truth and consequences
Jul. 3rd, 2002 02:26 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mamajoanSigh. How much do you hate it when you write a really long post and then accidentally close the window? A whole bunch, right? Yeah.
So![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
jrosehale asked about truth and consequences. She writes, When is truth necessary? When is it not? When have you regretted speaking it or not speaking it?
I love it when people pose such simple, easily answered questions. *g*
When is truth necessary?
I think this is too complex a subject to generalize about. Certainly there are times when a truth needs to be told. There are times when you have to tell the truth for the Greater Good(tm), whether that means to preserve your own personal sanity/integrity/mental health, or to help the family, group of friends, society, country, or all of humankind. I would put JRH's recent contretemps in this category. She said some difficult and painful, and hurtful, things, but they needed to be said. Sometimes not saying these things can be more harmful than keeping them bottled up inside; sometimes you can do *yourself* more damage by not telling.
Sometimes telling such a truth is painful and difficult for the teller as well as the hearer, and so sometimes we shy away from telling even though we know we ought to tell. Often, once we do tell, we don't feel any better -- heck, we may feel worse. So that brings me to:
When have you regretted not telling the truth?
There are times when a friend or family member does or says something that just cries out to be responded to -- when you just want to say, "I can't believe you said/did that. That was incredibly rude/cruel/offensive/stupid/[insert other adjective here]." But this can be one of the most difficult things to do, and so, all too often I don't do it. And then I feel really awful. (This happens a lot with my uncle. He can be insufferable on family vacations -- always trying to control the entire experience for everyone. A few times we've had scenes and I've so badly wanted to tell him *exactly* what I thought of his behavior, but I didn't, and wished I had. And he is *always* pulling stuff like that when we go places together, and every time I seethe about it, and my mom seethes, and we seethe together, but we never actually talk to him about it. My mom says "oh, he's too old to change his ways now anyhow," but I say, fuckin' BULLSHIT. But I digress.)
When have you regretted speaking the truth?
I can think of two examples where I regretted telling people that I had a crush on them. In the first case, the main reason I regretted it was that the guy was gay -- and if I hadn't been so infatuated I would have realized it long before I embarrassed myself. ;) In the second case, the chick said she only liked me as a friend -- and I made a real effort to get over it and be happy as her friend -- but for a long time afterward, she took advantage of my crush, played with my emotions by flirting with me and stringing me along. I guess it made her feel good to know that a cute younger chick had a thing for her, I dunno. That was painful for me personally, so I regret it because of that, even though I had no way of knowing how she would react to the revelation.
Those are reasonably harmless "regret telling the truth" examples, though. I guess I haven't had any major incidents of that type.
When is truth necessary vs. not?
I wrote a little above about when truth is necessary. There are also of course times when it's not. A good example of this is when you get a gift that you hate from someone you rarely see. What would be the point of calling elderly Aunt Sylvia to say, "Gee Auntie, these are the ugliest earrings ever! Where the hell did you find them??" Such a truth accomplishes nothing and only causes hurt feelings. Instead, you simply say, "Thanks for the earrings," and you remember that it's the thought that counts, and you shove the earrings to the farthest back corner of your drawer and there's no harm done.
Where the problems come in, though, is the cases that straddle the line between "this truth must be told" and "this truth shouldn't be told." An example of this that I see in my friends' experiences all too often is the coming-out debate. Should you come out to your elderly relatives/conservative neighbors/sheltered coworkers? On one hand, homophobic old Aunt Sylvia is 95 and about to die any day now, so why should she need to know that the niece she never sees is a lesbian? On the other hand, a lot of queer people feel that they're being dishonest to themselves if they don't come out; they're uncomfortable behaving as if they had something to hide when really they're proud of their queerness. This is a tough one in which each argument has its merits, so that's the tightrope you have to walk: to balance your own need for truth-telling with the good it will or won't do; to weigh the harm that not telling does against the harm that telling would do. And it can be so hard to be objective, to really know whether your desire to tell is selfishly motivated or truly based in the need for truth.
Finally,jrosehale writes, And are "truth" and "family" mutually-exclusive concepts? I think not. The thing is, a large part of determining whether to tell a truth involves considering your relationship to the potential hearer. It's a very different issue to consider coming out to homophobic Aunt Sylvia whom you barely know, versus coming out to your best friend (for example). The better you know someone, and the better your relationship with them, the more equipped you are to predict how they'll react to the truth, and that helps you decide whether to tell it. Family relationships are, much more often than non-family relationships, fraught with hidden resentments, preconceptions, lingering reactions to stuff that happened thirty years ago, and other such emotional baggage; and because of that, family relationships are more likely to be damaged by truth-telling, or to make truth-telling more difficult.
In other words, it's not that telling truth to family members is inherently problematic. Rather, it's that telling the truth in certain situations/circumstances is problematic, and family members are more likely to be involved in those situations/circumstances.
Of course, I'm in a biased position because I have such great relationships with my immediate family members, meaning my mom and brother. There's very little that I can't or won't tell my mom. And yes, I do realize that I'm a) very unusual and b) very lucky in this regard.
I feel like I have more to say, but wow, this is pretty long already, so I'll stop here.
So
jrosehale asked about truth and consequences. She writes, When is truth necessary? When is it not? When have you regretted speaking it or not speaking it?I love it when people pose such simple, easily answered questions. *g*
When is truth necessary?
I think this is too complex a subject to generalize about. Certainly there are times when a truth needs to be told. There are times when you have to tell the truth for the Greater Good(tm), whether that means to preserve your own personal sanity/integrity/mental health, or to help the family, group of friends, society, country, or all of humankind. I would put JRH's recent contretemps in this category. She said some difficult and painful, and hurtful, things, but they needed to be said. Sometimes not saying these things can be more harmful than keeping them bottled up inside; sometimes you can do *yourself* more damage by not telling.
Sometimes telling such a truth is painful and difficult for the teller as well as the hearer, and so sometimes we shy away from telling even though we know we ought to tell. Often, once we do tell, we don't feel any better -- heck, we may feel worse. So that brings me to:
When have you regretted not telling the truth?
There are times when a friend or family member does or says something that just cries out to be responded to -- when you just want to say, "I can't believe you said/did that. That was incredibly rude/cruel/offensive/stupid/[insert other adjective here]." But this can be one of the most difficult things to do, and so, all too often I don't do it. And then I feel really awful. (This happens a lot with my uncle. He can be insufferable on family vacations -- always trying to control the entire experience for everyone. A few times we've had scenes and I've so badly wanted to tell him *exactly* what I thought of his behavior, but I didn't, and wished I had. And he is *always* pulling stuff like that when we go places together, and every time I seethe about it, and my mom seethes, and we seethe together, but we never actually talk to him about it. My mom says "oh, he's too old to change his ways now anyhow," but I say, fuckin' BULLSHIT. But I digress.)
When have you regretted speaking the truth?
I can think of two examples where I regretted telling people that I had a crush on them. In the first case, the main reason I regretted it was that the guy was gay -- and if I hadn't been so infatuated I would have realized it long before I embarrassed myself. ;) In the second case, the chick said she only liked me as a friend -- and I made a real effort to get over it and be happy as her friend -- but for a long time afterward, she took advantage of my crush, played with my emotions by flirting with me and stringing me along. I guess it made her feel good to know that a cute younger chick had a thing for her, I dunno. That was painful for me personally, so I regret it because of that, even though I had no way of knowing how she would react to the revelation.
Those are reasonably harmless "regret telling the truth" examples, though. I guess I haven't had any major incidents of that type.
When is truth necessary vs. not?
I wrote a little above about when truth is necessary. There are also of course times when it's not. A good example of this is when you get a gift that you hate from someone you rarely see. What would be the point of calling elderly Aunt Sylvia to say, "Gee Auntie, these are the ugliest earrings ever! Where the hell did you find them??" Such a truth accomplishes nothing and only causes hurt feelings. Instead, you simply say, "Thanks for the earrings," and you remember that it's the thought that counts, and you shove the earrings to the farthest back corner of your drawer and there's no harm done.
Where the problems come in, though, is the cases that straddle the line between "this truth must be told" and "this truth shouldn't be told." An example of this that I see in my friends' experiences all too often is the coming-out debate. Should you come out to your elderly relatives/conservative neighbors/sheltered coworkers? On one hand, homophobic old Aunt Sylvia is 95 and about to die any day now, so why should she need to know that the niece she never sees is a lesbian? On the other hand, a lot of queer people feel that they're being dishonest to themselves if they don't come out; they're uncomfortable behaving as if they had something to hide when really they're proud of their queerness. This is a tough one in which each argument has its merits, so that's the tightrope you have to walk: to balance your own need for truth-telling with the good it will or won't do; to weigh the harm that not telling does against the harm that telling would do. And it can be so hard to be objective, to really know whether your desire to tell is selfishly motivated or truly based in the need for truth.
Finally,
jrosehale writes, And are "truth" and "family" mutually-exclusive concepts? I think not. The thing is, a large part of determining whether to tell a truth involves considering your relationship to the potential hearer. It's a very different issue to consider coming out to homophobic Aunt Sylvia whom you barely know, versus coming out to your best friend (for example). The better you know someone, and the better your relationship with them, the more equipped you are to predict how they'll react to the truth, and that helps you decide whether to tell it. Family relationships are, much more often than non-family relationships, fraught with hidden resentments, preconceptions, lingering reactions to stuff that happened thirty years ago, and other such emotional baggage; and because of that, family relationships are more likely to be damaged by truth-telling, or to make truth-telling more difficult.In other words, it's not that telling truth to family members is inherently problematic. Rather, it's that telling the truth in certain situations/circumstances is problematic, and family members are more likely to be involved in those situations/circumstances.
Of course, I'm in a biased position because I have such great relationships with my immediate family members, meaning my mom and brother. There's very little that I can't or won't tell my mom. And yes, I do realize that I'm a) very unusual and b) very lucky in this regard.
I feel like I have more to say, but wow, this is pretty long already, so I'll stop here.
