Emotional Honesty

When I was growing up, my father would always ask if I had a good time every time he took me some place. I soon learned that he didn’t want to hear the truth. He just wanted me to say that I had a good time. Saying how I really felt became an act of defiance, and he would make me pay for it by acting hurt which caused me to feel guilty. He did that kind of thing to me all the time. He let me know that he didn’t want to really know me or understand me. He just wanted me to say the words he wanted to hear. And of course when I realized that I was gay, I knew he definitely didn’t want to hear about that, so I kept it all inside.

Eventually all of this made me feel alone and isolated. But it also made me doubt that I was a real person. I suppressed so much that I began to wonder if I had feelings and opinions like other people. When people outside the family asked me what I thought, I couldn’t answer them. I didn’t know. I wasn’t used to talking about my inner life. And I also didn’t trust other people enough to tell them the truth. And I couldn’t simply tell them what they wanted to hear because I didn’t know them well enough for that.

My father didn’t want to hear the truth, and he would punish me with emotional blackmail if I was truthful. And my mother would sometimes react in wildly irrational ways if I ever slipped and told her what was really going on in my life. She’d sometimes call parents of classmates or teachers on the telephone and threaten to kill them, for instance. She sometimes did that without me saying anything.

After a while, it nearly drove me crazy. It was like Chinese water torture. Walking on eggshells doesn’t seem so bad if you do it for a few hours or a day or two now and then, but if you have to do it every day and you know nothing else, there comes a point when you just can’t stand it any more.

Emotional honesty is very important.  That's something I've learned in life.