Mark Twain, Telling the Truth, and Emotional Suffering

Posted on June 17, 2016 by Blair Ashby, One of Thousands of Spirituality Coaches on Noomii.

Mark Twain once said, “If you tell the truth, you never have to remember anything”. It’s a light-hearted reminder that lying tends to make problems, not relieve them. In many ways it’s obvious. You experience something, so that memory is natural. If one lies about it, one has to remember the lies on top of the truth. Then one has to make up more lies to add weight to the believability of the first lie. It’s a never-ending cycle of stacking lies to uphold a lie. Basically, lies hold us hostage to the imagined consequences of telling the truth. It’s a lot of work, telling lies.

Here is another way to look at this quote. If you’re experiencing a lot of negative emotions in your life, it is quite likely you are not telling yourself the truth about something. Reality is incessant. It will force itself upon us no matter what. However, sometimes we are not ready to face reality. When this happens, we tell lies to ourselves to invent a story we find easier to accept. Like the earlier conclusion about lies, we have to spend a lot of brainpower making up stories to explain the non-truths we’ve told ourselves in a futile exercise of trying to hide some aspect of reality from ourselves. Unfortunately, the consequence of this denial is almost always negative emotions or emotional pain. We don’t like being lied to, even if we’re the ones lying to ourselves. The important point is that most, if not all, of these negative emotions are totally unnecessary.

Maybe you are not ready or do not want to face reality about a situation or experience yet. That is okay. Reality can be ugly and hard to face. It frequently doesn’t agree with our sense of how the world should be. Yet it is reality. And keeping track of all the lies we tell ourselves to ignore or deny reality costs us. It costs us a lot of happiness and peace in our lives. You deserve a better life than than one filled with lies to cover up something you don’t like.

The nice thing is, you don’t have to face reality head-on to end the emotional pain you feel. You just need to admit to yourself how you’re feeling right now. Be truthful here. The more truthful you are about the negative emotions you’re feeling, the more you begin to release their hold over your life and your happiness. It seems counterintuitive, but for the sake of your happiness, try it. Use the phrase, “I feel…” and then fill in the emotions you’re feeling.

Saying “I feel” is important. If you say “I’m” and fill in an emotion, now you’ve tied yourself to that emotion. It becomes a dictator that rules you. If you say “I feel”, you give yourself permission to feel the emotions without allowing them to take over your mind.

Once you allow yourself to feel the emotions rising up in you, you no longer have to lie to yourself to justify feeling the way you do. You can accept you for who you are and how you feel. Later, if you want to go further, you can begin to gently face the reality that triggered the emotions. It’s a process of loving yourself, beginning with telling yourself the truth.

You’re an amazing person. You deserve the Joy, Peace, and Contentment that comes with accepting the reality about how you feel. You deserve to tell yourself the truth. You deserve happiness.

If you’d like to talk with me about your desire to experience more happiness, please call me. It would be my honor to walk with you and be your guide as you take the path to more happiness in your life.

May Joy, Peace, and Contentment fill your day.
Blair