Learning to Know What is Real

Reclaiming the truth-sense you always had

I just watched a part of an interview with Carly Simon.

She was talking about growing up as a young girl in her family, discovering her father was famous as a publisher and not as a shoe salesman (she’d misinterpreted the Schuster in Simon & Schuster.)

She said, “I was always trying to figure out the difference between what was true and what was not true because the grown-ups are supposed to know.”

The grown-ups are supposed to know — the difference between what’s the truth and what is not — but so often they do not.

The part about her little 7-year-old self struggling to figure out the difference between what was true and what was not true struck me. It rang so true for my little girl self — something I wondered about all the time too, as did some of my friends. Not that we had that vocabulary, but we had the need to know — how to tell the difference between what the truth was, and what was not.

I’ve worked with so many people who were equally anxiously plagued with this question in their own childhoods.
It’s the kind of thing you grow up thinking that anxiety doesn’t really matter, yet the fear — “Am I crazy?” — comes up over and over again.

When you live in a culture that says a huge part of your sensory intake system does not exist, yet you are receiving that information, and there is no reliable way to check the accuracy of the information or your interpretation — that right there is crazy-making.

And that fear of being found crazy doesn’t go away too soon. It stays around, ready to be reactivated, for many years.

Can I bring this in, or is it too much? The fear of being found crazy is an effective control device society uses on us.

It isn’t far-fetched. To this day women are locked away in (whatever nut huts are called) so their husbands can do what they want. This is especially common in wealthy families.

Even Sigmund Freud knew how often insanity was used as the excuse to get the wife out of the way so the husband could do what he wanted.

Cary Grant’s father had his mother put away so he could go off with another woman, start a new family, and essentially abandon Cary — Archie Leach — who ran off and joined the carnival, with life-long emotional wounding about his supposedly dead mother. He discovered in his early fame that she was alive in a sanatorium. By then she had lived with the insane reality of being perfectly sane, but locked up by a husband who didn’t want her anymore, and then naturally losing her confidence in her ability to know what was real and what was not.

So often we hear how these fears are “silly” or you should just get over them. But you cannot do anything until you acknowledge the veracity of them.

It would be horrible if it was true — that your husband could just have you locked up.
It would be horrible to find yourself locked up, when you weren’t crazy, you simply could perceive things others don’t.
It would be unbearable to be locked up for being yourself, and not what’s expected of you.

Acknowledging how horrible it would be if this thing you are scared of actually happened is only reasonable. And it is what a caring person would do.

You may be in circumstances where the likelihood of that happening to you now is very small, but that’s not what’s being asked so you can attune your calibration.

What’s being offered is a deep fear that does have legitimacy. It’s asking you to acknowledge the legitimacy — that’s all.

You don’t have to buy into it, or run away from it (the culture’s solution for everything). All that’s needed is that you allow as how awful that would be — and that energy itself will lift and bring you up to a new, higher level of comprehension and retroactive healing.

The act of listening is profound.

The act of acknowledging the emotional truth – it would be awful – is profound.

The act of being present with this part of yourself, with this energy, is profound receiving, which is profound.

Altogether this is the profound act of being present with yourself.

These are the steps of actually being On Your Side.

So much of the need to be right is not what society has defined it as. It’s not about the need to be right so you can be over someone else who is wrong — which is what competition says.

It is the visceral need to know your calibration is accurate — to know what is real and what isn’t; to know you can believe your sense of things, in any given moment.

Once your inner guidance is cleared of outer influences and survival needs, you will always know what is real and what is not, no matter what, and so live in a deep and abiding sense of wellbeing, connectedness, and infinite possibilities – no matter what anyone else says.