My ‘One Thing’ is Integrity
“I just want to stop caring so much what people think of me.”
At least once a month for as long as I can remember, someone will say this phrase — or a variation of it — to me.
Sometimes it’s a client sat opposite me during their first session, sometimes it’s a friend who’s pouring out their agonised heart to me, but every time I hear it I smile with recognition at the familiarity of that thought.
At how *important* it seems.
At the idea that it’s the answer to everything.
- If only I could stop *caring* so much.
- If only it wasn’t *so important to me* that people like me.
- If only I could stop *torturing myself* with the idea that I will be rejected if I say how it is I really feel.
And, nowadays, the first thing I pretty much always say in answer, is this:
“Look, in some ways we’re all just still monkeys. On some level, we all feel that our very survival is based on being an accepted as part of the whole.
If a monkey does something that makes the other monkeys throw them out of tree, they’ll land down on the ground where all the snakes and the tigers are, with no other monkeys to protect them or warn them of danger. They’ll lose their community, their security and their sense of safety. They’ll be vulnerable and alone.
So of course we make it feel dangerous to do the things that might lead to that. So of course we make it important to us what other people think of us.
But we’re also not monkeys. And I’m going to go out on a limb here (haha) not being a monkey expert, and suggest that perhaps there are some things that are important to human beings that aren’t so important to monkeys.
While we do make it important to be liked, as human beings we also make it super important to our self-worth to be seen and known as we truly are, and to be accepted as that unconditionally.
And I really believe that that is the one thing all human beings want and need in order to develop and grow into the truest, happiest version of themselves, whether they know it consciously or not.”
I have a story that once I came to understand this around a decade ago, everything started to change for me.
Being liked and admired — something that I had made my priority my whole life — became a cheap consolation prize for the new thing I had started to experience: real understanding and acceptance. This new thing felt so much richer and deeper and nourishing than that other thing, I couldn’t believe I had been accepting it for so long as a watered-down substitute.
And all I’d had to do to get it was to be willing to risk getting thrown out of the tree!
But that’s easier said than done, right? Particularly when the ‘risk’ is deeply coloured by life experiences; of how it felt when I was a child to be shunned by friends for saying ‘the wrong thing’, or spoken to coldly and harshly by my parents, and being sent to my room or to The Naughty Step as punishment.
Shame and fear are powerful and unpleasant emotions to feel and experience, and often — when they’re paired with painful events in our development— we create a story that feeling them is akin to dying;
- “I would *just die* if they ever found out.”
- “I felt like I just wanted to *disappear into the ground*.”
- “I just *couldn’t bear it* if they said no.”
Our monkey-brains convince us that experiencing rejection and anger would end us, so instead we hide who we truly are, edit how we truly feel and try like hell to figure out how to convince the other person to see us as all the things we want to seen as; likable, lovable, safe, strong, funny, smart.
Tragically though, in doing so we hide from them the one thing we need to show in order to achieve the thing we all truly want: authentic connection and unconditional acceptance.
“I do not adjust myself to please the world. I am myself wherever I am, and I let the world adjust. I will never promise to be this way or that way, I will only promise to show up, as I am, wherever I am. That’s it, and that’s all. People will like me or not, but being liked is not my One Thing; integrity is.”
I love this quote from Glennon Doyle. When I read it for the first time a few years back I highlighted that passage immediately on my Kindle, wishing that I had a hard copy of the book so I could press the pen into the page and underline it several more times, more vehemently.
Because yes, my ‘One Thing’ is integrity. I have learned that having integrity — matching what’s on the inside to the outside — is the one thing I need to remember in order to get where it is that I want to go. It’s not always a simple thing or an easy thing, and sometimes I still go to battle with myself over whether it’s ‘the right thing’, before quietly reminding myself that there is no ‘right thing’.
There is only what is right for me.
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Law Turley is a BACP Registered Integrative Therapist, Supervisor and Certified Radical Honesty Trainer living and working in the south west of the UK.
