Being Honest With Yourself
Honesty is not found in revealing the truth, but in understanding how deeply afraid of it we are.
- David Whyte
I switched schools at the beginning of my sophomore year in high school and became instant friends with Jeff, a kid who shared my sense of humor and my class schedule. Pretty soon we were hanging out after school, shooting hoops, and listening to music.
I came from a conservative evangelical Christian family and was still steeped in that world. Jeff came from a secular Jewish family. None of this made a difference until one day we started talking about evolution and of course I found myself defending creationism.
I remembered I had a book about creationism my dad bought me in middle school. Granted, I hadn’t actually read the book—I mean, why would I? Creationism was fact and here’s the book that says so, written by an expert (like, who else writes books except for experts?). Anyway, I brought the book over to Jeff’s house thinking that it would settle the debate.
As I showed him different arguments in the book, and he pointed out the obvious problems, I remember slowly realizing that I had been fooling myself. Creationism wasn’t the obvious slam dunk I wanted it to be. By the end of that joint book reading, I just wanted to change the subject.
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I have several memories like this from high school: moments when it became clear that I had been fooling myself (whether it was about religion, politics, how cool I thought I was, etc.). I never felt like I had been misled by anyone. Instead, I felt like I should’ve known better. The truth felt so obvious once I opened up to it.
As a teenager I didn’t have the tools to dig deeper into this, but it left me as a young adult with a fear of lying to myself and yearning to tell myself the truth. Now in mid-life, as I’ve stepped into my own emotional healing journey, and I work individually and in groups as an emotional health coach, I can see that self-honesty and self-deception aren’t what I thought they were.
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One of the reasons self-honesty and self-deception are so hard to understand is that most of us have an idea of our “self” as a unified whole. Maybe we assume our “self” has layers (ego vs. subconscious), but even with the layers, how do you make sense of honesty and deception? Who is deceiving whom?
It’s only through a robust parts-work lens that these ideas makes sense. If you’re just YOU then how can you be honest with or deceive you? But a fully fleshed out parts perspective (like Internal Family Systems, which I’ve mentioned before in my newsletter and you can read more about here) clears the fog out pretty quickly.
If I see myself as a system of parts, then honesty and deception take on totally different meanings. Self-honesty isn’t when one part tells another part the truth; that could still leave other parts in the dark. Self-honesty is when ALL inner parts are allowed to be heard and seen. Self-deception is when at least one inner part is shut down, shut out, or exiled.
Self-deception happens when parts are in conflict, don’t trust each other, and are afraid of that some parts could overwhelm or disrupt your internal system. When I was kid, I had manager parts that shut down the skeptical, inquisitive parts because they were afraid that such skepticism and inquiry would cause me to lose my attachment with my family and church community.
From this view, self-deception serves an important function in our inner system. Manager parts are doing their best to keep us safe. Self-honesty—that is, opening up and letting all our parts be heard and seen—is a serious threat to our well-being if it means losing the most important connections in our life.
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There is a fulcrum point in most people’s growth journey where the healing power of self-honesty outweighs the benefits of self-deception and safety. An inner trust starts to build that ALL of your parts have an essential goodness and wisdom. You begin to trust that no matter how painful self-honesty feels in the moment, your system will ultimately unfold into love, connection, and healing.