The home environment can foster several tendencies that encourage a person to act in ways that do not align with who they really are. As with work, the home is not an exclusion to the need to be yourself. If anything, it is the place where honesty is most important.
It is no surprise that a desire to please others can often be strongest in the family, as it is presumably the collection of people who you care about the most. At issue is the tension between the short-term benefit you will provide through saying and doing what pleases them now versus the long-term benefit you can only provide them through being an honest, integrated person. You can’t have both.
Unfortunate as it is, another strong motivation to withhold your true self in family settings is the desire to avoid close-quarter strife. Ironically, much of the strife seeking to be avoided in the home is from one or more members of the family with no such reservations. Some people are more apt to fight with people they do not live with, but many preferentially fight with those in their own home. Those who bend their authenticity to avoid conflict in the home are aiming for unity, but unity can only occur through addressing and resolving differences—not ignoring them.
The family unit is the best situated for the greatest growth. Families provide a wonderful opportunity to give and receive invitations to improve—invitations based on greater familiarity, greater concern, and a purer motive than any relationship outside the family. But these benefits cannot occur beyond the degree to which family members are willing to be themselves and be honest with one another. A family that grows together will continuously discover new areas of difference, each providing a new opportunity to achieve even greater levels of unity. A family that ignores differences cannot grow together, because they cannot grow at all. Growth requires change, and change can only occur as differences are actually addressed. Present your true self to your family members, and encourage them to do the same. Always ensure that what you say to and how you spend time with family members reflects your sincere beliefs. It is the only way for you to give and receive the best benefits in your family.
Marriage presents a special case of the danger of dissociating from your true self. Most deadening in marriage comes from an unwillingness to continue attempts to discover and resolve differences. Too many have watched their spouse transform from a vibrant, interesting person to a person who can only have fun during superficial experiences and conversation, and who typically has far more to say to friends and strangers than they do to you. This erosion comes over time as a spouse opts not to address additional faults revealed through marriage. Lovingly engage in the typically long and laborious process of assisting your spouse to address their faults within the limits of criticism they tolerate.
Requests for improvement become increasingly frustrating for both the repeater and the receiver when they need to be repeated. Faced with increasingly hostile responses to repeated requests for improvement, most quickly abandon future attempts, preferring the quiet misery of living with someone they don’t like to the intense unpleasantness of confronting them on their faults. Superficiality is not a solution to unresolved differences in family. Instead, continuously repeating an incrementally shrinking invitation for improvement provides the only hope for things improving. When you take the seemingly easier road of appeasement by ignoring what bothers you about a family member, you will find that those things will grow in incidence and intensity while your patience for tolerating them shrinks.
Deep and truthful communication is essential to maintaining a happy family. Be honest with your family when it comes to what you desire, what you appreciate, and what concerns you, whether you are talking about the world, yourself, or your family members.