There aren’t many words or phrases that, regardless of the context they are used in, make me wince when I hear them — the phrase “My Truth” is one of them.
It’s not even the words themselves that get to me. It’s the dismissive, self-focused, and manipulative tendencies that the use of this phrase often implies.
Since when do individuals have ownership over truth?
Since when were individual perceptions, beliefs, opinions, etc., raised to the same level and given the same value as truth itself?
What would be the appropriate response to someone claiming something is their truth when what they are saying is, quite literally, untrue?
I’ve been in conversation with people where they’ve invoked this phrase not only to dismiss my perspective or other relevant facts, or to shield themselves from any perceived criticism, but also to shut down the conversation entirely.
It was a way of saying they weren’t interested in any of my input for whatever reason, and that they rejected any new information in favour of their preconceived notion of “their truth.”
In reality, these people were not interested in truth at all — they were merely interested in what they believed or identified with, and wanted to present those concepts with the elevated status of being equal in value to truth itself.
I don’t think there’s been a single conversation I’ve had where someone invoked the phrase “my truth” where what they communicated showed any genuine interest in truth. Most of the time, the opposite was the case, and the phrase was invoked as a means of seeing to it that their personal beliefs were not subjected to the sometimes harsh, indiscriminate nature of the truth.
Often, the attitude has been a manipulative one — something like “this is my truth, and I don’t want to hear what you have to say about it unless you are validating it.”
The “personalised truths” these people talk about can often be something relatively harmless or even easy to agree with, but the level of ego behind the use of that phrase can be difficult to overlook, and is likely symptomatic of a language of thinking that is centred on belief or identity over all else, and they are most often concerned with what makes the thinker feel or look good, and are resistant to anything that may threaten that.
