Universal effects of willfully ignoring what you could know about yourself

Intentionally ignoring aspects of your character requires you to reduce your perception of reality. This cannot be done selectively. Your perception is like a dimmer switch, not a flashlight. When you reduce it on one thing, you reduce it in all. While you willingly maintain incorrect perceptions of yourself—either through outright lying, or simply by ignoring what you fear to look at—you will limit how correctly you can see anyone or anything else.

An important consequence of dishonesty is how it robs you of intimacy with others. Intimacy requires honesty. You cannot know someone or something else beyond the bounds of how you know yourself. The better you know yourself, the more quickly and fully you will get to know others. What you are able to see in others will be determined by how much of yourself you see, how much of yourself there is to see, and how much of the world you see, and how well you know God. Intimacy is a state that exceeds what normal life can offer in unity, companionship, compassion, support, and love. Love requires disclosure. To disclose yourself, you must first know yourself.

You understand all things through how they relate to yourself. How you define yourself—how you understand yourself to be, and what you make of yourself—is critical to your being able to understand what is around you in breadth, depth, and accuracy. To the extent that you are dishonest in anything, you will impede your ability to know yourself, and you can neither show yourself to others nor see who they are beyond the limits of how much you know yourself. Any effort you exert to avoid seeing who you really are creates a greater barrier preventing you from showing your true self to others or seeing as deeply into them. There are no bounds to what this can deprive you of.¹

Truth builds on itself. If you desire to be aware of more of anything, the best place to start is by coming to see more of yourself, including the parts that are least flattering.