[EP39] How to be Honest with Yourself

Transcript

Natasha: Welcome back to another episode of the Awakened Wife Podcast. I’m Natasha Koo—

Jachym: I’m Jachym Jerie, and we are from your exceptional relationship dot com.

Natasha: And the last episode, Episode 38, we shared with you are the three essential steps and tips on how to be authentic in your relationship or marriage. Now, today, we want to break down this topic even further. Because there’s one thing that we said the first step from the last episode, which is how to be honest, just being honest with yourself, but today, we’re going to be uncovering how to actually do that. It’s not as easy as you think it would be. Surprisingly, we think that you know, we are the ones we know ourselves best. And like, what what what else is there to uncover? Right? What else is hidden? What don’t I know about myself? 

But when you are in a relationship, and you are in a marriage, what you might have noticed is that a lot of the conflicts, right, a lot of the communication issues that come about a lot of times it is actually triggered because either other people they’re trying to get their point across, they’re trying to get their opinion across. And you’re trying to find that peaceful, thriving, joyful zone between your two worlds, right? So in one sense, you have to bring in that truth, you have to communicate that need to be yourself within your relationship, it’s the only way for it to truly thrive. So this is one of the reasons why it’s so essential to know yourself and be honest with yourself. 

A lot of people value transparency, a lot of people value honesty in their partner, right, and the communication expected from the other person. But how about you, and the message that you are sending to your partner? Is it honest and truthful to begin with, because that is the foundation of that transparency and Honesty and trust that you’re looking for? So with that kind of red carpet set up for us in how we’re going to engage with this topic, let’s dive into it. 

Jachym: In the very first part of this episode, we want to look at the reasons why you want to be even honest with yourself. What’s the big deal about it? First of all, being honest with yourself has an impact on how you’re living your life. And with it, when you are being honest, comes a sense of freedom, a sense of fulfillment, a sense of purpose, a sense of rightness, so you start to feel good about yourself, and you start to live a life that feels good to you because it is coming from an authentic and truthful place within you. So imagine you are putting yourself in some contorted position, and you have to walk through life in this position, now that that position is not natural to you, it’s awkward, and you feel not good in your body. 

And your body’s telling you it doesn’t feel good. And then you suddenly adapt to the position that feels right for you. In this moment, it feels freeing, it feels right, your body’s thankful for it. Well, it’s the same thing with being honest with yourself, you are walking around in some contorted position, and then you start being honest with yourself and he starts to feel good. The second impact it has and while it has a huge impact on your relationship. You know, when you’re being honest, you actually can create the relationship of your dreams, how else are you going to go about it, when you’re not being honest, all you’re going to create is some kind of ideal that you have made up that’s not grounded within your body within your truth. 

And then when you do create it, if you create it, then you’re not going to be happy about it. Right. And so being honest with yourself is a way of showing up fully in the relationship, which then, in turn, gives your partner the chance to actually fulfill the desires needs that you have, or to even have an honest conversation and realize, you know, we have some massive differences in our relationship. We have some differences in our lifestyle and our worldview and this is your truth and this is my truth and what are we doing together as a couple. 

You can only discover that when both of you’re standing in your truth. If you’re not standing in your truth, you’re not going to have this benefit of finding a new way together it fulfills and honors both of your desires. So it is really a game-changer because suddenly you can have the relationship that you want and you give your partner the chance to actually fulfill what you’re craving for is not a guarantee that they will. And if they are not, that’s another chance for you to grow. But it’s just, it’s like it’s giving the right foundation to build the house that you really want to have.

Natasha: One of the reasons why people find it difficult, to be honest with themselves is that at the beginning, especially if you’re in a dating stage, you want to bring out the best side of you, right, you want the person to see how great you are, know, your strength, and all of that. But that wears out over time, doesn’t it? And when it comes to marriages, and long-term relationships, it isn’t really about up keeping that image and us being dishonest by bringing our best foot forward. That’s not the dishonesty that a lot of individuals make when they’re in these long-term relationships and marriages, what ends up happening that this honesty that can happen is that the roles in which both of you are playing become more and more concrete, right. 

So you kind of fit yourself more snugly into whatever expectations or whatever things that you are now expecting or projecting or doing for each other. Right. And if you’ve been together with your partner for many years, those projections and those expectations might become really, really rigid. And so that rigidity, sometimes people find it hard to then connect within and honestly with themselves because those roles feel like they’ve been just defined for you, they’ve been created, they’ve been defined for you, you’ve been doing it for a while. 

And it’s hard to let that go. So one example I can give you is, for example, you know, me feeling like I am the caretaker of our relationship, or of the team or of our household and of our home and things like that. Now, I’ve taken on this role, and it’s become, like, more and more rigid over the course of our relationship in our marriage. But if I want to be honest with myself, I can always reassess that and figure out is that my truth? If I’m doing something, is it honestly, Am I doing it willingly? Or am I doing it due to obligation, and these rules that we’ve kind of defined for ourselves and that we have kind of lived into? Right? 

So that actually goes into the first point of how you can be honest with yourself, is to actually ask yourself, Is this something that I want? Am I doing this willingly? Or is there something else that defining the actions that I’m supposed to take? Or are supposed to make? Right? Was there a conversation once upon a time I had with my partner? That’s become this unwritten rule that I have to do this? And is it in my truth in my, you know, best interest to keep that going to share with you a story of this and being honest with myself, I have to say that, for me, I took the roles of being a wife being a certain way, so seriously, for the beginning of our relationship. 

And actually, it wasn’t anything that Jachym projected even upon me, it was something that I expected of myself. Now, if I don’t sit down, or if our marriage didn’t deteriorate the way it did, I never even took the time to actually take a look at it. How am I being in this relationship? What am I doing? And what are the things that I’m saying yes to that doesn’t even feel right, but I do it due to obligation. And it’s not honest. So that happened within our relationship. And I actually felt a great deal of guilt. Right? I felt a great deal of guilt. Because I felt like I had to, I had this obligation of how to do that. And I had to serve it up. Then I had to produce and be that person. Right? 

But that is honest. And the moment you actually connect with yourself and you check-in Okay, what am I actually willing to do? What is actually true for me? That is a completely different conversation and actually makes your relationship and your whole marriage so much more malleable, you are able to actually transform in a positive way both you and your partner if you take this approach, right so you’re not stuck in that rut that so many couples, we know that get stuck in. Because you actually have this honesty and this, you know, the connection back to yourself by figuring out how to be honest with yourself. So that’s actually one of the things that we cover within our cherished wife program is to build disconnection, right? Because so often we’re lost in the conflicts and issues within our relationships, that we forget what it is that I need that I want. 

Jachym: So before we go deeper into being honest with yourself, and then how you can do that I do you want to have a little segue here, which is that when we think about being honest to yourself, we think that there’s a singular truth, that we are basically being boiled down to one perspective or one desire that we have. And that is our truth. Well, actually, what you’ll find when you do a bit of this work is that you’re a bit more complex. And part of what you can pin that down to is that you have competing desires within you. If you look at the neurological patterns, they’re competing for neural networks that are a play within a human being. 

And, and so you may have different things that are important to you that seem to be in conflict. And so when we’re saying, Well, you know, be honest with yourself, it may look like it’s like, Okay, I just need to find that one singular truth. But actually, what’s really important is to be open and listen to all of you to actually hear the different voices to actually hear the different needs and desires, maybe you have a desire to have deep, meaningful conversations with your husband. And at the same time, you have a desire to be silly, and playful, and all of that. They are not exclusive with each other, but they can come into conflict with each other. And they state other things that homos are competing at some of them are socially not acceptable because they are deemed inappropriate or dirty, or whatever it is, right. 

So I wanted to throw that in there so that you don’t get to a narrow view of the topic that we’re covering. Now, the next point is really crucial in how can you be honest with yourself, you need to listen to your body. This is so important because your mind can create all kinds of scenarios, it can rationalize in all kinds of ways. And he can really talk you out of what you know, to be true in your body in your heart. And so do not fall into that trap. You want to learn to listen to your body and feel how does that feel to me? And if you’re not used to that it can take a little bit of time because you’re needing to rediscover the language of your body. 

And no, oh, yes, this is something that tells me that it’s good for me, or this is something that’s not good for me and forget about rationalizing it, I can tell you in the work that we do with people listening to our bodies, the most important thing, most of the time, when I get an icky feeling in my body, it often is several minutes ahead of time before I discover what’s actually going on in the conversation that I feel this strange feeling in my body. So there’s an immense wisdom in your body. And so being honest with yourself starts with coming into your body and feeling your body and working with your body and respecting what you’re hearing. And not to go into your head all the time and rationalizing what you think is right for you. Because those in those in those reasons, no, feel what’s actually here, within your body, he makes an absolutely massive difference to this whole process. 

Now I’ll cover the next point as well because it’s one that has it has a lot of different perspectives on it. And maybe Natasha can add her own view on it as well, we’ll see. It’s about questioning your self-image and action. And Tasha already shared that she had a certain self-image about what she has to be as wide for who she is as a woman. And having that self-image dictates how you’re behaving. And then if your truth is against that self-image, you’re not going to listen to it, you’re not only going to allow it in most likely you’re going to suppress it or censor it as soon as its surfaces if I even be suppressed right now because you don’t want to upset that self-image. So for example, if you have been brought up in a household that views sex very badly, maybe it’s a Christian household because, in Christianity, there’s a bunch of directions in Christianity.

Do you have a very negative view on sex, and you are actually a very sexual person you enjoy sex, and, but you don’t, you can’t go there, you can actually feel that and be with that and admit that, because of the self-image that you have about yourself being a nice girl, well, that that’s an image. So you want to become aware of the self-image that you’re carrying, as yourself as a wife, as a woman, and, and, or even about relationships and marriages, which is actually more of the ideals. 

But when you question the self-image, as it starts to open them up, it starts to open them up, and you start to consider that maybe there are other ways of living life of being, of interacting of showing up that are different than what you’re doing now. But they can show up as long as you’re blind to that self-image and the ideas that you’re holding within yourself. And the same thing goes for having ideals, right, having the ideal wife or the ideal husband, or being an ideal woman, or whatever that means you have a certain ideal, it is going to cut away things that are right for you, because they don’t fit into that box. And we do truly underestimate the power of thought that on beliefs that we don’t take them seriously.

Like, or we take them very seriously on one level. But another level, we think it’s just a thought when in reality, it’s defining our entire world. And it’s defining how we’re showing up. So really getting in there and questioning those things is so vital to discover your truth, not a condition truth. Now the truth has been put up by society. Now the truth that you have come up yourself an idealized, but actually being here in the moment, and what you find is that the truth is actually more dialed into each moment, rather than it being an overcasting arch in your life for your relationship is you become more tuned to what’s right, right now. Not what is right, tomorrow, or even two seconds from now what’s right, right now. Because then you’re actually being flexible, and you’re being fluent with your expression, and how you are showing up in the relationship. 

Natasha: That’s a wonderful practice to get to that point where you are connected to yourself in every moment, right. And you’re able to be able to tap into that truth and express that within your relationship. Now, the reality check that I want to give a lot of you listeners is that most of us are not there. And most of us are not able to get there, be present in a moment, present with yourself, present with your partner. Because that wasn’t something we did in the past. In fact, so many of us, you know, live and get on with life and do everything that we should and have to. And before we know it, we come home and retire and we don’t have that capacity to or we don’t prioritize, you know, this connection back to ourselves. So a lot of times, especially when it comes to relationships, there’s a lot of hidden hurts, there a lot of emotional turmoil, a lot of issues that just get swept under the carpet again and again, not by our partner necessarily, but a lot of times by us because we something happens. 

You’re like, Oh, no big deal. You weren’t honest with yourself at that moment. But you said, Oh, no big deal. I don’t have time for that, like, oh, let’s just, let’s just compromise so that you know, we can get on with our day, there’s like other stuff to take care of. And before you know it, you’ve engaged in the relationship with dishonesty, because you didn’t pause there and take a moment actually feel what was right for you. And so many people operate in their relationships in this way just to get it done, just move on just to you know, not get hung up on all these little things that all these conflicts and tensions actually build up.  

And that’s where you have those conversations where you start to blow up out of seemingly out of nowhere or at the most inconvenient moments at your partner because, you know, something bothers you for months. And finally, you can’t handle it and you just explode them right? You’re angry, you’re frustrated and you can’t help it. It can’t hold it in anymore. Well, can’t hold it in anymore. It can’t hold in that this honesty, right? The fact that you haven’t acknowledged what has happened. You haven’t acknowledged certain feelings that you might have, you know, had and you might have been impacted by a certain, you know, something that your partner said or something that might have happened, you didn’t process it, you weren’t honest with yourself, you just moved on like nothing happened, right? 

So that dishonesty over time really does impact you because it impacts how you view your partner too. And so, yes, ideally, we want to get to that place where we are present in every moment, right. But what that means is that today, now, we have to be willing to actually question what is true, because it might be different than what I think it is, you might have to question your self-image, your ideals, you might have to pause and actually feel, and those things will help you to be honest with yourself.

We have a lot of conversations with couples. And a lot of times what we start to find is that you know, they come with us saying, Ah, we have this communication issue, we fight a lot. But within half an hour, we hit the nail, right, we hit the hammer on the nail. And we realize that there was a moment in time in the past where they were so deeply hurt, where their expectations were just not met, or their needs weren’t met. And they were just so sad and so distraught by what happened. But they never fully acknowledged that and never fully met that experience with honesty, and neither the day, go to their partner vulnerably, honestly, and share that.  

And so, over time, these wounds might just stay. And they might even get worse because you don’t address it. So it festers and you build, you know, grudges or certain bitterness or resentment towards your partner with all of that. But the reason why that so negatively impacts your relationship or your marriage isn’t because of what happened in the past, is due to the lack of honesty within yourself, right. And so that’s why this is really so important. And it’s a key thing that we help women with, so that they can actually, you know, meet the past with a certain peace within themselves a peacefulness within their hearts, and not from a place of something that isn’t nice for them something that they can’t get over.   

And that they have to relive again and again and again in their head because they can go over it, because something was so bad, right. And so when you do come from this place where you haven’t fully digested and you weren’t really honest with yourself in the past, what you might find is that you are in conflict with yourself with your partner with your marriage today. Because you’re struggling to meet your guy today who might be real nice, you know, your husband might be a good guy, he’s been a good man to you every single day. 

But you can’t accept that because he can’t accept something else when the past that has happened that you might have deemed not good, right? So by trying to make peace with today, without accepting the past, we have to be honest with what has happened in the past also. And that could be, you know, scary. And that can be very scary. And so that’s one of the reasons why we work with people one on one or one on two if you are willing to come in as a couple to address any issues that you find really so difficult to face, honestly, by yourself on your own. And so this is, I guess, one of the reasons why we are speaking with you about this topic, how to be honest with yourself, because the transparency, the honesty, the trust we ask of our partner, ultimately comes from the honesty you have with yourself.

And also that same honesty you have as your dress past hurts. And these are really valuable skills that are necessary. And I truly believe that it’s not necessary to have you want to have a thriving happy, healthy relationship. No one really had a happy healthy relationship by having you know, Santa Claus bag, gift bag load of stuff in the past that you haven’t gotten over yet are fights that were unresolved. Right? And to resolve those things today and into the future really requires you to be honest with yourself.

Jachym: Oh my oh my gosh, we are diving deep huh? So, let’s, let’s look at some of the pitfalls that people fall into when they’re trying to be honest with themselves. One of them is overthinking. Am I being honest with myself? Is that really my truth? Usually, that’s a sign that you’re not really listening to your body, you need to stop relying on your mind and start listening to your body. And what you have to also realize is that it’s an iterative process. So something feels right. 

And you go with it, and you realize, Oh, that wasn’t quite right, or, yeah, and that was really right. And so you get feedback, you get feedback on the language your body speaks, and you as a whole being get feedback on things that you follow through and how they turn out. And so you adjust and you adapt as you go along with this process. So overthinking really is a sign that you’re not actually going in and doing and listening to what’s right, right now onto your body. And so take it as a sign it’s a good sign, you know, that, whenever you catch yourself overthinking, you’re like, Alright, I’m all in my head. Let me come back to my body. What’s What, what? What feels right to me right now? And you can play with the question doesn’t have to be this question.

You can be what’s my truth right now, or whatever, you know, there’s different ways you can express it. But just feeling with your body makes such a big difference. Now, the other thing that people fall into is being impulsive. Meaning you are thinking you have found your truth and you immediately act on it. Now, sometimes, it’s good, it’s good to be speedy, and decisive, and clear. And many times it isn’t. So the reason why it isn’t is because when you feel your truth, and it’s like, it’s this, this is my truth.

It can neglect other parts of you that do also have a say in this whole thing. And so it’s a one-sided truth. Now, you do not have to analyze and be like, Well, is this all there is what it boils down to is just bringing the awareness into your body, being willing to be open and honest with yourself to feel and to be patient. You know, okay, so I feel like this is the right thing for me. And you can just be with that. And feel, and sometimes something else comes up. And it gives you a more holistic picture, right?

So of course, there are different scenarios in this. So when you are being very much in the moment right now and you’re honoring the truth right now, you may not have the time or space, to sit with it. But sometimes it just makes sense to make space in your day and to sit with yourself and to feel into your body and to open yourself up to the different processes, desires that are happening within you, and letting them unfold. Because as you sit with it often new conclusions and other ways of being can come into your consciousness that you didn’t think of before and that you will not come to if you were to just analyze things.

Jachym: So with that, it is time to wrap it up for today. If you enjoyed this episode, then leave us a review. If you like to see the show notes, head over to your exceptional relationship.com forward slash 39. That’s number three, nine. And we will speak to you on the next episode, where we’re going to dive deeper into authenticity, transparency, and honesty within relationships. Thank you for your attention and take care bye-bye!