The truth doesn’t hurt, but not knowing it does

Contrary to what some poets, writers and musicians lament ‘the truth hurts’ – it really doesn’t. It’s not knowing the truth, avoiding, denying or resisting the truth in our lives that causes us to feel any discomfort or pain.

Sometimes the more we resist the truth, the more anxious or fearful we become because it may be stepping away from what is unpleasantly familiar, into something pleasant that is foreign to us but knowing and accepting the truth brings immediate relief and joy.

When we are really challenged in life – someone betrays us, a loved one becomes ill or dies, we are rejected or fortune doesn’t follow us, we may feel pain but the pain we feel is not caused by our external circumstances, but by our lack of true understanding, the meaning we give it and our resistance to the reality.

Our avoidance or resistance is guided by the false beliefs we have gained from our past experiences and what we’ve been taught that we try so hard to hang onto. That is until nature takes over and guides us through a grief process to the truth so we no longer need to feel any discomfort or pain.

The well-known five stages of grief – ‘denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance’ is a theory formulated by Swiss-American psychiatrist, Elisabeth Kübler-Ross. She also noted that it wasn’t a complete list of possible emotions and could occur in any order with reactions being different between different people. This is because we all have different perceptions and beliefs but the process always begins with denial and ends with the acceptance of the truth.