The Importance of Speaking Your Truth
Speaking truthfully about what happened to you will never be wrong and in fact, is good for your health.
The western, clinical medicine world is becoming increasingly aware that mental and physical health are not separate, something the ancients have always known. It’s integral to the medicine. But, the ancients were a bit more specific and noticed that there is an emotion associated with each organ.
In Chinese Medicine, each organ has a pathway that runs throughout the body, and these are referred to as meridians or primary channels. The primary channels exist to manage the organ system and express the emotions of their respective organs, and when this doesn’t happen, for example being told to suppress your feelings or keep secret experiences that need to be brought to light, the complement channels step in, specifically the divergent channels, which you can read more about here. This is also why the complement channels are so important for full healing.
In everyday language, trying to be something we are not—or more likely, when someone is trying to make us something we are not—will never result in health or happiness. We are all conditioned, to some degree, to be, do, or say (or not be, do, or say) certain things and at all stages in our lives. As children, the expectations are different from when we are older, but there are nevertheless lots of useless prescriptions.
I recently had a cyberbullying experience by a distant, 73 year old family member, who I have not spoken to or seen in at least twenty years. Of course, I screenshot the entire conversation. When I shared the screenshots to my personal facebook page, I got some backlash about not having crossed out his name. As can be expected, there was some shaming, gaslighting, and an accusation of being dramatic and that the whole thing was not a big deal. This is called comparative suffering, which serves to invalidate people’s feelings. To be clear, most people found it alarming and even a little frightening.
You own everything that happened to you. Tell your stories. If people wanted you to write warmly about them, they should have behaved better.—Ann Lamott
Why should I, the person who was attacked out of the blue and still took the time to reach out to his daughter to make sure he was ok, cross out his name? Why is there an expectation for me to keep him anonymous when talking about an experience that happened to me? These are the expectations that force us to suppress emotion that will ultimately put us into divergent pathology territory.
You can read this post to learn more about divergent pathology, but if you know anyone with chronic, debilitating diseases, there is a good chance that this is divergent pathology. While there are multiple contributors to any disease state, when we are in flow, there will not be pain. Pain and dis-ease come from resistance, and wouldn’t most people feel resistance when they are being told they should be something they are not?
Pressuring someone to withhold an experience that happened to them creates resistance, through engaging the sinew channels to hold in that response. Living with resistance will eventually lead itself to dis-ease. Period. There’s no getting around it. Until you are allowed/allow yourself to deal with the emotion, the resistance, the problem will lay latent.
It’s not the emotion that causes the problem; it’s our resistance to it that does.
Mediumship is a term we use in classical Chinese medicine, and you can think of it like oil in a car; over time, it gets dirty and depleted and needs to be replaced. Mediumship gets worn down by things like environmental pollutants, some medications, not getting enough rest, our diets, and of course, our emotional experiences that we don’t effectively process. Divergent treatments help the body to build back the various aspects of mediumship, allowing the body to either put the problem back into latency as it continues to build mediumship or possibly, getting rid of it altogether. What often looks like problems of aging are actually problems that have been latent but are now becoming active, because our bodies can no longer hold them in latency.
As is the case in most instances of bad behavior, this is not the first time this has happened; it’s the first time it has been shared.
I have received numerous messages from others who have been bullied and harassed by this same person. In one instance, this person was attacked, also unprovoked, via social media on a holiday evening, and when she contacted my relative’s wife to ask if she could help stop the bullying, the wife’s response was ‘thanks for ruining my holiday’. (But your husband is attacking people on social media, so how good is your holiday, really?) This also shows us how unhealthy patterns of behavior can be enabled in and by our families when we would rather save face than address a family member who has a problem.
If you’ve had troubling experiences that you were forced to keep secret, please know that what happened to you was not your fault. Please know that there are people who can help you unpack those experiences—a variety of kinds of therapists, as well as acupuncturists—and the sooner you do it, the better your health will be. Protecting others’ bad behavior at your own expense helps no one, and our first responsibility is to ourselves. We cannot share our unique gifts with the world if we are encumbered by suppressed emotion and shame, so speak your truth—always and only the truth—and remember, if people wanted you to write about them warmly, they would have behaved better.
