The White Lie of "Okay-ness

When it comes to emotional health, people fall into one of twocategories: those who are aware of their feelings and consciously work toward healing and maturing, and those who are not aware and operate on emotional autopilot.

Some people realize they must deal with unresolved issues in their lives to heal and move on. For others, poor emotional health is the only state they know, and the concept of achieving emotional health and flushing out pain and negativity from their lives doesn't even seem within the realm of possibility.

Either way whether you believe you can or can't become emotionally healthier-you're right. Only you have the power to believe, and only you can transform that belief into reality. And the first step is being emotionally honest with yourself and others. This is not always easy. Even though emotional health seems to be in vogue right now, we still frown on the expression of pain. Each day, society encourages people to put on a face that communicates, "Everything's OK."

This is one of the greatest social illusions. It's impossible for everything to be OK. According to The Great American Lie by Rick Thorne (self-published, 2002), most people make hundreds of statements a day that misrepresent reality. Technically, this means we're all little white liars. When I contemplated this, I realized that the majority of white lies I told were intended to portray everything about me and my life as OK. Playing the role of "Mr. Successful" and struggling to keep my act together took up a lot of my energy all to compensate for my insecurities and low self-confidence.

There was the challenge. If I was to truly commit myself to achieving emotional health, I had to start practising microscopic honesty by telling it like it is.

From then on, when people asked me, "How are you doing?" I would check in to see if I had sadness in my heart about an issue between me and my daughter, or whether I was stricken with fear about a business deal that could fall through. Since this was how I felt, I told them the truth only to discover that they seemed to take it harder than I did. Nevertheless, I continue to tell it like it is, only because I don't want to expend any more energy on faking it.

Honesty is a foundational cornerstone in emotional health. At the same time, it's also one of the scariest principles to abide by because it exposes us for who we really are and reveals the multitude of feelings that teem inside of us.

Some people think avoiding honesty keeps them impervious to pain. But, mysteriously, the opposite is true: if we truly want to feel secure, we have to stop wasting energy in constructing a false image of ourselves. That's authenticity, and developing it is healing oil to our emotions.

It takes real courage and strength to embrace life principles like honesty, which are easy to comprehend but difficult to follow. The most incredible journey is the one from your head to your heart. Explore.

Some people think avoiding honesty keeps them impervious to pain. But, mysteriously, the opposite is true: if we truly want to feel secure, we have to stop wasting energy in constructing a false image of ourselves.