The truth hurts sometimes, but trying to keep an obvious truth hidden inside yourself can hurt even more. Making excuses doesn’t help, rationalizing doesn’t help, yelling doesn’t help. Bringing yourself to a painful but honest realization will actually do you better.

When some of my clients have been avoiding a problem and struggling with reality, I have often said something like this, “You can think that way about your problem if you like, pretend it isn’t there. Or you can face the truth and acknowledge its existence. Either way, the reality of your problem will still be there. You just have more power to make your situation better if you face it.”

Reality is trying come to the surface anyway, and yet we keep trying to stuff it down.

Take a person with an alcohol addiction. The truth is that they cannot drink alcohol for the rest of their life. The risk for relapse is high given their history. If they continue to associate good times and stress management with having a drink, they will struggle to accept this reality. Even when they relapse and start thinking addiction thoughts, they keep fighting to ignore the truth. They can try to pretend their addiction really “isn’t that bad” or that they know how to control their drinking now, but the addiction is still there. Period. Trying to justify alcohol use will cause the same problems they came to counselling with. The only way to be free of this bondage is to face the reality of the addiction and make different choices. The solution is in their hands – sobriety – but they will need to be honest with themselves to have the best quality of life.

We will very well be creating misery for ourselves and important relationships by trying to shove reality under the rug. All of this comes down to accepting the maybe ugly but ever-present truth.

Usually, facing the truth of a difficult situation is a shorter-term pain than most people anticipate. It can hurt like a sucker punch, but then the best part comes. You get the chance to move forward with your life, leaving behind a clunky, dirty piece of baggage that you’ve been dragging around behind you. As long as you keep trying to dress up that piece of baggage and keep it with you, it’s going to keep weighing you down. Call it out for what it is, dump it, and get on to the best part of life. If not with others then at least be honest with yourself.