instead of honoring our inner senses, we go along to get along. This is how we lose our innocence (inner-sense).
Our truth can’t do any harm to another person, place or thing – it is innocent. Seeing, knowing and speaking our truth keeps us in alignment with ourselves, and with others. It helps us make good choices for ourselves and keeps us both honest and open to learning and understanding instead of jumping to conclusions. Truth includes the facts about what is happening in the objective physical world, and the subjective feelings we experience as we relate to what is happening. If we are told that our rights do not matter, even though we signed an agreement that states our rights, our rights have been violated. The truth is that we have rights, and the other party does not want to honor them. If we feel rejected, and unimportant when we are told that our rights do not matter, that is also the truth given our subjective experience. If we believe another’s version of the truth instead of ours, and go along with it, we can lose ourselves completely.
Those of us that have been in a relationship with a narcissistic person have experienced this ‘inversion’ of the truth repeatedly. First, we are told how wonderful and special we are, showered with gifts and attention. We trust that this person has our best interests at heart. Then, we are told how we are the problem if we want anything different than they want. We are told what we want is wrong and selfish and that we should feel guilty, or ashamed about it since they don’t agree with it. It’s very hard to hold onto our ‘truth’ when this happens, and we begin to question if what we want or how we feel IS the problem –perhaps we are the crazy one?
We may ignore our own truth (facts or feelings) to handle the pain of what is happening. Instead of acknowledging that we are being ‘played’, we rationalize their behavior and make it OK. One example might be a woman in an abusive marriage defending her husband’s angry outbursts towards her because ‘he had a hard childhood’ so she lets him treat her badly. Instead of acknowledging the truth of what is happening, she continues to allow him to hit her, shame her emotionally, and threaten her if she tells any of her friends or family about what is going on. Her fear of his truth is greater than her ability to acknowledge her own truth and act on the facts and feelings she is experiencing. When we have been taught to ignore our own feelings and focus on soothing someone else’s feelings to stay safe, we can lose our inner sense of what is and isn’t OK with us. Our ‘inner sense’ of what is and isn’t OK for us is what we use to honor our INNOCENCE.
There is never a need to make someone else wrong for their choices. They are innocent in deciding what is best for them, even if you see it differently. If you don’t want others to make you wrong for your choices, then start acknowledging the innocence in their choices. Think of it this way, if they had a better way of handling things they would be using it – BUT THEY DON’T. If you can see them as innocent in doing what they are doing, you can begin to honor the fact that you have been doing the best you can with what you understood as well. Now that you can see that YOUR truth is what matters the most, you can see yourself as innocent and begin to honor what is best for you. It’s OK that the woman stayed in the abusive relationship as long as she did. There may be that ‘last straw’ event that has her finally acknowledge the truth of what is happening and how she feels. Once she allows that to happen, she can see her own innocence (she was doing the best she could!) and now her truth is going to help her make better choices for herself. She can use her ‘inner-sense’ to do what is most loving for her in moving away from the abusive situation.
Our truth cannot do harm to another. There are no consequences that you are responsible for if another doesn’t agree with your choices, or it shakes up their perspectives of themselves or the world. That is their responsibility. Your truth is your responsibility.
What truth can you reclaim as innocent today?