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More Mental Health Articles
Emotional Dishonesty and Toxic Shame
Self-image is the story you learned to tell yourself about who you are. It developed and formed in childhood from wounded significant people, who don't see you, but tell you how your reality should be according to how they experience the world. You learned to play a role, instead of learning to be emotionally authentic and to accept all emotions, you were forced to distort your relationship to your feelings; thereby becoming emotionally dishonest in order to survive.
When our relationship with our self and with life is dysfunctional what develops is an inability to really love or trust. We distance ourselves from feelings. What develops is toxic shame. Toxic shame is the belief that there is something inherently wrong with who we are, with our being.
Guilt is, “I made a mistake, I did something wrong.” The feeling of toxic shame is, “I am a mistake. There is something wrong with me” or I am a “bad” person. Emotionally dishonest people can be constantly riddled by doubting thoughts such as, “But if you really knew who I am, you wouldn't love me.”
Emotionally dishonest people have no real concept of self as an individual entity. This manifests in defensive coping strategies that were learned in order to distance oneself from owning one's feelings. When discussing feelings, not using “I”, but instead referring to “self” using the third person, “you” to abstractly talk about a feeling.
Another strategy to distance from the immediate emotional impact of dealing with feelings is to talk about feelings within the context of an entertaining story that avoids directly owning feelings or dealing with them. Often, the focus of the story details are designed to prove a point and make the person right, by elucidating how they were wronged, in reaction to a situation, and to blame someone for making them a victim but off the topic of personal feelings.
Emotionally dishonest people have great difficulty self reflecting and acknowledging their part in situations involving emotional conflict. They will typically see all problems as emanating from someone else, and now own their part in creating the situation at hand.
Self-esteem is built on a foundation of living authentically and being in touch with all feelings. Recovery of one's authentic self is based on truth, not on creating a false self image. Fear is the foundation of emotional dishonesty.
Truth embodies the notion that one can be oneself authentically because without distortions there can be trust and honesty in relating to the world. This creates a state of happiness, peace, and bliss.
