The truth you resist is the battle you fight

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 odor will be. Don’t take it out for a few days and the stench 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 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 linger alive in subconscious. Metaphorically, the lingering incomplete cycles are like scratches formed on the spectacles – anything and everything seen through the spectacle looks scratched. It is ironical that the scratches are not on objects, but in the medium through which the objects are viewed. In all, they hamper the vision.

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

The secret of emotional health is to tell the persons who hurt you that they hurt you, when they hurt you. Otherwise these incomplete cycles will reappear sometime in 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 old feelings. Those reawakened feelings will lead you to act in a way that may be completely irrelevant to the current context of your life. However, it is important to remember that 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, don’t overkill. If the person feels with you, you have succeeded. If not, understand who you are dealing with. Accept what is. Forgive and let go of your hurt. Move on… You have nothing to prove.