A process that has helped me a lot these past 6 years is something I call “truth therapy”.
The cool thing about truth therapy is that you don’t need a therapist for it, and you don’t even need to know the truth.
It’s a practice, a skill you can build and use any time you want. Sometimes in a matter of seconds.
…so what is truth therapy and how does it work?
It is often said that all suffering arises from illusion.
I don’t know if that’s true.
How can anyone know if such an idea is true? It would require us to find every individual instance of suffering, be certain what caused it, and so on…
But what I can say, is that when I peel back the layers of illusions from an experience, a lot of the suffering tends to evaporate.
Truth therapy is that process:
1) Notice you are suffering (or creating suffering, or perpetuating suffering).
2) Ask yourself: “What’s real here?”
3) Suspend your belief in anything else.
So when I said “How can anyone know if such an idea is true? It would require us to find every individual instance of suffering, be certain what caused it, and so on…” that’s truth therapy.
This is helpful to me, because the world is full of ideas. And sometimes it’s not so obvious what the impact of believing them will be. But if we focus on what is real, it’s like going back to a “save state” where for a moment you are not hijacked by them.
So what do I mean when I say “What’s real here?”
I don’t mean “real” in an absolute sense, or real in a philosophical sense. The point of truth therapy isn’t to look at the sky and say “Can anyone even know the sky is real? Truman’s sky looked real. Look what happened to him!”
The point is also not to arrive at the ultimate truth of things (though if you do, awesome). It’s simply to identify the realest thing we can find in our experience, use it as an anchor, and let everything else float away.
Usually this means sticking to what is directly observable, and questioning what is not.
Let me give some examples:
Something I found really challenging in my twenties is living in a society which is profoundly sick, goes against our very nature, and most people don’t notice because they’re too stuck living their brainwashed lives without thinking for themselves.
This reality often made me feel depressed and confused.
Let’s run some truth therapy on it.
Please note that there is no formal process for this.
I’m going to give you an approach rooted in thinking first because I find truth therapy is specifically helpful for overthinkers. But my favorite way of doing it doesn’t involve thinking at all. So I’ll make sure to mention that as well.
“Society is profoundly sick.”
Not observable. It’s an idea. A judgment of some kind. We can definitely point at unpleasant things that are happening. But we can also point at good things. We also don’t really know what “sick” means here. (If your immune system is fighting a virus and you are asymptomatic, are you sick?).
I’m not saying 20yo Pep didn’t have some valid points to make about society. What I’m saying is, we can’t directly obsere if they are real.
For all intents and purposes, it may be an illusion. So we’ll ditch it.
(Please note that the perspective I’m taking when practicing truth therapy is not that this is an illusion. Or that this is false. Simply that I can not know, that there is no way for me to know, and that if entertaining it as truth creates suffering, it’s best to let it go.)
“Society goes against our nature.”
Not observable. There’s no way for us to point what our nature is.
You could argue “look at uncontacted tribes, they live differently!”. Yes, they sure do, because they are responding to a different environment with different challenges than us. But how do you know out of all the different ways humans live which one is natural? Who are you to decide that? What makes you think skyscrapers aren’t natural because we built them? Why do you say ant hills and bird’s nests are natural then?
“Most people don’t notice….”
Not observable. There are 7 billion people in the world and you’ve met maybe 7000. That’s 1 millionth of people, not most. Aside from that, how do you even know what’s going on in their head? Another thought to let go of.
“they’re too stuck living their brainwashed lives without thinking for themselves.”
Popular belief, but not observable either. How do we know they are brainwashed? How do we know that they aren’t thinking individual thoughts which happen to align with the norms?
We may not like how the masses think, but that doesn’t mean they’re brainwiahed into thinking it. Also…let me refer back to the 1 millionth of people you met. Do you actually know what they think, each of them? Or are you looking at a small fraction of their behavior (the little part of their lives you see and interact with) and creating explanations for it? We can drop this one as a potential illusion too.
Hold on.
Remember how I told you that I felt confused and depressed for years about this?
Isn’t that crazy? That literally no part of what I was supposedly depressed about holds up to scrutiny?
So what was observably real then?
“I feel confused and depressed.”
That’s the part that was left. The part that stood the test of truth therapy.
Also quite interesting to point out is just how much fun I had in those years, and that my average month looked like a millennial’s bucket list.
Yet, I kept believing ideas like this and being depressed about them.
Were they the cause of my depression? I don’t know. Not verifiable. Probably just the result of trauma.
Hold on, how do we know if it’s the result of trauma? Can we point at the trauma causing the depression right now? Actually, also no. It may still be true, but we can’t directly witness it. Suspend belief.
What’s real is the feeling. What’s real is where I am.
I am here in my bedroom. 20yo. I am touching a guitar. I feel burned out and confused.
That is truth. That’s real. Everything else was a layer of potential illusion for us to peel away.
Okay now what do we do? We arrived at some degree of observable truth, but what’s the point? I still feel depressed?
First of all, don’t underestimate what we just did.
We made the world a very different place.
The sickness, the brainwashing, the stuckness of people…all of that disappeared.
We may still feel depressed but we no longer live in a world that causes it. Huge difference in agency.
Since we have agency now, we also opened the door to creating changes.
But let’s not rush into that yet.
When you peel away potential illusions until you arrive at something true, and find that this truth is still unpleasant, then the thing to do is to be with it. (To the degree you currently have capacity for.)
What truth therapy does is invite us to be more intimate with reality. Because that is where we really live.
And the only way to create a new reality is to collaborate with it. But for that we have to be with it.
You can’t collaborate with something you insist is not here.
(And you can’t collaborate with something you insist is here, but isn’t. Which is why we suspend our beliefs.)
The example I just gave ended it with a bit of a bummer: 20yo me still felt depressed when only the truth was left.
However, in my experience it is much more common for truth therapy to end in realizing there was no issue to begin with.
Let’s say a friend hasn’t texted you in weeks and you think “they don’t care for me” so you feel bad.
Can you observe the lack of care? no.
What’s real is that they didn’t text (actually, scratch that, it’s that you didn’t receive a text).
Did you text? If not, text. They may be thinking the same.
If yes, then what’s observable is they didn’t text back. This can have 100s of reasons, from feeling ashamed, being overwhelmed by their inbox, being abroad and not receiving the texts or being abducted by aliens.
Either way, the suffering is created by deciding it means they don’t care. Suspend this belief. Now talk to them, you might wanna start with sharing you wish they’d text you more and asking what’s going on.
(I myself, for example, rarely text my friends unless the purpose is practical. This is not because of how I feel about them, but how I feel about texting. A new friend who has never met a non-texter in their life might never think of this as a possibility, and conclude I’m not interested in them.)
If you’re not a very thinky-person, you may already have noticed this part, but:
You don’t need to question all your beliefs one by one to practice truth therapy. You can skip that part. You can also just decide to be in reality by doing it.
Use your senses to witness what’s here, and whenever something occurs to you that is not related to what’s here, ignore it.
An easy access point here is feeling more of the body and focusing on that for a while.
Then practice interacting with life for as long as possible without interacting with the parts that are not observable.
You may be surprised to find just how many there are.
Disrespect? Not observable, pure interpretation.
“I deserve ____”, “they deserve ____”, not observable. Not even interpretation. Just a random thought. (Though what you may find observable is something like feeling desire or unpleasantness.)
I’m not saying those things are not conceptually true, or should not be engaged with.
But I invite you to try this out as a practice and see what it does. When you find yourself suffering, practice truth therapy and see where it gets you.
The goal here is not to arrive at only what’s knowable. Plenty of what we label as potential illusions may turn out to be true.
The goal is simply, for the duration of the practice, to not concern yourself with anything that is unknownable.
That rabbit hole goes deep (and I’ll likely write a book about it at some point) but perhaps the most beautiful part of this is this:
I started doing it as a way to wave away potential illusions that reinforced suffering, and I eventually found this practice restores curiosity and naturally leads to a sense of wonder with the world.
When you really commit to identifying what’s verifiably true about your experience and what isn’t, you eventually land at a feeling that everything is ineffable.
And what else is left to do but be in awe of it?
To take the delight in everything that happens?
So in that sense, truth therapy does transport me from unpleasant to pleasant. Just not the same way you’d think.