emotionally necessary dishonesty
this is all in good faith, I promise
Frustratingly, our minds do not immediately and totally disclose to us why we are feeling what we are feeling, all of the time. If you are committed to being straightforward with the people you care about, this is a problem. You cannot transmit straightforwardly what has been transmitted to you blurry and warped. At some point, you will be forced to play Broken Telephone with your loved ones and your mumbling heart.
When one of the things your heart is mumbling is "your relationship with this loved one needs to be transformed," Broken Telephone becomes high-stakes. You may be placed in what feels like an impossible position, what I will call Broken Telephone on Hard Mode. You feel that your mind and heart have become disordered, that there is mess and pain and friction. You feel that your relationship needs to change to accommodate this mess. Maybe you need distance. Maybe you need to set some difficult boundaries. For this to go well, your loved one needs to accept this change. For them to accept this change, they need to understand why you need it. But, as the telephone is broken, you don’t understand why you need it, only that your heart demands relief. The only way forward is to offer your loved one your best guess as to why you need what you need. You must come up with a model of your mess, an approximation, a plausible story. And if you are committed to being straightforward with your loved one, it may feel very shameful to offer them no more than a plausible story.
You are on the horns of a practical dilemma.
On one horn, you can refrain from cleaning up your relationship until you're able to clean up The Mess Inside.* This may be untenable: the mess of your relationship may be life-deranging in a way that cannot be tolerated. Or, the internal and external messes may exacerbate each other reciprocally, such that The Mess Inside cannot be cleaned as long as your relational status quo is maintained.
On the other horn, you can come up with a reasonable-sounding theory which your loved one can accept — and so which probably contains a grain of truth — but which, from your perspective, feels like a PR campaign. And though you might be transparent that it is just a working hypothesis, that you're not totally sure what's going on, that there are other candidate theories — all of this will feel like ass-covering. Until you have a clear view of your heart, any description of it will seem like an obfuscation. You will feel dishonest. Your relationship will feel cheapened, and your integrity compromised. You might succeed in changing the relationship in the way you need, but at a cost to your self-respect.
It is a cruel prank that even you, a well-intentioned basically-wise person, can find yourself in this bind. Whatever you choose, you will suffer for it. But personal experience tells me that, generally, it is better to choose the second horn. I have impaled myself on the first horn many times. I've sunken to its base and pressed my wet belly against the head of the bull. I would not recommend it. If I could, I would bind myself always to choose the second horn. If I could bind the world to do so, I suspect the world would be a better place. Maybe the world would be better still if we issued a blanket amnesty for anyone engaging in emotionally necessary PR, so that it would not count against their integrity. Or maybe PR should always be spiritually costly — maybe this is what keeps us honest in the midst of feeling dishonest. I don’t know.
This describes Broken Telephone on Hard Mode. On easier modes, there will be ways to escape the dilemma. For instance, in some relationships there will be leeway to ask for changes to be made on the promise that an explanation will be provided as soon as a good (not merely plausible) one is available. See also: "Spending some time apart to figure things out." Arguably, in a healthy relationship, this should feel like an option. In an even healthier relationship, your loved one may themselves be able to help you connect with your heart and arrive at a satisfactory model. May all your significant relationships be so — this is rare and precious.
If you find yourself playing Broken Telephone, reflect on whether you are truly playing on Hard Mode. If you can discover a way to get off the horns entirely, wonderful! If you cannot, if there aren't enough degrees of freedom within the relationship to allow for a cunning solution, consider that the relationship may be a bit rotten. When it comes to this, give yourself a little slack (but only a little) if you must spin some yarn.
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