I think I've finally found the description of what I've been meaning to describe as the most damaging one can do to self and in turn others, when not in tune with these type of emotions.
It is what essentially causes PEOPLE TO HURT OTHER PEOPLE.
Emotional Honesty
Emotional Honesty is our capacity to consciously feel our true feelings, our true emotions, as we experience them in our body.
Intellectual Honesty
Intellectual honesty aids emotional honesty by helping us make sure that what we base our beliefs on, and therefore our responses, is true.
Intellectual honesty therefore helps us to be more emotionally honest. If we are not intellectually honest, if we don’t discover the facts of our predicament, we can generate emotions that are not appropriate in the context of external reality. If we then act on these emotions, even by expressing them, then we run the very likely risky result of doing violence onto others and creating suffering because the external world is likely not deserving of our reaction — which, had we been more patient and intellectually honest about the facts of a situation, we could have avoided.
***Reciprocally, BEING ABLE TO FEEL our true feelings and work through painful ones helps us assess reality more honestly. It can also make or break any marriage or serious relationship. ***
If we are not emotionally honest then we will be less intellectually honest because we’ll have unconscious emotions governing our decisions, opinions, and thoughts. This is based on some interesting science, which I mention just below. This affects us and those around us. We are more prone to acting out our pain onto others via the maxim, “hurt people hurt others.”
It happens so much more than we take time to think about. And, in my experience, did not understand this soon enough to be able to salvage such damaging outcomes of long term relationships.
I had been in a very difficult 13 year marriage where subconscious hurt feelings were brought forth into the relationship, unresolved, thus causing one to project anger, frustration, and hurt onto the other person. This is essentially damaging, and, what has to be realized here is that what one carries can cause the other to take on blame, unnecessary verbal attacks and slander which really has nothing to do with them in the first place. It becomes a home with now two very disconnected people who have attempted to love, do not know what to do with their feelings, and certainly could not reciprocate love in the manner to which both were just not capable of doing together.
I CANNOT STRESS HOW VERY DIFFICULT THESE EXPERIENCES WERE FOR ME.
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Modern neuroscience informs us that most of our decisions and beliefs are emotionally driven. For this reason, emotional honesty, and emotional process work to heal and reduce our painful feelings, is crucial for intellectual honesty.
In other words, many people won’t be intellectually honest, not because the facts are obscure, but because they don’t want to believe the truth due to a fear of feeling pain, even if it’s the death of their illusions. So, if we can accept that “the truth hurts,” and adjust accordingly, we stand to be more intellectually honest, more in alignment with reality, and ultimately more productive, effective, joyful, and helpful. These positives usually come after we make peace with the truth, become more grounded, and adjust our lives appropriately.
In one sense, all of our feelings are true because they exist. However, just because we feel something, doesn’t mean that what we assume from our feelings is true.
For example, because I feel upset at you doesn’t mean that you deserve it or that you actually did anything to justify my upset.
To find out if my interpretation of my feeling is accurate, I can exercise critical thinking to find out if what I believe about what upset me is true. If I find out you didn’t eat the half a watermelon I was saving and I just missed seeing it in the back of the fridge (which, if you know me, is utterly likely!), then my feeling, while true for me, was not true in its assumption and projection onto you.
I want to mention a point about emotional healing - in the context of emotional honesty.
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If we haven’t done some core emotional wound work, we really can’t be as loving as we’d like because when our buttons are constantly pushed we tend to shut-out what triggered us, thus limiting our outreach, our love in action. ********************************
BINGO. ROOT OF ALL THAT IS SO WRONG. AND SO DAMAGING.
What’s more, dealing intimately with our own heartaches fosters compassion and empathy in us for others that suffer (which is everyone). When we can accept our own pain and wade through our griefs until they run clear, then we can extend our love to a world that suffers.
****When we don’t do this personal work, we miss a lot of suffering because when external painful events trigger our unconscious pain we haven’t dealt with, we tend to defend against it and tune it out. *****
Just as we can’t heal without intellectual honesty, without emotional honesty we also can’t heal because we don’t know what we are feeling. Emotional dishonesty, therefore, shows up as a disconnect both from feeling our feelings and being conscious of them.
Indeed, intellectual and emotional dishonesty are SERIOUS coping mechanisms that allow us to keep doing what we are doing, even if it is violent, cruel, selfish, and breeds unhappiness. Both allow us to deny reality and make a mess of our lives and the planet. They prevent us from waking up and from real transformation.
Such people perhaps don’t realize that goodness and abundance can be found honestly and that alleviating isn’t achieved by ignorance but by embracing it, so that ***violence is prevented and love in action is promoted.***
Our experience and awareness of both our intellect and feelings must therefore be as honest as possible to maximize emotional healing, and ultimately our spirituality. If they are not — which is likely because we have come to convince ourselves that aspects of our false self, including its many beliefs, are true — then hopefully we do have just enough honesty and intelligence, courage and care, to begin to notice where we are not being honest in both heart and mind.
This begins a spiral up rather than down into more delusion and suffering, so we can more readily unravel our false sense of self in order to allow our better humanity to emerge. This true sense of self is not only the absence of heal-able heartache and all its dark spots inside us, but our full-functioning self imbued with the inner psycho-spiritual riches, what I call our Finer Jewels of Being Human, that we rescue from clearing out our hearts.
Let’s consider an example to illustrate intellectual and emotional honesty so far.
Say a blogger says, “I love animals,” and it turns out that he also eats meat. What a hypocrite, right? Especially if you’re an animal rights activist, as I am, right? Well, many jump to this conclusion without thinking it through, thereby creating the very violence they are railing against. This is a perfect example of what is often the projection and displacement of one’s own disowned violence.
Applying critical thinking, we can deduce that maybe there is a good reason that he eats meat. And, maybe he isn’t happy about it either. But we’d have to ask some questions first to become intellectually informed.
For example, it’s possible that he does love animals and it might also be possible that he needs to eat meat to sustain his health. In fact, upon further discovery we find out that he can’t digest vegetable protein (a real-life problem for some people), so meat is his mainstay. So, he can both love animals and eat meat without being a hypocrite.
However, it may also pain him some to eat meat from animals that he loves.
Now, if this fellow is intellectually honest he would need to verify through self-reflection that indeed he loves animals. To be intellectually honest about this he would have to also be emotionally honest and allow himself to feel his love for animals. He would also have to admit by way of intellectual honesty that killing animals doesn’t support his love of them.
His intellectual honesty would also acknowledge that he eats animals not because he wants to promote their killing, but because he needs to in order to get protein that he can digest. Yet, regardless of these facts, he might still feel badly, and rather than shut out those feelings because he is justified, further emotional honesty allows him to feel any sadness, remorse, and guilt as a result of his need and actions.
Eventually, through some process around this, he might come to a natural resolve without having had to deny aspect of his heart and mind. Indeed, this is how real growth happens, honestly. We have to struggle with things some, and if struggling for difficult truths in mind and heart is too tough for you, the option to believe dishonest spiritual slogans to live in a bliss bubble of magical beliefs and denial can be just as diminishing, if not more so.
Now, if you were one to jump all over this meat-eating, animal-loving blogger guy, would you also be able to be intellectually honest enough — by not letting your own ego get the best of you — to correct yourself, maybe even apologize? Would you be emotionally honest enough to feel and be with any remorse, sadness, and self-disappointment that came up in yourself, and be able to learn and grow from it?
These same dynamics of self-correction are what would also allow major corporations to admit they are wrong, to see they do violence, to change their ways. It’s only reasonable that we should set the example, right? We can each day with ourselves, with our family, and with the land — through our actions. This is honest, grounded spirituality in action.
AMEN!
I want to thank Jack Adam Weber L.Ac., Dipl. C.H., contributing Writer for Wake Up World for this article, to which I've added in my own experiences into it that relate so very much to the cause of my past pain and suffering, which was unnecessary had I understood this.
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