Personal Development|Relationships|Communication|Emotional Health

4 Surprising Lies That Increase Stress and Destroy Peace

#4 May Be Your Default Setting

I was getting ready to have my second IV inserted in 8 days time. I had been literally hemorrhaging to death from a tumour the doctors had missed. After 2.5 days in the ICU and 4 units of blood pumped into me, I was back at a different hospital for my full abdominal surgery to remove the tumour.

The nurse came into prep me for surgery. As she sat down I said,

“Please don’t tell me that inserting the IV isn’t going to hurt. Please don’t tell me that it will only hurt a little. Tell me it may hurt and you don’t know how bad it will be.”

She blinked at me and said, “Okay… that’s not what they tell us to say.”

I said, “Well, last week when I had to go through this I realized that I had two different reactions. One was the physical pain and the other was the sensation of being lied to. I’d rather be able to focus on dealing with the pain and continue feeling that I can trust you.”

She caught her breath, looked me straight in the eye and said, “That makes all the sense in the world. I wonder why we do it this way?”

I said, “I’m not sure. But I’ve learned over the years that we as a society have become more and more comfortable with various forms of dishonesty. I think we think we’re helping, but on an emotional level we are definitely shooting ourselves in the foot.”

I don’t think most of us want or mean to be dishonest. I think it’s starts when we try to protect ourselves from pain or the unknown. Often the false images we portray are part of our fight/flight/freeze mechanism. We duck and weave to survive.

Many years ago, I had to learn that if I was going to survive the toxic relationships and debilitating health issues in my life, I would have to come to terms with how much stress I was dealing with, and more importantly, how to not just manage it, but overcome it.

Transcend it.

I realized that if I stayed stressed, I wasn’t going to have the energy or presence of mind to find solutions. If I was going to survive and maybe even have a different life than what I was currently enduring, I was going to have to learn to do things in a way I never had before. I had to accept that I didn’t know what I didn’t know.

It was time to get really brave. I had to shine a light into every nook and cranny. I had to look. I had to listen. All I knew was that no matter what I might learn about myself or anybody else, I wanted the answers. I needed the answers.

I began my Quest To Embrace Radical Honesty.

I soon realized I was going to have to look at my life, interactions and relationships on a more granular level- to get radically honest and sift through my thoughts, feelings, and reactions. I was going to have to dissect my interactions with others from a completely different angle.

With practice, I learned to pay close attention to my feelings and thoughts and what messages they were sending me. I began to see and understand the messages I had chosen to believe over the course of my life. Yes, sometimes what I learned about myself was a blow to my ego, BUT I learned that peace comes from owning ALL of my truth, not just the parts that were acceptable, soothing or pretty.

Being content with our whole selves and resolving stress requires honesty- loving, but sometimes brutal, honesty.

Now I realize this is not a popular remedy. The more common approach to emotional care and stress management is to self medicate through a variety of behaviors — run faster, be busier, look better, stuff the feelings down, distract, disconnect, numb out, rationalize, and soothe ourselves away from the discomfort, frustration and pain.

The problem is that just because we find a way to calm ourselves down, does not mean we resolved the situation that caused the discomfort, frustration or pain.

It just stacks up inside us - Waiting to be recycled (and relived) later.

Many have felt their stress levels rising during the COVID-19 pandemic. While working with other people, what I have found consistently is that part of the challenge goes way beyond the threat of the virus itself. What they are realizing is that their regular stress coping mechanisms haven’t been enough.

Perhaps you too have felt uncomfortable and unable to overcome your stressors because of this new level of stillness and/or togetherness. Maybe you are experiencing your unresolved stress recycling a bit more quickly or intensely.

Regardless of what is thrown our way, if we can learn to address situations more honestly, sift through the events in our lives more openly and thoroughly, we can learn to thrive in our adversity.

The truth however, is that it is impossible to solve something that we keep camouflaged. We can’t build a solid foundation if we don’t deal honestly with ourselves and with each other. It all starts with acknowledging things as they are without filter, blame, rationalization or excuse.

We can develop more kindness, more patience, more stress resilience and a more joyful outlook amid turmoil. With practice we start to see that the dark times are what give us the opportunity to stretch ourselves into a better person. As we learn to do this, we are better equipped to help others do the same.

Granted it isn’t the easiest thing to do, but the results are beyond wonderful. I have worked hard on myself, seen and felt the results in my own life, and now I help others do the same.

Developing these traits usually comes through processing through the emotions, thoughts and behaviours rather than trying to bypass them. Bypassing helps us to calm down, but it doesn’t help us to resolve the issue. Just as the nurse had been trained to handle a patient under duress, one of the main things we do in the bypass model is to employ various forms of dishonesty.

Let’s start with four super common ways we camouflage ourselves, and others, with a little society- approved dishonesty.

1 “It’s Nothing. Everything is fine. No big deal.”

When was the last time you asked someone or were asked by someone, “How are you?” and you were prepared to hear the truth or to tell the truth about how things were really going?

We are so accustomed to “cleaning up” our reality that we don’t necessarily think about this being a form of dishonesty.

So often we neglect to pay attention to our emotions and sort them out. Instead, we have a tendency to bully them into submission with our logic.

If we aren’t good at doing this for ourselves, chances are we aren’t great at being there for others when they need an effective, patient, and compassionate, listening ear.

Reflect for a moment. How often do you disclose how you’re really doing without at least a mental apology for “TMI”? How well do you listen to others without feeling uncomfortable or wishing they would stop telling you so much about their situation?

2 “Yeah, but look at all you/I have to be grateful for.”

This one goes hand in hand with #1. When we move into telling someone how grateful they should be right after they have disclosed a negative situation they are grappling with, it’s actually dismissing and often shaming them about the turmoil they are in at the moment. We do this to ourselves, too.

When we attempt to engage gratitude too soon, we are trying to bypass the mess - shortcut our way back to happy. The subtle message received is often, “Don’t tell me what’s really going on, ‘cuz I’ll have to gratitude bomb you. Don’t be honest with how things really are — clean it up and get back to happy - ASAP.” When we use this manipulation on ourselves, we are not being a good friend to Self and a whole host of issues can arise.

3 “This is the story of my life. If _______ didn’t happen, I wouldn’t be _____.”

This is the opposite side of the spectrum from #2. Sometimes, we hold onto some interesting ideas as a way to protect ourselves from the unknown and avoid possibly even more pain. In our efforts to feel validated we may find ourselves, or watch others, cling to distress and blame.

If we stay grooved into this way of thinking, we get stuck in a variety of negative emotions. We find ourselves focusing on others’ actions and feeling victimized, rather than working through our reactions and finding a valuable lesson.

It’s the lesson we gain directly from the stressful situation that can give us the most genuine gratitude. Clinging to stress and blame reinforces the false belief, “This is too big for me. I’m not responsible for myself. I have no choices.”

4 “I don’t know.”

This phrase is part of many people’s speech patterns like “ah” or “um”. I know many people who have developed a noise that expresses “I don’t know” rather than saying the actual phrase all the time. Whether expressed in words or not, this is a common technique we employ, trying to bypass the messiness of emotions by dismissing or ignoring them.

When we tell ourselves we don’t know, we are literally telling our brain we don’t have the answer, so do not bother to look for one. Not only do we train ourselves to dismiss ourselves, it’s also a very handy way of dismissing and/or resisting other people’s questions.

“I don’t know” only reinforces our false belief that we are helpless to find solutions about ourselves, that life is a huge mystery/mistake, and that our situations are here to stay.

When working with clients who want to get more clarity and find solutions to their life’s challenges, looking at how often they are in this cycle of “I don’t know” is pretty crucial. Only through breaking out of this habit do they truly begin to sort themselves effectively.

The nurse looked me in the eye. She smiled kindly and said, “This may hurt, but we need to do it.”

After years of listening to my body, I could feel it relax because I was hearing the truth. I felt trust and acceptance for the process. I said, “I understand.”

It did hurt. But it hurt less than what I had expected to feel and I didn’t have any sense of being deceived or coddled. I was allowed to have the experience without any preconceived ideas or opinions put upon me by the nurse. The amount of pain I experienced wasn’t good or bad. She hadn’t told me what I “should” be feeling. There was no scale I was expected to measure up to.

It was a great experiment. One that has continued to help me learn to be a better listener and friend to those stuck in one of the above “bypass” models.

Mindfulness Moment: I invite you to experiment with each one of these 4 common bypass models. Pick one and focus on it over a few days. Then pick another. See what stressors can be seen and solutions found by embracing a new level of honesty within yourself. You may be surprised at how much better you feel.

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Peggy Nazer has been a life coach and teacher for 17 years, specializing in emotional health, stress resilience, and building healthy relationships to help people accomplish their personal transformation goals. She uses a combination of techniques including mindfulness, emotional release, energy balancing, stress resilience mastery and success habits in both private and group session settings. She created Success Dynamics Academy to help clients identify and effectively manage their mental and emotional perspectives that create conflict and stop progress pertaining to their personal and professional goals. Find out more at: peggynazer.com