How to Look Your Partner in the Eyes and Speak Your Deepest Truth

This is my third essay of my series on how to grow and maintain healthy relationships. To recap what we’ve covered so far:

• Each individual in a relationship comes with his or her own behaviors and desires.
• When one person behaves in a way that frustrates the desires of the other, there is a possibility for resentment to grow as a result.
• Resentment accumulates like debt, weights on the heart of the resentful person, motivates vengeful behavior and more retaliation, and fuels a death spiral in a relationship.
• Truth is the only thing that can clear resentment and redeem a relationship.
• Before you can tell the truth, you must first find it within you through an honest examination of your deepest emotions and motives.

In the last essay, I detailed a journalling exercise to aid the process of inner-truth discovery.

If you do the exercise fully and properly with someone you are resenting, your attitude toward that person and view of the entire situation will be very different.

But the adventure isn’t over yet.

To really make a difference in your relationships, you have to share your Truth with the other person in real conversation.

In this essay, I detail steps for how to approach this.

But first, let’s talk about why you would ever consider doing such a terrifying thing in the first place.

Why the Truth DOES In Fact Set You Free

I’ve guided a few people through the journaling process I outlined in my last essay. Everyone always finds it very illuminating, and they inevitably feel much better about the relationship once they can see it all on paper.

Often, once the person starts to feel a bit better, they say to me: “Ok well now that I understand what’s going on, I’m not bothered by the situation any more. So I don’t think there’s any need to mention this to (the other person).”

Oh! if only life were so easy.

Our experience is fundamentally centered around our relationships, and relationships are fundamentally centered around mutual connection.

The journaling process helped you articulate your experience with more clarity, but the tension won’t be resolved until your experience is shared with the other person. If you keep them in the dark, you will keep them disconnected, and the relationship problems will persist.

You think you understand the nature of your problem, but your thinking from a place of concealment and cowardice. Therefore, you can’t trust any of your judgments.

Soon as you share the truth with the other person, your experience will completely change. The tension you felt before, perhaps for years, will instantly melt away. You will see the person with completely new eyes, and your appreciation for them will come flooding back as if a dam had just broken.

Sharing deep truths with someone close to you is one of the most confronting things you could ever do in your life, but it’s also one of the most rewarding.

If you’ve had any experience of “finally getting something heavy off your chest” before, then you should have a sense of what I’m talking about. “Makeup sex” is actually based on the same phenomenon. Two lovers, once separated by resentment, have been reunited through Truth, and now all they want to do is act that union out with their bodies.

Again, sharing deep truth with someone is one of THE most confronting things you can do in life. So there’s a huge motivation to deceive yourself and say “But this case is different…”.

But honesty is always the best policy, even if it’s the most difficult policy to follow.

If you decide to go forward with it, here is how I recommend going about the next steps.

Writing The Letter

Letter writing is an art form that modern people’s have almost completely forgotten about.

I’ve come to regard letters as one of the most powerful tools for clearing your mind, cleansing your spirit, and improving your relationships.

After you’ve finished the journaling process, you will have all your source materials of truth in front of you. The letter writing process is about transforming those materials into something understandable by others.

There are five parts to the letters I write:

1. Set the Intention — Your default motivation in a state of resentment is to seek revenge. This motivation will try to sneak in and contaminate your writing in very subtle ways. To avoid this, I start with and intention: “I want our relationship to get better, and I’m sharing you these things with that goal in mind.”
2. Confess your Shame — To ensure you truly are speaking from a place of betterment instead of vengeance, you want to open your kimono right away and take ownership of all the ways you contributed to the problem. It’s harder to resent someone for their misbehavior while conscious of your own failings. No one wants to be a hypocrite.
3. List out Your Resentments — Now you get into the meat of the matter. List out all the themes of frustrating behavior that cause you resentment. Say the words “I resent you for doing x” instead of “I resent THE FACT that you did x” We don’t relate emotionally to facts, we relate emotionally to people. So “I resent you” is always the more truthful statement, even if feels more confrontational.
4. Share your Desires and Fears — This is where you are the most vulnerable, and thus most likely to get emotional. Whatever emotional displays come through your face, eyes and voice, don’t try to repress them. When it comes to reaching people in a way that actually makes lasting change, these emotional displays are actually more important than the words themselves. When you feel something, lean into it and keep writing.
5. State Your Hope — This is an echo of the first section where you set the intention. Hope is your vision of a future where that intention has succeeded. Hope is what motivates us to go through all the hardship necessary in fixing a relationship. The more genuinely you articulate your hope, the more likely the other person will feel motivated to continue the conversation.

It takes a while to write the first draft of a letter, and just like with journaling, you learn a lot through the process.

But the real insights come when you start to edit the letter.

Editing the Letter

Have you ever had a friend ask you to read an email they were planning on sending to someone they had issues with?

In their mind, they think they’re writing a flawless masterpiece. In your mind, the entire message is riddled with passive aggressive jabs and stabs, and you have zero hope that it will go over well with the other party.

Guess what, you will make the same mistakes in your messages.

That’s why it’s utterly important to proofread your letter several times before finishing it.

Imagine you had a series of of “Spell Checkers” that underlined all the different types of disingenuous lines. Here are the checkers I recommend using:

• Vengeance Checker — Since you are still in place of resentment, you will be likely to say things with a motive of inflicting pain. Imagine you’re a prosecution attorney, and your job is to argue how the resentful side of you is using this word/sentence/paragraph to be harmful. If you can’t make the case, keep the sentence. If there’s some way the line can be used to harm, delete or rewrite it.
• Presumption Checker — Your sole responsibility in truth telling is to understand and communicate YOUR personal experience as deeply and clearly as you can. To do so, you must stay entirely outside of OTHER people’s experience. You can’t say things like “I know you feel this way…” or “You want to do this…”. Not only is this presumptuous and destined to exacerbate problems, it’s also objectively false. You can’t read minds, so you can’t know for certain how anyone else is thinking or feeling, so don’t presume to do so in your writing. Say “you struck me as being this way” or “I got the impression you were being this way.” This way, you can mention key story elements while staying within the realm of your personal experience.
• Sugar Coat Checker — The truth is a bitter pill to swallow. People usually try to sugar coat the Truth pill to avoid conflict, but sugar just makes the whole thing taste worse. Look for sentences where you dance around the subject, try to downplay things, or use a bunch of words to hide the truth. These sentences are likely to trigger the other person’s irritation. Delete these sentences, or replace them with simple “I feel” sentences.
• Simplicity Checker — The truth is always elegant, which is why fewer words usually work best. I try to whittle down my letters to short and basic sentences, and keep it right on the heart of the matter the whole time.

If you go through the editing process, you won’t just be more effective at reaching the other person in this specific case, you will also be more effective at communication in general.

You’ll start to see the patterns of how you unconsciously seek vengeance, presume to know more than is possible, and dance around the truth without saying it forthright.

Once your letter is tight, you are ready to speak to the person.

Reading the Letter face-to-face

Reading a letter to someone in their face is not a common practice, but it’s an extremely powerful one.

You don’t want to be in a position where you’re butchering words and getting lost in side tangents and side arguments. The closer you are to the person, the more complex the relationship dynamics will be. A wrong word can totally throw the thing off, so don’t leave it to chance.

Tell the person that you’ve taken the time to really reflect on your situation, and you would very much appreciate if he or she gave you 5–10 minutes of your undivided attention while you read through it.

Let the person know that you’re not trying to make an argument for anything, you just want to be transparent and give the opportunity to know your feelings.

Then once you’re done, you give the floor to the other person to share their reactions. Again, try to keep the conversation on topic of personal experiences and not debates about who’s right and wrong.

Expect to get emotional, and expect the other person to get emotional as well. If it’s unemotional and purely intellectual, that means you weren’t doing it properly.

As I mentioned before, facts, opinions and arguments aren’t the foundation for relationship dynamics — it’s all about emotions.

Organize your emotions, and share them transparently with the people you love, and you will be set free.

But not for long, because whatever behaviors and desires led to the problem in the first place are likely to repeat again in the future.

That’s why relationship building doesn’t stop with open communication, both parties also need to put in serious effort to make things work.

Figuring out where to invest this effort will be the focus of my next essay.