The gift of brutal honesty with ourselves

We all avoid facing the truth at times: the hurtful realisations, the disruptive decisions they’d trigger, the reckoning with guilt, shame, loss. We are wired for self-protection and our instinct to avoid suffering sometimes expresses itself as resistance to looking ourselves and life in the face.

What are you afraid you aren’t being honest with yourself about? What are the lies that you may have been telling yourself? About yourself, about others, about life?

Write them down. Don’t censor yourself. Just put anything and everything that comes to mind. You can always decide later that some of the things you wrote aren’t your truth after all. But just be brutally honest at first. Don’t hold back. There’s a catharsis in the act of expressing and articulating our thoughts, fears, doubts. Give yourself the gift of it.