This is http://www.essayz.com/a9001181.htm Previous-Essay <== This-Essay ==> Following-Essay Click HERE on this line to find essays via Your-Key-Words. {Most frequent wordstarts of each essay will be put here.} ========================================================== %HONEST OWN LOVE FEELING EMOTIONS THOUGHTS INTIMATE 900118 If we do not feel secure in owning our own feelings and emotions we are unlikely to feel secure in being honest about our thoughts, desires, fears, failures, or intimate relationships. If we are not secure in owning what is most unquestionably our own; we cannot be honest with ourselves or others about what matters most to us. Then anything about which we are honest is not likely to matter much. Personal and communal integrity depend upon honest connections which bind the community together. Dishonest transactions do not connect members of a community. Dishonest transactions separate people who are together, but are not members with-unity; are not a com-unity because there is little communion. Honesty about trivial unimportant considerations does not bind a community together in the absence of honesty about what really is central in people's desires, fears, hopes and aspirations. Meaningful intimacy entails not only closeness; but also generosity, receptivity, acceptance, welcome, openness, and honesty. Closeness which is forced, coerced, tricked, manipulated or otherwise imposed undermines generosity, receptivity, acceptance, welcome, openness and honesty; and so is not meaningful. Rape is not meaningful intimacy. Forced intimacy is a form of rape, even if not sexual rape in the literal sense. When we find that our true feelings and emotions are not accepted by others, we find it difficult to own our own feelings and emotions. We are unlikely to feel secure in being honest about our thoughts, desires, fears, failures, or intimate relationships. We are unlikely to enter into meaningful intimacy. We are unlikely to enjoy personal and communal integrity. We and our communities are likely to disintegrate when we find that our true feelings and emotions are not accepted by others. It is important for members of a community to learn how to be comfortable with knowledge of other people's true feelings and emotions; for being uncomfortable, embarrassed, with such knowledge is likely to lead to rejections which undermine honesty. To be comfortable with such knowledge we must know how to integrate it into a coherent whole which has a place for it with integrity. The knowledge system of a community must have a place for knowledge of people's true feelings and emotions; else through embarrassment, rejection and dishonesty the community will disintegrate. A community which is compulsively objective has no place within its knowledge system to integrate knowledge of people's true feelings and emotions; it is doomed to disintegrate because it is unable to own the true feelings and emotions of its members, and dishonesty results. Indifference to feelings and emotions is not healthy. To be comfortable with emotional knowledge a community must know how to integrate it into a coherent communal whole which has a place for emotional knowledge with integrity. It is not enough for individuals to integrate such knowledge in isolated ways; it is essential that integration also occur in a coherent way within the community as a whole. A community is secure when its members are free to own their own feelings and emotions; and so are able to be honest about their thoughts, desires, fears, failures, and intimate relationships. Such security is not achieved through defensive measures. (c) 2005 by Paul A. Smith in (On Being Yourself, Whole and Healthy) ==========================================================