The hardest part of deep growth is that you have to be fully honest about who you are and where you have been emotionally. For those of us who have suffered, this involves casting away congenial lies involving emotions hidden and locked away deep within us.
We lie to protect ourselves from the pain, and to stop lying is to release the captured and bound pain.
But I see no other way.
And I will make a public note to myself that this process of lying often makes people stupid. You might think you are having a discussion about, say, masks, but you are really dealing with their repression of what they felt when their father left for good when they were ten. It all gets mixed in together in unpredictable and confusing ways.
And while it is reasonable to hope for rationality from those around us, we—I—need to remember that the tacit demand being made, as heard by their unconscious, is that they be made to suffer.
In all human interactions there is a lot going on, and a prodigious amount of latent communication and information being exchanged.