Letting up on oneself about having to hide and pretend is freeing and it feels good, like breathing fresh

air

it means being expressive of feeling—mad when you express resentment and warm and moved when
you express appreciation and silent when you don't yet know what you feel. Telling the truth has to do
with being expressive of feeling and using descriptive language regardless of ideas about tact or
propriety. The first thing you have to get over to tell the truth is politeness—

Honest people speak simply, using language more to describe than to evaluate.

focus on making the distinction over and over again between valueladen words and descriptive words.
Descriptive words make pictures happen in the minds of the speaker and the hearer, create experiences
like sexual excitement, anger, righteous indignation, embarrassment, sympathy, sadness, joyfulness, or
laughter. An honest person is one who is creating vivid pictures, feelings, sounds, and smells in the
singular attempt to portray what has occurred or is occurring within her or around her.

Our problems do not arise from not thinking enough before we speak. Just the opposite is true. The way
we learn to think and modify what we have to say before we speak kills millions of us unnecessarily and
lays waste most of the cripples left, injured but still alive

We all tend to get lost in the swamp of our evaluative minds trying to make decisions and figure out how
to behave and what to do next while constantly considering what we imagine others might imagine
about us as a result of any action we anticipate taking. This concern about controlling the opinions of
others and keeping control of ourselves kills more people than any form of environmental stress.

The main thing that can free a person from his or her own mind is telling the truth. Telling the truth is
always interpreted by the mind as a threat to its security

TABOOS AGAINST EXCITEMENT

a person who has put a lot of energy into denying his own sexuality and making sexual behavior an evil
thing may become a self-appointed defender of the public morals and will make it his civic duty to screen
pornographic movies and books in a tireless effort to protect the young people of this country from filth.
This may be the only way he can deal with his own sexual feelings without violating what his mind
believes is acceptable behavior. Most of us, however, don't go to this extreme. We suppress our sexuality
with guilt, moralism, and compensating forms of excitement like overeating, overworking, smoking
cigarettes, taking drugs, drinking, and so on. We keep ourselves busy thinking, eating, working hard, and
alternately using tranquilizers and stimulants rather than staying in touch with the sensations in our
bodies.

When we begin to acknowledge the unacknowledged aggression and repressed anger, it no longer runs
our lives. Usually a few other unacknowledged emotions show up too. In fact, there are always other
feelings underneath the anger

Neurosis is essentially a refusal to accept what is happening in the present. Neurosis involves denying
the truth about any form of excitement, here and now. A neurotic is a person who incessantly demands
that life be other than it is.

Whether we earn the label neurotic depends only on the frequency, persistence, and intensity with
which we deny feelings, sensations, or any experience whatsoever. A person who refuses to
acknowledge experience over and over is a neurotic. Thus, neurosis is a name for consistently denying
sexuality, aggression, joy, grief, love, and other feelings. The key to the cure for neurosis is not only the
identification of the feelings being denied, but the person's acknowledgment, of those feelings.

We get lost in our minds and lose touch with our experience when we begin to feel something that we
are afraid is too much for us to feel, or something we think we are not supposed to feel.

Refocusing on experience ( instead of our thoughts and fantasies ) helps the person in denial to feel what
is going on inside him and begin to tell the truth to cure himself

To escape the hard-earned, hard-built prison of the self, we must reinterpret our identities to include
more than that prison
HOW TO DEAL WITH ANGER

Withheld anger destroys relationships by sucking the aliveness out of them. For aliveness to be restored,
both to the relationships and the individual, anger must be expressed.

The way anger is expressed has everything to do with the outcome of an argument. When anger is
expressed in such a way that both people are fully present to the experience, the anger eventually goes
away, and the people have a new opening in their relationship.

The continuum can be divided into two parts, indirect expression and direct expression. All indirect
forms are sick and stupid. Many direct forms fail as well.

To express anger fully, we must give up most of our constraints on it. We can inhibit killing and physical
violence. But we must be willing to be angry rather than decent and fair, because angry, rather than
decent and fair, is what we presently are. After we are angry, we may be decent and fair, but we will
never be authentically angry or authentically fair while we are struggling to be both at once.

In our culture, when we are older we still experience anger, but we no longer permit ourselves to be
angry and to express anger at the same time. Therefore we don't get over. it as quickly as we did when
we were younger. We learn, in the course of growing up, after getting punished for anger and losing a
few battles, that it is smarter to hide our anger than to express it. We are raised to believe that we
should, get angry only at certain times, at certain people, and only if we are "right." Since we all get
angry all the time, at the wrong people, at the wrong times, and for the wrong reasons, we learn early in
life that the way to deal with this unwanted anger is to keep it hidden.

When anger is not expressed directly, it is expressed indirectly. So it gets expressed but not experienced.
If anger is not expressed directly, it is not experienced directly. Unless a person experiences anger in the
body and acknowledges the experience, the anger does not complete itself-—does not discharge,
subside, and go away

When anger is expressed indirectly, in ways that are calculated to avoid the experience of anger, anger
gets stored up rather than dissipating. The experience of anger is converted to thoughts about the
resented person—-judgments, complaints, conclusions, and imaginary conversations. When you are
preoccupied with thoughts about someone toward whom you are angry, you become distracted
Even if the person toward whom we are angry doesn't change, agree to change, or apologize, we can still
forgive that person for our own benefit.

So this is what happens with anger: as children grow, constantly overpowered, cared for, and controlled,
childhood expressions of anger against stronger adults are punished, either overtly or covertly, or worse,
condescendingly moralized about. As children, we do the best we can to copy approved ways of dealing
with anger to avoid getting punished for it. The result, at least in our culture, is that most people don't
express anger directly.

In fact, more often than not, when people tell the truth about their feelings, relationships get better,
even if the truth is about hatred.

Agreeing to tell the truth about anger in a committed relationship is a way to get over some of the
damage and suffering that comes from how you were raised. It is a way of losing your mind and coming
to your senses and experiencing yourself as a being, rather than as a jumble of morals gleaned from
whatever your sad story may be. It is a way of growing beyond primitive foolishness to a more advanced
form

Telling the Truth About Anger for the Sake of Forgiveness

When you are willing to have an experience be as it is, prior to categorizing the experience as "good" or
"bad," and you don't waste all of your energy trying to avoid or lie about the experience, you have a
choice about how you can respond to that experience.

One of the hallmarks of suppressed anger is helplessness. The language of helplessness is "I can't;" "they
made me;" "it's no use;" "it doesn't really matter;" and "you just don't understand." Power is assigned to
forces outside the speaker.

Generally, people are willing to admit that they feel "upset," but not that they are angry . Even
acknowledging "upset" is a first step; some of us deny even that. The second step is admitting that our
"upset" is anger. The third step is speaking resentments specifically and in contact with one's own body
and the eyes of the other person.
Clue about denying anger-> When you find yourself "trying," struggling, striving without any results, look
for whom you are trying to please: you are probably mad at them.

Another clue is self-condemnation. Instead of condemning yourself and calling yourself a rotten, weak,
or stupid person, ask yourself, "Who am I mad at?" Don't let yourself off the hook with the
rationalization, "I'm just mad at myself." This is worthless. You postulate two people, "I" and "myself who
are mad at each other. Put the two pieces back together and find someone else to be mad at. When you
have a choice of being mad at someone else or mad at yourself, always pick someone else. Most people
think selfcondemnation is a virtue; it's not.

Another hint of hidden anger is perfectionism. People who are proud of being perfectionists and for
whom hardly anything is ever good enough are angry at someone else

"Why do I have to express my anger directly to another person? Isn't it possible to just forget about it or
just understand the other person's situation and forgive him?" The answer is no. You cannot forgive
someone else without expressing your resentment directly to her or him.

Forgiving someone with whom you are angry—actually experiencing forgiving him—only happens after
you tell him what he did or said that you resent.