It is said that people fear public speaking more than they fear death. Well, I would propose that people fear telling the truth to the people that are important to them even more than public speaking and that they often would choose death over both.

All death jokes aside, I would like to include a few thoughts about what occurs within a relationship when we withhold the truth not only about something we have done but just as importantly, our feelings and thoughts.

A withhold can be defined as anything that you do not say or reveal to another person who matters to you out of fear of their reaction. Consider moments in your life when a person who is important to you said or did something that you didn’t agree with or like. What happened in those moments? Or, consider a time when a colleague didn’t follow through on something they said they would do, and you never addressed it with them. Over time, what did you eventually conclude about that person? Did you begin to notice that you really didn’t want to interact with them anymore? Did you start to make up stories about them? And lastly, consider the times when you have agreed to do something that you didn’t really want to do in a relationship. How happy did you feel doing it? How did you feel when you were asked to do it again?

Withholding our feelings from each other only allows one thing to occur in a relationship: withdrawal. Over time, after enough resentment has built from our withheld feelings, we begin to separate from the other person one way or another and this results in there being no relationship at all. In any relationship, this is the number one cause of death of the relationship.

So, how do we become fully expressed in a relationship? Think about what you might do and stay tuned for my next post.