Finding one’s own truth and expressing it is the most important path to heal damaged self-esteem, and to live a meaningful life.

We all are such phonies – from time to time. We compliment the neighbor on their new flower bed, even though we find it hideous. We agree with a new boss, although he has no idea what he’s talking about. We lend support to a desperate friend, when we know that all that can be done is to accept the loss.

So many of us have learned how to please others and don’t even know what our own stance looks like. Or worse, we know exactly what is looks like and can’t find the courage or the heart to be sincere about it.

We so often want to protect another person from hurt that we start bending our own convictions.

Honesty does not have to be brutal. It can be spoken earnestly and with warmth, without giving in to anger or inflicting needless pain.

Many times we are so hung up on what we are lacking, or what we can’t have, that we completely disregard the power we already have. Especially in intimate relationships.

In my psychotherapy practice, I have worked with a number of couples where this discrepancy in perception becomes quickly obvious. One partner will feel “steamrolled” or overpowered by the other, especially during fights.

The curious thing is that very often neither partner feels particularly powerful. They actually feel quite the opposite; at a loss for how to bring their message across.

Both partners feel that they aren’t being heard, and often feel overwhelmed and intimidated by the onslaught of blame or demands from the other side.

We might feel powerless in the face of stubborn resistance, but underestimate that our own demands may come across as equally forceful and hard to be met.

Beauty, said the late the Irish writer and poet John O’Donohue, is the place inside of us that is not wounded. That is free and expansive and unburdened by the sorrow we carry around from our past.

“Your identity is not equivalent to your biography,” is his message. There is a place is all of us “where there is still a sureness in you, where there’s a seamlessness in you and where there is a confidence and tranquility in you.”

I love this image of a place of peace that lies within all of us. We don’t have to go and find it somewhere else. We don’t have to pay hundreds of dollars to visit a wellness resort or buy happiness by going on a shopping spree. We don’t have to look to someone else to give us something we think we need.

We already have it. We just don’t pay attention to it.

So many of us feel starved for support and attention. We feel alone, and riddled by doubts about what we should do and who we should be. We constantly obsess about what is lacking from our lives.

How many of us have woken up in the wee hours of the morning, anxious and in the grip of fear. “I shouldn’t have said that, now I’m going to lose that person.”"I wish I wasn’t so lonely.” “I don’t have enough friends, I am all alone in the world.” And so on.

We tend to lose sight of what is already present in our lives, and that we can rely on them.

I came across this book by Byron Katie, called I Need Your Love – Is That True?: How to Stop Seeking Love, Approval, and Appreciation and Start Finding Them Instead. It was published a couple of years ago. I’m a bit of a newcomer to self help literature, but she is quite popular, so you may have read or heard about it many times before.

I was struck by a quote in the book that reflects our most basic existential fears so eloquently that I want to just type the whole thing:

One of the most destructive forces in our own minds is the critical voice that seems to comment on much of what we do.

“Why did I say this? I look like such a fool.”

“I could have jumped in here and helped my colleague out, I’m such a dope.”

“This didn’t turn out right, I have to do it all over again.”

It seems like in many ways we are our own worst critics.

Yes, sometimes we do mess up. But most of the time we do the best we can. If we want to change, we have to first and foremost deal with the self judgement we put on ourselves.

So often, we are unaware of the effect of our words on others.

Something we say may linger in another person’s mind, and we underestimate the importance it may have on them.

Something that was said weeks ago may linger in our minds, and is brought up after the other long forgot about it.

Our perception, as well as our memory, is extremely selective.

We tend to pay attention to only those parts of a conversation that are important to our own agenda. We usually remember only the words that have emotional significance for us, and neglect everything else that was said – including our own thoughtless statements.

These imbalances are exacerbated when there are power discrepancies. Like the one between parents and children. Teachers and Students. Psychotherapists and their patients.

I have recently been on both ends of such miscommunications.

I’ve been listening to a series of talks given by Caroline Myss on Self Esteem. Much of what she says is highly valuable.

But I noticed how she keeps propagating a staunch attitude of absolutely not blaming anybody for their misdeeds. Instead, she insists in a tone that sounds (as she says herself) punitive, that we need to take responsibility for ourselves at all times.

Of course we don’t want to get hung up on pointing the finger at others. Especially in relationships with a partner or a close friend, it’s highly detrimental to insist how only the other is to blame for whatever is going wrong.

There also is a limit as to how long we can blame our caregivers for the sins of the past. All parents make mistakes. It’s a built in feature of being human. And some parents never admit to their terrible misconduct or take responsibility for the damage they’ve done.

We have to deal with the sins of our abusers. We have to confront that we were victims at one point. That we had no power over what was done to us. That we suffered at the hands of the people we were supposed to trust.

We need to acknowledge the powerlessness of these situations and grieve the abuse.

Then, at some point, we need to move on.

We all get defensive at times. I know I do when I’m having a really bad day and feel like I’m not being heard or misunderstood. And let’s face it, we are not being heard or understood by others all the time. It’s part of being alive.

Defensiveness is one of the most destructive dynamics among couples. One, or maybe both at the same time feel tired, fragile or insecure, and when the other one has something unsupportive to say, the walls go up.

In an attempt to protect our fragile state of mind we lock the other person out, and if the other person isn’t fully on their toes, a confrontation is inevitable.

The essence of every fight is when both parties feel they have to arm themselves against an attack from outside. That is when we put on the armor and grab our mental weapons and enter the path of war. We cannot hold back the onslaught of overwhelming emotions that arise in us – anger, hurt, feeling attacked – and point the finger back at the offender in an attempt to draw attention to the imperfections of the other person.

When such strong feelings arise, it’s very difficult to intercept the automatic unraveling of a beginning fight.

So many of us have been made to grow up as pleasers, as “good girls” and “sweet boys.”  The expectation of our parents was that we behave at all times. It wasn’t allowed to have an angry meltdown, or even to cry in desperate pain.

Some of us were disciplined and forced into submission. We were reprimanded and yelled at and punished for apparent “misdeeds” that are completely normal for kids, like soiling yourself or breaking something accidentally.

Others had to take care of an anxious or fragile parent who wasn’t able to withstand any kind of challenge. They had to protect their caretakers from the pain they went through themselves.

Maybe they were bullied in class but couldn’t tell their mother about it, because she wouldn’t know how to stand up to the offender, or would deteriorate emotionally in the face of the pain her child had to endure.

Sometimes just a harmless scratch on a child’s knee will make their mother react with hysterical worry. The kid learns a lesson: “My mom can’t help me when I’m hurt and gets too upset, so I better don’t tell her about it.” This is how children become the caretakers of their parents.

Couples go through ups and downs. And while we bicker and fight, many people think about walking away.

One of my clients has been going through a rough patch in her marriage. She has struggled with depression and anxiety and was laid off from her job. While she was trying to recover, her husband went through a stressful time at his job and ended up having an affair.

The healing was difficult to achieve. Once trust has been broken it’s hard to recover. Both were going back and forth about whether to reconcile or to split. Much harm had been done. But after months of pondering they decided to make it work.

This is often the one thing that is missing when relationships go sour: the determination to stick it out. It has been said that the biggest difference between couples who separate and those who stay together is simply deciding that breaking up is not an option.

I keep thinking about a quote I read somewhere by either Will Smith or his wife, Jada Pinkett-Smith. When they got married they were well aware that especially in Hollywood the options to be tempted by someone else are plentiful.

They decided that they would just commit to each other, fully knowing that there would always be other attractive people but making a conscious decision that they would simply not allow someone else to intrude.

How well that works for them I cannot judge. But it sounds like a good idea to me. It’s what many people of our parents’ and grandparents’ generation have long practiced.

Modern relationships place a lot of importance on how much couples have in common and how the other can expand our world view. It’s certainly nice when that happens. But it’s not essential.