When you are less mature in your thinking it is very easy to believe that life is one thing or the other, like people are either telling the truth or they’re lying and that’s just all there is to it!

There are normally three versions of the truth, your version, their version and the actual real-life version. The issue that we have is that when we go through an experience in our life, our brain is going to process it in a very different way to how the circumstances actually occurred, and how someone else might process that information differently. Our brain is getting bombarded by all of this information and we can’t take on board all of it which means that when you go through an experience and maybe compared to someone else’s experience they may have a different truth of what the situation looks like compared to what your truth looks like so if you’ve ever been in a situation where it appeared that someone was lying about what had happened but they really believed that they were telling the truth they may not be deliberately lying, they may just have a different version of the truth.

If you’ve ever been accused of lying, it may not be that you’re lying you just have a different memory of what the truth of that situation was for you. A long time ago, when I was just a little kid, I had a job doing the paper rounds. I didn’t like asking people for money at their doors so I quit, the boss lady said that next week was my last week and to hand her over the notes of customers who had paid and not paid. One day when I came home from school, my mum was mad because the boss lady rang and said that I was still supposed to be doing my paper round that week and she also said that at lunchtime that day I’d come home from school and told the delivery driver that I was not going to take the papers and I’d refused to accept them –  also not true.

There are a couple of different things going on here. Number one was that I was then annoyed because my mum had believed this lady’s version of events rather than mine but it took a very long time for me to come to some kind of acceptance that this woman’s experience may have been muddled, maybe she got me confused with somebody else. However, for her, that version of events was probably what she believed to be the truth. My truth was different. My truth was I did my last round last week and I’ve been in school all day so I haven’t been here to deny the newspapers for the paper round but somewhere along the line things got muddy and blurry and then it was very difficult to make sense of what truth there was in that situation. I didn’t go back to sort it out, I just had a big old rout with my mum and then soaked about it for a considerable period of time.

Here’s what we need to do: we need to get better at communicating because the more we communicate about how we’re thinking and feeling and how we perceiving and understanding what’s going on in the world around us, the better chance we have of finding something which is closer to the truth of the event and not just the truth of the event that happened for us. We can also be mindful of the fact that other people’s experiences might come across as very different for them. I want you to take from today to remember that the truth is very rarely clear and easy to understand and straightforward. It’s normally a bit foggy and quite often there are several different versions of it that exist at any one time and that’s okay.

By Gemma Bailey
https://www.childtherapisthertfordshire.nlp4kids.org