We admire persons who act with integrity, meaning that they respect the words they say, they are honest and respect the promises they make.
It is very difficult to act with integrity if we live in fear, fear of not being accepted, or not being liked, ultimately fear of not being loved, in this fear we forget our values and act dishonestly only because we are begging for love.
This is common for a lot of people. How to move forward? How to overcame this paralysing fear?
First of all we need to understand what we need, and to do so we need to give a name to our feelings.
Unfortunately one of the consequence of fear is that when we are in fear we loose awareness. We became less aware of our feelings, for example.
So we have to find a way to remove the fear, to accept that even IF we will not be loved when we are ourselves or speak our truth (the idea of not being loved is a projection in the future a reflection of our thinking that creates the fear) we will survive.
How to remove the fear? By taking action. We take action and we feel the guilt for example of not agreeing with someone, or saying not to some else's need (may be someone we love). This feels awful sometimes, so we are in a dilemma, we either act in fear or we feel guilt or shame (this will be normal at the beginning, we will loose the fear but we will feel the feelings we did not want to feel and we were covering them up with our fear).
The first time I stood my ground with a colleague at work, I exercised what I wanted to say for the whole week end and I was still terrorised when I arrived at work Monday morning.
It was difficult but facing my fear made me feel several feelings I was trying to cover up with fear and not doing an action because of fear: I felt terrified to face this fear for the first time, I felt guilty to ask for something like I felt I did not deserve it (low self esteem) I felt shameful for asking for something so trivial (in this way I was judging myself saying that my need was trivial and this is lack of self esteem because all needs are equally important regardless or how big or small their are) and I lost my temper (because I was a beginner and my colleague smiled to me and I misinterpreted her smile and I felt belittled as she was laughing about me - so the action of respecting my needs and making a request activated other feelings I had to feel which I avoided to feel and I was covering them up with fear ) but I did it.
Little by little those actions (acting with integrity and facing our fears) became more normal, we will not feel all those feelings because once we feel certain feelings connected to our past traumas they disappear.
The less fear I felt the more aware I was of myself and asserting myself is now normal and it feels great!
Find the freedom to be yourself one step at the time.