The Fourth Compassion: Truth

Denial, repression, suppression, rationalization, justification and hazy memory are among some of the ways in which we try to cope with our traumas. Pain, emotional and physical, has been waiting in the shadows behind these unhealthy coping mechanisms for a long time and it emerges with a full-blown vengeance when we stop using them. Gabor Maté quotes Helen Knott as saying, “When you have a lifetime of emotions that you have been running from, it seems like once they catch up, they will gang-beat you and leave you crippled in an alleyway.”Maté argues that this pain isn’t the enemy. It is, instead, a signpost alerting us to what is wrong. We don’t need to protect ourselves from our pain and we don’t need to protect ourselves from the truth of our situation. Truth is the compassion we bring to healing when we accept and acknowledge the pain we live with. Living in denial of our pain, or trying to manage it some other way (repression, suppression, rationalization, justification and hazy memory), is not how we heal.