We’ve all had similar experiences: there’s an unfair situation. You’ve just found your doll with its head off. You burst into a spontaneous roar and immediately your mother anxiously rushes to see what happened. You try to explain that it must be your brother’s doing, through the tears. But he left the house earlier, instead of triumfally laughting in front of you, so your mother can not see the picture the same way as you do and is not interested in that version. Instead, she tries to calm you down and says, “Don’t cry, honey, I’ll buy you a new one.” This leads to exaggerating your crying and for a while you feel desperate, then suddenly you fall silent. Because you feel that there’s no point – she doesn’t understand why you’re crying. In fact, neither do you – but you probably wanted to express your pain at the injustice, to draw the attention of the house “authorities” and coerce them to restore justice by punishing the culprit.

But the “authorities” – your mother – had a different agenda. Her main goal has been to restore silence as quickly as possible, because she herself had a lot on her table. So when you did shut up, your mother felt relieved, kissed you on the cheek and left. Or she just left without a kiss – it depends on the type of mother you had 😉

But you still keep your unspoken truth inside you, along with the feeling that no one cares to understand you. And you are right, because “your truth” that this was your brother’s doing is not a fact, but an assumption without evidence and even you have some doubt. Maybe you needed your mother to conduct an investigation to clarify the truth and make a fair judgment, but nothing like that happened. Or you just wanted to be listened to with understanding, like good psychologists do. But your mother was not a psychologist – she was just an ordinary loving mother who was doing the best she could. So then you decided to dealing with your problems on your own, instead of trying to explain your own truth, because that makes you feel somehow defeated in such cases.

So the real issue here is to understand that when we tell our own truth, we can have hidden agenda – unconscious expectations about what the other person should do. Sometimes we just expect a shoulder to cry on. But how many of your friends, colleagues or your partner or boss can actively listen like professional psychologists? None, right? Most of them are just trying to give you advice or solution for your problems, which further irritates you and makes you keep your mouth shut. Again, like in your childhood!

Sometimes we need just tell our truth to feel relief. But in other cases we secretly seek confirmation that we were right and the other party who did us the injustice was bad. We are looking for validation in such cases. In other cases we share our truth with the secret desire to get this shameless offender to change their behavior or to admit that they are wrong. And this desire is especially strong when we share our truth with the alleged offender himself – saying in a scolding tone, “You always do this or that” actually masks our fear of directly saying what we want to this person. Instead, we prefer to accuse them to their face, trying to achieve what we want imposing guilt on them. And so, guilt imposing behavior becomes a way for unconsciously manipulating children, partners, or other people in our own world for our whole life.

So it seems the question here is not whether it is worth telling your truth, but asking yourself WHY you are telling it – what is your deepest reason for telling it.

Why for example most haters on the internet are insecure own truth expressors who are afraid to stand up in front of others and speak openly, but feel obligated to criticize the truth of others, when it doesn’t match their own ? What if they subconsciously believe there is only one truth and that is the truth of the authority? And when I unintentionally provoke their truth with my different opinion they perceive it as attack to their personality, because they build their persona around their truth. So the real communication dynamic here is not about the truth, but about the power. They lack confidence to speak because as children they learned that only the authority can have their own truth – they were punished, shamed, or otherwise silenced when they tried to speak what they sense. Their immature parents or bosses didn’t understand that many personal truths can exist simultaneously, without any one of them needing to dominate.
And because of that, such already grown by age, but not by consciousness people believe they have to become the final authority, stepping on everyones head to win the right to express their truth openly at the end. They have to beat the boss. Taking the crown from someone they perceive as an authority is their next unconcious battle that did not take place with the authority in their own family as children. They are just trying to validate themselves this way. The joke is that if they are trying to beat you, this means they curently perceive you as authority, because they are feeling less confident comparing to you and trying to “minimize” you this way, to humiliate you.

For them, telling the truth is a power struggle in which there is only one winner – the one who has the last word. And they are not telling their truth – they are trying to shut you up! Only then will they themselves become an authority in their own eyes.

Sad. Because children raised in such a toxic environment become passive-aggressive in their communication, instead of being assertive. And strive for power instead of authencity.

Which differs by the ultimate goal by the way – to be yourself and express your truth freely, without ulterior motives.