Honesty; Choosing Authenticity over Anxiety

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Hey everybody, welcome back to Partnership Aligned Podcast.
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So before I get into today's content, I just wanted to let you all know that I am reopening my group called Master Your Marriage and Your Mind.
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Okay.
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This is something that I do for a few months out of the year where you get to join and learn communication skills.
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You get to overcome your fear of talking to your partner in an authentic, honest way.
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You get to bond with other women who are working on the same thing.
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And you get to get coached every single week and also hear other women get coached on their marriage as well.
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It is highly powerful.
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The results that you get are out of this world.
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And I am so excited to reopen this group.
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So we are starting again in just a few weeks.
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If you're interested, you can email me elana e-l-a-n-a at partnershipaligned.com, or you can send me a DM on Instagram.
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My handle is at partnershipaligned.
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All right, so let's get into it.
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Today we are moving on to our next spiritual characteristic that will improve your marriage.
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And that is actually the one that is nearest and dearest to me, which is honesty.
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I actually used to be a very dishonest person.
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I am in recovery, and so my addiction played a big part into that.
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But even outside of addiction, I always exaggerated.
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I always told stories in a way that were bigger than they were.
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I omitted information.
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Like I just didn't present myself in an honest, authentic way.
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And now that I'm so far removed from that, now that I am a very honest and authentic person, I look back on that and I ask myself, why, right?
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Hindsight is 2020.
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And maybe you'll resonate with this if you're struggling with honesty in your relationships.
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For me, it was a couple of things.
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Number one, um, if I am not totally honest with you, then that means that you can't get too close to me, right?
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And then like I get to live over here in my bubble in like separation from others.
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The other thing that it was is if I am not totally honest with you, then I'm not exposed.
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You won't see me for who I really am.
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And I never really thought of myself as a bad person or unworthy or anything like that.
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Thank God I had a mom who instilled really great self-esteem in me.
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But I did think that there were parts of me that other people just wouldn't approve of.
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And instead of taking a look at those parts, instead of deciding whether I approve of those things or not, I just decided to hide them from the world, uh, including my, you know, my husband at the time, uh, friends, other romantic relationships.
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And what I found was that I was wasn't able to have the kind of fulfillment and intimacy that I wanted to have in my romantic relationships because I wouldn't let my partner see who I really was.
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What I learned over time after working on becoming a more honest person is that the parts of me that I wanted to hide are exactly the same parts that everybody else is trying to hide about themselves.
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Like I am not a special snowflake, and neither are you.
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And I mean that in the best way possible, right?
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Whatever your insecurities are, whatever you have, some like bad habits, whatever some of your thoughts are that are less than kind, like whatever it is, it really just makes you human, and we all have that, right?
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Now, let's take this uh tendency to be dishonest or to hide ourselves, and then let's move it over into marriage, right?
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Because that's what we talk about here.
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What I find when I'm working with women, men as well, but especially with women, is that they cannot be honest about how they are feeling about their partner to their partner.
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They have a very hard time speaking up about what it is that they need and how they're feeling about the lack of what they're getting.
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And I think there's a few reasons for this.
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I th well, first of all, it all falls under the umbrella of fear, right?
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We're afraid that if we say the thing that we have been wanting to say to our partner, a few things might happen.
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Number one, a fear of rejection, right?
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Like either they won't care or they'll tell us there's something wrong with us, or they'll leave, or something like that.
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Then there's a fear of not being um of not being validated, right?
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A fear of invalidation, of I'm gonna go ahead and speak how I really feel, which is really scary.
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And you're going to somehow invalidate that.
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And then I'm going to feel not only exposed, but again, rejected, right?
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A lot of it comes back to rejection.
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Um, another reason is I'm afraid of conflict.
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That's a big one.
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I am afraid of being in conflict with you, either because I never win, or because I'm afraid to upset you, or like there are just so many reasons.
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At the end of the day, if you are dishonest within your marriage, but by the way, that doesn't necessarily mean that you're outright lying, although you might be.
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It just means that you are not being your full self, right?
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It's like you're not being authentic, right?
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But I think before authenticity comes honesty, I think that they relate to each other, but they're not the same thing.
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First, you have to be honest, then you can be authentic.
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You cannot be authentic without honesty, right?
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So I think that one of the things that comes up the most in this area is I can't fully be honest with him because I don't know how to handle that conversation.
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And that is where communication skills come in.
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Communication skills, learning how to say the hard things in a way that does feel aligned, that is the money.
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Like that is the secret sauce right there.
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And that's something that I help you with.
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I literally make verbiage prompts for you based on what it is that you want to say to your partner.
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So I'll give you an example.
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I once had a client who was five years into her marriage, and at the very, very beginning of the relationship, before they even got married, she got pregnant.
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And when she told him that she was pregnant, he responded less than enthusiastically, let's just say.
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And she never talked to him about how much that affected her.
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She was with this man, she's still with him.
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She was with this man for five years when I worked with her and had never told him how deeply that had hurt her.
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Now, they went on to have the baby and he loves her very much.
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Like it is, but what happened was she entered into this marriage with this deep resentment and also just this deep fear that like he doesn't really want to be here, right?
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That was kind of what she took from his comments when she said, I'm pregnant.
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Um, he doesn't really want to be here.
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And so she lived those five years in marriage with this man, thinking that he didn't want to be there.
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Now think about it.
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If you're in a marriage with a man and you think he doesn't actually want to be there and you have a kid and everything, what are you gonna do?
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Well, what she did was she overcompensated to make sure that he did want to be there, right?
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She made everything super easy on him.
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She took care of the kid without asking for anything, even though like he was a good father and wanted to be involved.
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Um, she just she took care of everything.
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She put the world on her shoulders because she didn't want to inconvenience him, she didn't want to upset him because she had this underlying belief that he didn't want to be there.
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In our work together, what we did was the first thing that we did was the inner work.
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Okay, spoiler alert, relationship coaching is self-coaching.
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So we really worked on her fears.
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Why didn't she say anything?
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Where does that come from?
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And then we had to ask the big question, which is do you like your reasons for not being honest in your marriage?
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Like, are you aligned and comfortable with never talking about something that is so deeply affecting you just out of fear?
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And of course the answer is no, right?
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Like fear is never alignment, ever, even though it runs our life.
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And it took us, um, took her maybe like five months before she was ready to have that conversation with him.
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We did a ton of prep work.
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Uh, she was petrified, man.
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She was petrified.
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But we worked through it and she did go and talk to him about it.
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And it was this beautiful moment of her like becoming her real self and saying, like, hey, this is what's going on for me, man.
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Like, I am struggling with this, and I've been struggling with this, and I know that it affects the way that I treat you.
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And I know that it affects the way I show up, you know, in the bedroom and with money and with the kid and with everything.
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I am so affected by this underlying belief that you don't want to be here based on what you said five years ago.
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And I've never talked to you about it because I'm that scared.
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And now I'm in a place in my life where I am more scared not to be honest than I am to be in conflict with you.
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And it was so beautiful and it ended in a really beautiful way.
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So that is just one of many, many, many, many, many examples that I have of a woman not being totally honest with her husband, even though she's not like outright lying to him on a daily basis or anything, but she's not being authentic.
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She's not showing him what's going on with her.
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And so my question to you is are you being honest in your marriage?
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If I came to your partner right now and asked him or her how you were feeling about the marriage and about them, would they know the answer?
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Would they say, I don't know, because you don't talk to each other?
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Or would they give me an answer that wasn't true because you put on a facade?
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Or would they say, no, something is wrong, but I just don't know what it is, right?
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Because maybe you're passive aggressive or you give the silent treatment.
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Like, does your partner actually know how you're feeling about yourself, about them, about the marriage?
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If your answer is anything other than hell yes, I really want to invite you to take a look at that.
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You have one life and maybe just one marriage, right?
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These days you never know.
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But the marriage that you're in right now, it's like, do you want to live it authentically or do you want to live it in fear?
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Over the past eight years, I have become my most authentic self.
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And I want to tell you how unbelievably amazing it feels to be myself, right?
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I'm now in a very aligned relationship, and I am 100% myself.
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The good, the bad, the ugly.
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I talk about how I'm feeling, I talk about my fears, I show the parts of me that are messy, all of it.
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Because at the end of the day, I am so much more afraid of being dishonest and misaligned and inauthentic and losing myself in that way, like I did in my marriage.
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I'm so much more afraid of that than I am of somebody judging me, you know?
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And at the end of the day, if my partner is gonna judge me for being human, then they're probably not the right person for me.
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Or we just need to talk things out, right?
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We all judge.
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So what I want to offer you is that there is another way, right?
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And you might be saying to yourself, yes, I would love that, but like, how the hell do I get there?
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Well, that's where I come in, all right?
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That is what master your marriage and your mind is about.
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It is a part course, part coaching, part uh bonding.
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It is all of the above.
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You come into the room, it's on Zoom once a week.
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It's a small group.
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I always keep it to under five women.
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We get to know each other really well, we empower each other, and I teach you how to be yourself.
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I teach you how to speak your truth.
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I teach you how to show up in your marriage every single day as your authentic self, unapologetically and without shame.
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If that resonates for you, if that's something that you want, then I am here to show you how to get there.
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So get in touch with me and let's make it happen.
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All right, guys.
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Thank you so much, and I'll talk to you next time.