Brutal honesty: the first step to true transformation

When I am in social settings and people learn what I do and about the transformations I have experienced, I’m often asked about what is the first thing others can do to increase their self-esteem, self-confidence and to gain inner-peace.

The answer, is simple, I answer: Be brutally honest about yourself and the negative sides of your personality that you wish you didn’t possess.

An issue I have with some motivational experts is that they instruct their audience at great length to recognize their superb qualities and how unique and special they are. My problem with this is that they don’t ask us to focus enough (if at all) on admitting who we are when it comes to the less favorable sides to our personalities.

Four years ago, when I was broken and at the end of my rope, I made a decision that if I was going to continue on in life, I would have to do this by being the healthiest and happiest “me” possible. I wanted a secure self-esteem and an ultimately genuine, not fleeting, self-confidence.

To achieve this, I had to first admit who I had become and not just paint this negative side of myself with a broad brush. I would have to peer into myself in great detail and perform an honest self-inventory. We all have dark parts of our personalities and traits we wish we didn’t possess, and we all struggle with our darkness in different arenas.

It may be jealousy, bitte
ess, lying, using people, cheating, or as was my case, and in what seems to be affecting our society a lot, anger. I have struggled with many issues, but none greater than anger and the abusive behavior that came from it.

The abusive behavior I speak of wasn’t in the sense of physical abuse, but more verbal and acting out. When I would really lose my temper I had the lovely habit of breaking inanimate objects. This manifestation of my anger was my rock-bottom and had it continued unabated, it could have turned into physical abuse.

However, I don’t want to play down how bad verbal abuse can be and breaking an inanimate object is still a violent act.

Some recovery programs teach that you must first admit there is a problem and then “make a searching and moral inventory.” But, what I find rare is in this process of admitting faults is doing it with complete honesty. Brutal honesty.

We may not realize it, but we often encourage our peers to feel good about their negative behavior. I was recently in line at a bookstore and there was a couple in front of me. Their dialogue, although all too common, disturbed me:

Reflections of the self and the soul

“I kind of feel bad for flipping off that guy,” said regretful random man.

“Screw him, honey, he cut you off, after all,” replied enabling random woman.

This behavior is not okay. It doesn’t matter what someone else did. We are responsible for our actions, and allowing others to justify wrongdoings doesn’t help them to reach a higher plane of living. Instead, it justifies their actions and impedes them from improving. And it reinforces our own negative behavior.

Some well-intentioned professionals do this as well.

While going through my own transformation, I would hear these professionals give advice on admitting faults: “That wasn’t you who displayed this negativity; it was your past affecting how you behaved and a reflection of your poor self-esteem. You need to embrace who you really are, that you are special and great.”

I reject this philosophy of dealing with our flaws.

I was an angry person and it was I who displayed these acts of anger, not someone else! Once we create excuses or justifications, using our past for present behavior, then we are not truly admitting who we have become.

Our past should be used only as an explanation, not as justification.

Admitting that I had anger and temper issues was the most difficult task I had ever faced. It was painful and evoked many emotions of regret and pain, but it was also my first step to enlightenment. Through this process, and despite the pain it caused me, I felt liberated.

One of the reasons it is so difficult for many of us to exert this brutal honesty is because we actually don’t think we can truly transform; therefore it’s easier to pretend we are better than we actually are. Our society is filled with clichés and a belief system that teaches us we can’t change.

“A leopard doesn’t change its spots.”

“People are who they are; people don’t change.”

Then we have parables like the scorpion and the frog.

Well, we are not leopards, scorpions or frogs, and people do change. I know this because I did, and I have seen so many people achieve a similar transformation. We have this incredible tool within us, our brain, which is the key to our transformation.

However, we can’t use this tool to assist us in transforming if we’re too busy using it to justify our negative actions.

By admitting painful truths to myself, I changed from running away from my issues to taking control of them. How are we supposed to transform to greatness if we ignore who we really are to begin with? There is only so much transforming and growing we can do as long as we are not being fully honest with ourselves.

After we are honest with ourselves and start the road to redemption and transformation, we can then begin to accept ourselves and others. This acceptance is our freedom from past behavior; because I have transcended my issues and found inner peace, I can accept myself fully, not only who I was as an angry individual, but who I am now as a healthy person.

When we wrong someone, lose our temper, lie, use someone, etc., we have a space in reflecting on this action to decide how we are going to handle this internally. Often we take the easy road and justify our bad behavior so that we feel better.

But it’s far better to take the tough road and admit who we are and what we are capable of, because that road leads us to the greatest gift of all: true transformation.

Original article posted in Carter's column, In That Moment of Space, for the Washington Times Communities. http://communities.washingtontimes.com/neighborhood/moment-space/2011/oct/6/brutal-honesty-first-step-true-transformation/