Here is the full transcript of Willie Earley’s talk titled “Truth Telling in Relationships, Are We There Yet?” at TEDxJerseyCity conference.
In this TEDx talk, psychiatrist Willie Earley addresses the complexities of honesty within relationships. He reflects on his personal experiences and observations, noting that while people desire truth and openness, they often struggle to practice it. Earley discusses the common tendency to tell white lies or omit the truth for convenience, highlighting the challenges people face in being completely honest with themselves and others.
He emphasizes the role of secrets in shaping relationships, sharing his own story as an example of how hidden truths can impact one’s sense of self and interactions with others. Earley argues that embracing authenticity and confronting uncomfortable truths can lead to more fulfilling relationships. He concludes by stressing the importance of being true to oneself and the transformative power of authentic communication in relationships.
Listen to the audio version here:
TRANSCRIPT:
Understanding Relationships
So, I think it goes without saying that relationships can be complicated, sometimes quite complicated. So why is it in relationships, despite our willingness to be in relationships, we find it difficult and sometimes difficult to manage the truth and tell the truth? Why is it in relationships do we tell lies to ourselves? Why do we lie to others?
And really, what is the fear of self-disclosure? Now, I’ve struggled with these issues over the years. I’ve had my fair share of relationship hiccups. I’ve also had the pleasure of listening to other people.
You may have seen in my bio that I’m a psychiatrist. And when I had a clinical practice, I often heard patients tell me about their lives as well. I also come from a very large family and have a wide network of friends, and I’ve heard people talk about their relationships almost all of my life. And one of the things that I’ve heard and observed over these years has surprised me.
Truth and Openness in Relationships
And one of the first observations is that although we talk about wanting truth and openness in relationships, I don’t think at times we truly value truth and openness in relationships. A case in point, if I were to ask this audience by a show of hands how many of you would see truth as an important attribute in relationships, how many would raise your hand?
Okay, so it’s a fair number, at least those that I can see up front. If I were to also ask you how many of you have ever engaged in conversations, let’s say with a friend who you might be attracted to, maybe a text message or a telephone call, maybe emails or maybe even dinner or drinks, but you didn’t tell your spouse or your significant other, how many of you have also done that?
The Struggle with Honesty
Or honestly, we’ll answer that question. Well, I think that the very nature that we at one hand, we say we want honesty, while on the other hand, we sometimes use honesty for our own convenience. We sometimes fail to tell the truth, we sometimes tell little white lies, or sometimes omit the truth altogether. And I struggle, and I’ve struggled over the years trying to understand why do we do that.
And one of the things that I’ve come to a conclusion is, and this is not based on any research, but just my own observation, is that we struggle with the truth because we in many ways have difficulties hearing the truth. And we recognize that we tell ourselves, we tell little white lies and we don’t sometimes tell the full story when we’re interacting with our mates or significant others.
But I think if we were to acknowledge within ourselves that sometimes our mates also are telling us little white lies and not necessarily being forthcoming with us, we may then have to deal with the anxiety of understanding what their truths are and having both their truth and our truth on the table. And then we would have to re-evaluate whether or not we are truly dealing with people or a person that we would want to be with.
The Fear of Honesty
Now I think that that’s a common error that people make, is that when they hear the truth from someone, they sometimes feel that they have to have a knee-jerk reaction as opposed to calmly hearing what’s happening. They sometimes feel that they have to have an action such as protest, become angry, or leave the relationship.
I would say the fact that the person is sharing their lives does not mean that you need to leave. It merely means that you need to understand that they are sharing another aspect of their lives that you have, to this point, have not seen.
The Role of Secrets
Secrets play an important part in our lives. I think it goes without saying that secrets, we all have secrets. Some secrets we don’t share with anyone. They are totally within us.
Other secrets we may share with a select few. And then there are some secrets that we aren’t even consciously aware of that seem to trickle up into our lives and sometimes wreak havoc in our everyday existence. Secrets help protect us. They help protect us from embarrassment.
They help protect us from shame. And they help protect us from rejection. They prevent us from becoming one with each other. They prevent us from communicating clearly.
The Power of Secrets
Secrets are, on one hand, they drain us of our power. I would like to share with you a secret of mine, just to illustrate this point. I was named after my father. No, that’s not the secret.
The secret is I am the illegitimate son of my father, who happened to be a Baptist minister. Now, my mother and father were never married.
My father, in fact, was married and had a family at the time that I was born and conceived. I mean, conceived and brought into the world, reverse order.
And at the time, when I was growing up, I didn’t really think anything of it, until I was about 11 years old, and one of my friends says to me, he says, Willie, did you know you were a bastard? And being 11 years old, I didn’t quite understand what a bastard, what that phrase meant. But upon him explaining it to me, I immediately became embarrassed. I immediately became just overwhelmed with shame, embarrassment.
I really didn’t feel as if I was equal to my friends and some of the other people around me. And I hid it. I began hiding it. This was when I was, like I said, about 11 or 12.
And so up until I was in my 20s, I really didn’t talk much about my family. I didn’t talk much about things that were going on in my family. I hid that part of me. As I said earlier, secrets drain you of your power.
The Impact of Secrets
By hiding myself, I felt as if I wasn’t really engaging in society. And I was carrying around my own personal scarlet letter. And I knew I had to have it gone. I wanted it gone.
So I tell you this now because as I’ve grown through the years, I’ve exposed that secret. I’ve decided to share my life. And now that secret no longer has the power that it had before. And it brought me to the point to realize that secrets have a way of trapping you in a life that you really don’t want.
That the only way to really expose and be truthful to yourself and be authentic is to share your life. And so that brought me into why aren’t we doing more of this in relationships? And I really question why aren’t we doing it more in relationships. And one of the reasons that I think that we don’t do it is because we fear rejection or we fear abandonment.
Adjusting to Truth in Relationships
Now all too often when we begin sharing a side of ourselves that we have prior to that point not spoken about to our loved ones, they have to adjust to where we are. Sometimes they adjust appropriately or they don’t leave. But sometimes they do. They feel that what you’re saying is not compatible with what they had signed up for.
But again, I think if we were to step back and recognize that we all harbor secret sides that we haven’t shared with each other, we would be a little bit more, what should I say, we would be a little bit more cautious in our desires to
leave a relationship just because you have found a new layer that you had previously not noticed. I mentioned to you earlier that I have had relationship hiccups in the past. I want to share with you one of those relationship hiccups. I’m twice divorced.
Personal Reflections on Marriage and Divorce
And as a psychiatrist, you know, I thought I would have some insights into my life. But that was not the case. Divorce are no different from anyone else when it comes to having insights into their own personal lives. But what I realized when I was going through my separation of my second divorce, I realized that I truly hadn’t been truthful to myself when I decided to get married.
I had spent my early years, my early 20s or so, going through school and through med school and that sort of thing, so I really didn’t spend a lot of time, I really didn’t spend a lot of time at all in dating. I was nosed down into the books. And so when I finally finished school and that sort of thing, I started to look and date. But I dated with a purpose.
I wanted this so-called prototypic American dream. You know, the wife, two to three kids, a house and a career, a nice career. And so I was going for that. And so I figured that that was the mark of success.
And like you, like many of you who may have also done things of this nature, I didn’t question whether or not that was my dream or whether or not it was a dream that I had took on just because society said it was important. And so what happened is that while I was in the middle of this relationship, my last relationship, I realized that I liked many aspects of the marriage life. I liked, I enjoyed having my children and family, but there were many aspects that were alien to me, such aspects as fidelity and monogamy. Those were not issues that I had come to terms with.
The Challenge of Marriage
As I said, I had spent a lot of years being very studious and being very much on point with my education. And I wanted that side of me to grow, but unfortunately within the marriage, it could not grow. And so I began dating. Unfortunately I was still married.
Marriage and dating don’t necessarily mix. And so I started talking, I had a lot of conversations with my now ex-wife, and I spoke to her about my newfound revelations. And she listened, but as is often the case with authentic conversations, her wishes were not my, I mean my wishes were not her wishes, and the marriage ended in divorce. But an interesting thing happened along the way and over the years of post-divorce.
Finding Authenticity After Divorce
You know, when I began having that conversation with my wife, I feared that I would lose the respect of her, my children, my family and friends. But the thing that happened was that it didn’t happen. I began to, I still showed my wife and my family that I was there, I am there. My family and friends saw that I was still there, and despite my desires to live this alternative life that was different from how society viewed that I should live.
But one of the things that happened is that by having this authentic conversation, both my wife and I were able to maintain our relationship, our friendship, and we still have that friendship today. And the love that I have for my children is still there, and my family and friends also understand where I am.
So although I took a chance, a leap of faith in being authentic, and it was a scary leap of faith, and it went totally against what I consider my professional standing in society and went against all of the societal norms, I felt it was in keeping with my norms. And so this empowerment that I felt by being authentic once again brought me back to when I spoke about my childhood.
The Power of Authenticity
It taught me that being yourself is really all that we have. We shouldn’t try to put on airs or be something that we aren’t. And so my wish for you and my wish for everyone is to try authenticity. Now we’ve tried, and many of us have been in relationships where we may tell white lies, manipulate or deceive as a means of interacting, but it’s really important that you try the other side of the coin, and that is being honest, being brave, and being willing to listen as well as hear and verbalize what you feel.
In Closing: The Power of Being You
In closing, I wanted to leave you with two points. There’s one that I often tell my children, and it relates to the power of being you when you’re in the right place. And it says we all have superpowers. We just need to find the right place to exercise them.
Remember that on Krypton, even Superman is just a man. The second point is a quote by Brené Brown, and it says, “Authenticity is the daily practice of letting go of who you think you should be and embracing who you are.” And with that, I conclude.