I No Longer Soften the Truth

“And the biggest difference between then and now is this: I no longer soften the truth. Not for other people. And not for myself.”

One of the things sexual assault steals is trust.

Not just trust in other people.

Trust in yourself.

Trust in what you know.

Trust in the signals that arise in your body before your mind can make sense of them.

When I was eighteen years old, I experienced a violent sexual assault. It would take years before I understood that healing wasn’t only about recovering from what happened. It was also about learning to trust myself again.

Learning to trust what I felt.

Learning to trust what I knew.

Learning to trust the quiet voice inside that says, “Something isn’t right here.”

For a long time, I didn’t understand how much courage that would require.

Years later, I found myself in transformational communities, spiritual circles, workshops, retreats, and trainings. Some of those experiences changed my life. Some introduced me to teachers, ideas, and practices that continue to influence me today.

Recently, I’ve seen videos and posts of a previous teacher.

The Workshop

 I attended several of his workshops several years ago. Many of his teachings were and still are radical, insightful, and profound. Some of the ideas I encountered in those rooms continue to influence how I navigate the world today. I remain genuinely grateful for that.

Which is what made what happened next so confusing.

During one workshop, a statement was made and presented as a statistical fact. It was then followed by an observation that rape was harder for men than it was for women.

The statement landed hard in my body.

Really hard.

Part of that reaction was undoubtedly connected to where I was in my own healing journey at the time. I had experienced sexual assault. I was still unpacking the pieces of that experience and its impact on my life.

But even beyond my personal history, something about the statement felt deeply off.

The truth is, rape is hard. It is devastating and violating. It changes lives and relationships—not only with others, but with ourselves.

Comparing who suffers more feels both impossible and unnecessary.

Pain is not a competition.

Trauma is not a contest.

During the break, I looked up the statistics that had been quoted. They were wrong.

Not slightly wrong.

Wildly wrong.

So I approached the teacher. I explained what I had found and shared my concerns.

His first response was to dismiss me. He told me that given my personal history, I wasn’t a reliable source for objectivity on the subject.

To be fair, there may have been some truth in that. At that point in my life, I was still carrying a great deal of pain. I may not have been entirely unbiased.

But what happened next is what stayed with me.

He admitted he knew the statistic was inaccurate when he presented it.

He knew.

Then he explained why he had done it.

According to him, it served the workshop’s integrity and broader teaching.

I remember sitting there trying to process what I had just heard.

The issue was no longer the statistic.

The issue was that truth itself seemed to have become secondary to the lesson.

Then he told me he was going to do me a favor.

During the next session, he would show a video. At a certain point in the video, something was said that addressed my concern.

When that moment happened, he explained, he would nod at me.

And I would know that was his apology.

I was floored.

I remember responding:

“Or you could just apologize and correct the information in front of the group.”

He smirked.

Then he said something I have never forgotten.

“That wouldn’t serve the teaching or the group. It would only serve you. This is bigger than the individual.”

The Bigger Question

I spent much of the remainder of that workshop feeling dismissed and gaslit.

But looking back, something else was happening too.

I was questioning myself.

Was I overreacting?

Was I being selfish?

Was I making it about me?

Was I compromising the group’s experience by insisting on accuracy?

I carried those questions for a long time.

What took me years to understand was that my concern wasn’t actually about being challenged.

I have no problem with metaphor.

I have no problem with mythology, folklore, archetypes, or even fantasy being used to illuminate a teaching.

Some of the most powerful truths we encounter are not factual truths at all. They are symbolic truths. Stories that point us toward something larger than ourselves. Spiritual traditions have been doing that for thousands of years.

Not everything a teacher says has to be literally true to be valuable.

This was different.

This wasn’t a myth.

This wasn’t an archetype.

This wasn’t a story being used to illustrate a point.

This was a statistic presented as fact.

A statistic that the teacher later admitted he knew was inaccurate.

And it wasn’t just any statistic.

It was a statistic being used to support the claim that rape is harder for men than it is for women.

At first glance, that may seem like a statement that benefits men and diminishes women.

But over time, I realized it diminishes everyone.

It diminishes women who have been raped.

It diminishes men who have been raped.

It diminishes anyone who has experienced sexual violence, coercion, manipulation, or violation.

It turns human suffering into a comparison.

A competition.

An argument.

When the truth is that trauma hurts.

Violation hurts.

Betrayal hurts.

No matter who experiences it.

The Mirror

Sitting there with him felt like another violation.

Not because he disagreed with me.

Not because he challenged me.

But because I felt my reality being dismissed in service of a larger narrative.

I felt fear. I felt doubt. I felt anger and even rage.

And perhaps most surprisingly, I felt ashamed for feeling those things. Ashamed that I was upset. Ashamed that I couldn’t simply let it go. Ashamed that I seemed to be the only person in the room having such a strong reaction.

It took a long time to unpack all of that.

Long enough to realize that what I was wrestling with wasn’t just the workshop.

It was my relationship to my own knowing.

It was my tendency to question myself when someone in authority told me my experience wasn’t valid.

It was the old wound that says:

Maybe they’re right.

Maybe I’m wrong.

Maybe I should trust them more than I trust myself.

As I continued to work with it, I realized the workshop had touched something much deeper.

Something personal.

Part of the reason I never told anyone about my rape when it happened was that I was trying to take care of everyone else.

My brother told me he couldn’t handle it.

So I lied.

My mother was dying, and all the attention in our family needed to be there.

So I lied.

My manager frightened me when he came into the store afterward.

So I lied.

Looking back, I can see that in my own way I had done something similar to what that teacher was doing.

I had sacrificed the truth in service of a bigger picture.

Not because I was trying to manipulate anyone.

Not because I was teaching a lesson.

But because I believed other people’s needs mattered more than my own.

I protected everyone else from the truth of what had happened to me because I thought it would be too hard for them.

In the process, I forgot myself.

I forgot to allow myself to feel how hard it was for me.

And in doing that, I bypassed giving both myself and my family the opportunity to work and be with the truth.

Or perhaps more accurately, I abandoned myself.

That realization was difficult to sit with.

The workshop triggered me because of what was happening in the room.

But it also triggered me because of the mirror it held up.

It revealed a pattern I knew intimately.

The willingness to set aside truth in order to protect others.

The willingness to diminish my own experience for the comfort of someone else.

The willingness to carry the burden alone.

Life has a way of showing us ourselves from every angle.

That was a long time ago.

I am not there anymore.

But shades of it still appear from time to time.

There are still moments when someone talks about how hard it was for my brother.

Sometimes people rush to defend him.

Years ago, that would have sent me spiraling.

It would have felt like another dismissal of my experience.

Now I hear it differently.

Their compassion for him does not erase what happened to me.

Their understanding of his pain does not require me to abandon my own.

Sure, it still hurts sometimes.

But I can be with that hurt differently now.

The truth is, my brother struggled.

The truth is, my mother was dying.

The truth is, people around me may not have known how to handle what happened.

And the truth is that I was raped.

All of those things can be true at the same time.

Today, when I look back at that workshop, I can see that what upset me so deeply was not simply that someone presented a false statistic.

It was that I was being invited, once again, to put a larger narrative ahead of the truth of lived experience.

This time, however, I chose differently.

Eventually, I chose myself.

That’s Not True

Last year, another piece of this puzzle revealed itself.

I was having a conversation with a family member about a past memory.

They shared their version of what happened.

I remember responding:

“That’s not true.”

As emotions escalated, I found myself thinking:

Does it really matter at this point? Just let it go.

I actually did let it go in the moment and felt good about it. I’d like to say I was able to continue to do that when I went home.

I didn’t.

The conversation stayed with me.

For days.

Then weeks.

It kept working on me.

Eventually, I brought it to a group I was part of.

I talked about what had happened and how much it was still affecting me.

A short time later, I found myself sitting alone, looking out over the woods.

And I cried.

And cried.

And cried.

Not just for that conversation.

For all the years I had spent arguing with my own knowing.

Writing has been one of the ways I’ve made sense of my life.

But there was always a place where I held back.

A place where I stopped short of saying exactly what I wanted to say.

As I sat there, something became clear.

Part of the reason I held back was fear.

Not fear of writing.

Fear of being challenged.

Fear that a friend or family member would read my words and say:

“That’s not true.”

“That didn’t happen.”

“That’s not how I remember it.”

And then something unexpected happened.

I realized that in my conversation with my family member, I had become the very voice I was most afraid of encountering.

I had become the person saying:

“That’s not true.”

I was so focused on the possibility that someone else might question my experience that I failed to notice I was doing the same thing.

And then another realization arrived.

The person I was most afraid of facing through my writing wasn’t my family.

It wasn’t my friends.

It wasn’t my critics.

It was me.

I was afraid of my own judgment.

My own doubt.

My own questioning.

My own inner voice that wanted certainty before it would allow me to speak.

As I sat there looking into the woods, something shifted.

By becoming the voice I feared most, I was finally able to face it.

By facing it, I was finally able to face myself.

And something let go.

Memory and Truth

Memory is not the most reliable source of facts.

None of ours are.

Memory is shaped by perception, emotion, and meaning. It is influenced by what we could understand at the time and by what we needed to survive.

Two people can live through the same event and carry away entirely different memories of what happened.

That doesn’t necessarily make either one dishonest.

It makes them human.

Over time, I came to understand that memory is not simply a record of events.

It is also a doorway into truth.

Not always factual truth.

But lived truth.

Emotional truth.

Soul truth.

The truth of what something meant.

The truth of how it shaped us.

The truth of what it felt like to be there.

My truth does not come solely from the details I remember.

My truth comes from my soul.

The details matter.

But they are not always the point.

Sometimes the deeper truth lives beneath the facts.

Sometimes what matters most is not whether every detail is perfectly accurate, but whether we are willing to explore the meaning of our experience honestly.

That realization changed my relationship to writing.

I stopped trying to prove myself.

I stopped trying to make my stories airtight against disagreement.

I stopped writing as though I were presenting evidence in a courtroom.

Instead, I began writing from the place that knows.

The place that remembers differently from the mind.

The place that speaks through feeling, intuition, memory, and meaning.

And I realized something else.

Standing in our truth requires a certain kind of courage.

Because sooner or later, we have to accept that someone may disagree with our version of events.

Someone may remember it differently.

Someone may believe we got it wrong.

And if we tell our stories honestly enough, eventually we have to be willing to become the villain in someone else’s story.

The truth is, we probably already are.

Just as others have occupied that role in ours.

Eventually, we get to play all the parts.

The victim.

The protector.

The truth-teller.

The one who hides the truth.

The hero.

The villain.

The teacher.

The student.

Life is rarely as simple as the stories we tell about it.

And perhaps wisdom begins when we stop trying to be right and start trying to be honest.

The Dam Breaks

When I finally understood that, something in me relaxed.

The air cleared.

It felt as though a dam had broken.

What had been holding back my writing for years suddenly loosened its grip.

The writing came.

The stories came.

The words came.

And with them came a freedom I didn’t even realize I had been withholding from myself.

The Real Lesson

For a long time, I thought the lesson from that experience was about teachers.

About authority.

About charisma.

About the danger of believing someone has all the answers.

There is truth in that.

But the deeper lesson was about me.

It was about the ways I had learned to abandon myself.

The ways I had learned to soften difficult truths.

The ways I had convinced myself that protecting other people was more important than honoring my own experience.

The workshop didn’t create that wound.

It revealed it.

And by revealing it, I had the opportunity to heal it.

The teacher offered teachings that helped shape my life.

The teacher also crossed a line that I could no longer ignore.

Both of those things are true.

For years I believed truth should sometimes be sacrificed for something bigger.

The teaching.

The family.

The relationship.

The story.

What I know now is that truth is the bigger thing.

I don’t need to choose one truth over another.

I don’t need to make anyone a villain.

I don’t need to make anyone a hero.

I simply need to tell the truth.

And the biggest difference between then and now is this:

I no longer soften the truth.  Not for other people. And not for myself.

And perhaps that is why the stories come now.

Not because I finally found the right words.

But because I finally stopped asking permission to speak them.