Honesty

When lived honestly, life heals itself. The truth you resist is the battle
you fight.

You have dumped clothes inside a washing machine. The machine has performed
its job. Now the clothes have to be taken out for drying. The longer you
keep the clothes inside the machine the fouler the odour will become. Don't
take it out for a few days and the stink will become unbearable. So it is
with our thoughts and emotions. The more and more we keep building thoughts
but do not communicate, and the more and more we feel the emotions but do
not express, the greater becomes the gap in the relationship. How long will
you sweep things under the carpet? Eventually it will come out, and when it
comes out it will come out in unmanageable ugly proportions.

Thoughts formed but not communicated and emotions felt but not expressed
become incomplete cycles. Incomplete cycles liner alive in the subconscious.
Metaphorically, the lingering incomplete cycles are like the scratches
formed in the spectacles – anything and everything seen through the
spectacles looks scratched. It is ironical that the scratches are not on the
objects, but in the medium through which the objects are viewed. All in all,
it hampers the vision.

When you do not spontaneously communicate your thoughts and express your
feelings, you begin to distort it. You tend to exaggerate or diminish the
truth to placate your suppressed feelings. When you cannot face, you tend to
deny. What you cannot accept, you pretend as if you do not care about it. As
far as our incomplete cycles are concerned, it seems, time makes a liar out
of all of us.

The secret of emotional health is to tell the person who hurt you that they
hurt you, when they hurt you. Otherwise these incomplete cycles will
reappear sometime in the future and ruin even your good times. The weight of
the emotional baggage burdens the present. Something in the present will
remind you of some unfinished suppression and reawaken those old feelings.
Those reawakened feelings will lead you to take action, which may be
completely irrelevant to the current contexts of your life. However it is
important to remember that the old feelings resurface in order to be
resolved and not to punish you. Emotional stress is purely due to thoughts
not communicated and emotions not expressed. Emotional illness is a storage
disease.

You are telling me, "Honestly, if I start expressing all my thoughts and
feelings, I will hurt the person who matters so much to me." I am telling
you, "If you don't, you will eventually hurt the relationship itself."

Let us learn to face the truth, even if it hurts. Let those who matter to us
the most learn to face the truth, even if it hurts. Communicate your
thoughts and feelings directly to the person who instigated it. Be prompt.
Don't wait for ideal conditions. Be simple. Finish your complaint and let
go. Don't exaggerate; don't nag; avoid overkill. If the person feels with
you, you have succeeded. If not, understand whom you are dealing with.
Accept what is. Forgive and let go of your hurt. Move on…. You have nothing
to prove.