When Did I Learn to Stop Telling the Truth?
And how can I bring more honesty into my interactions?
As a kid, I was extremely honest. Asking awkward questions loudly in supermarket queues, and making my Gran cringe with embarrassment.
“Granny Joan, why does that lady have a beard?” I famously asked loudly on the bus.
Granny Joan still does this impression of kid me, my tone very earnest and curious, and loud. I wanted, no needed to know why this unexpected thing was happening, and I couldn't be put off, so the legend goes.
I was undistractible. And unbribable too.
Oh, how I've changed.
The truthfulness is still there, only so much quieter. Over the years I became increasingly afraid to ask questions, to make a mistake.
I needed to be socialized, of course, but I wonder if the process went too far? If I was too sensitive to it, and I lost touch with an important part of me.
Lately, I’m trying to get it back.
People-pleasing
There’s a section of this newsletter called Polite Robot because of a mode I discovered after I got sober. Polite Robot was an intense people-pleasing personality that I rolled out when I was uncomfortable or uncertain. I created it in my teens. Taking cues from others and adapting myself to their preferences because I couldn't access my own in the time available.
I remember the mode so well: frozen, quiet, polite, terrified to speak in case I made a mistake. It felt like being locked in. Like being a ghost. Like not counting.
I would pray that no one spoke to me, because I couldn’t respond adequately. At the same time, I longed to connect. To be seen and heard and valued for who I really was. The vibrant, silly, daft person you would know if only I could emerge. I played out scripts in my head, trying to guess the questions that might come so I could prepare an answer. Avoiding eye contact with the people I wanted to talk to the most.
Drinking offered an escape, temporarily. I felt free when I drank, though I got myself into trouble. But it didn't bring me any closer to learning how to express myself in groups or admit my preferences or make things happen.
Polite Robot usually emerged because I was with people who were dominant and extroverted, and not leaving space for me, the kind of people I spent a lot of time with growing up. The kind of person I pretended to be growing up!
Perhaps everyone has a mode like this. People talk a lot about autopilot, for instance. For me, Polite Robot was kind of like autopilot - except without autonomy.
When I first got sober, I joked about Polite Robot, but by the time I was diagnosed as autistic, five years later, I lost track of the funny side. All that lost life. For a while, I found it very sad.
Inner child
When I think back to that kid version of me, with her irrepressible need for truth and her lack of concern over what others would think, it can be difficult to connect her with Polite Robot. What were the steps from one version of myself to another?
Because of course, I am both of these versions of myself. The trick, according to therapy, is to integrate these parts.
As I write these posts, I always think of all the people who say, “Oh, but everyone feels like that, don’t they?”
They are probably right. Everyone does feel like this. Every kid gets socialized, after all. We each have to learn that it isn’t appropriate to stare at strangers who fascinate us. That it can upset people to ask personal questions about things you find intriguing about them.
I wonder though, for the autistic/sensitive child, is this process of socialisation more painful? Might it require a gentler touch? Because if that gentler approach isn’t there, the child can retreat to their inner world, from where it can be difficult to call them back.
Rudy Simone writes in her book, Aspergirls: “Emotionally, we require an atmosphere of tolerance and non-judgement.”
This was certainly true of little me. And current me, tbh. Though, I didn’t really discover an environment (or personality) like this - kind, tolerant and non-judgemental - until I got sober. Sure, I found pockets of it along the way, and people like this, but they were soothing islands in a sea of something more cynical and critical.
It’s possible I offered this environment to my friends. Tolerance and non-judgmentalness were a part of my life, are a part of my nature, but they weren't the norm. I didn’t seek out these things or cultivate them in myself.
I’m not sure I recognised their value in the way I do now.
I definitely didn't know how to offer them to myself.
I confused the defensive shell I’d created to survive with my actual self. I didn’t seek out an atmosphere of tolerance and non-judgment, because I didn’t know I needed it.
Shame
These days, I understand that this gentle atmosphere is essential for my development. For reasons I don’t understand (Autism? Critical messaging? Growing up in the empathy-free 80s and 90s? A working-class background? Neurodivergent parents?) my real self is very delicate and fragile, prone to retreating at the faintest whiff of criticism.
Brene Brown talks about toxic shame, and millions of people relate. Susan Cain talks about introverts and millions of people relate. But growing up in the 90s, where was the encouragement for quiet, slow-paced, low-energy, gentle folks?
I took drugs and alcohol to become extroverted because it seemed like a requirement. But the strategy stole years of my life. There were some fun times, too, of course. And the strategy created my life, too. It’s complicated.
In the therapy that led to and supported my transition into sobriety, shame came up a lot. I remember my therapist asking if there was any time in my life in which I had felt acceptable, and I had to admit, that no, there was not.
I remember her seeming shocked by this. Maybe a therapeutic technique to help me relate to myself.
“Did you hear yourself, then?” she asked, and I wasn’t really sure I had.
It felt like she was trying to set up a teaching moment. From now on, I wouldn’t have to feel so embarrassed about my existence. I felt her willing me to have an epiphany, that I was ok just as I was. But I couldn’t do it. I was too ashamed! In a deep and essential way that felt very painful.
I didn’t understand why all my life I had struggled. Why had my relationships been so unfulfilling and painful?
I knew that this wasn’t the way other people saw me, and I also knew that that didn’t matter. My relationship with myself was the most abusive relationship of all the abusive relationships I had been in. And I didn’t know how to change it.
For years, shame was like the air I breathed and the food I was brought up on. I had no idea how to integrate the different versions of myself, without feeling ashamed of the older one. Perhaps because each iteration struggled so much, and her coping strategies were so unhelpful. Dependence on people and substances and approval and praise.
Learning about the autistic struggle for a sense of self has helped me come to terms with this.
Social experiments
Nowadays, I have a wide circle of kind, tolerant and non-judgemental friends and colleagues. Some of us help each other learn and try out more assertive and authoritative behavior. We call it social experimenting, and we’ve had some glorious victories. I’m getting better at admitting my preferences and asking for what I need. Very occasionally I might even let someone know when their behaviour has negatively impacted me.
I am learning to express myself. To share my thoughts with others, and ask what they are thinking. Rather than making negative guesses and drawing catastrophic conclusions. It’s fun!
I’m experimenting with letting people see the soft and silly underbelly that seems to be mostly what I am. My relationships are improving. Things are changing, incrementally, the way things do. I feel hopeful about the future.
I’ve written a lot about the sadness I have about not getting what I needed growing up, but what if actually I got exactly what was required?
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Chelsey Flood is the author of Infinite Sky and Nightwanderers, and a senior lecturer in creative writing at UWE University. She writes about freedom, addiction, nature and love at Beautiful Hangover, autism and self-compassion at Polite Robot, and is also working on a non-fiction book about getting sober, and a new YA novel.
This post captures something I've been reflecting on a lot recently. "Taking my cues from others and adapting myself to their preferences" - I have done this a lot. I've been calling it "acting" or "pretending". I love your question, "when did I learn to stop telling the truth?" because that is exactly how it feels. Like, I realized over time that people didn't react well when I said what I was really thinking, and so I learned how to stop, think, and say something else instead. I think this has been a big part of my success in the corporate world, actually. I'm working on a presentation on this theme.
Oh gosh. All of this rings so true for me too. My most famous line was to someone of quite lofty standing who told me he had a son my age (3) named Bruce and apparently I was outraged, with arms straightened down and fingers in fists, and said, “That’s not a name for a boy. That’s a dog’s name”. (My grandma’s dog name was Bruce). But there are a whole host of lines like that haha
I am quite sad my honesty and also my curious questioning was silenced, though I am now just starting to begin to be okay with asking questions about everything again, even if it’s only mostly to myself. People tend to dislike the honesty thing though. I think I am much more silent than I would be as a result of that.
It’s so hard to integrate all of these selfs and to learn to be my actual self (non-masking) these days but I am working on it! I think it’s a long and tricky process but at least you not you’re not the only one in it. Have been writing and drawing about exactly all of this and also worried it all sounds too sad and if that’s actually correct or not, but that’s what we experienced. Sometimes it’s not about the verified facts, it’s about the truth of the emotional experience!