Can Honesty Break Through Habit?
His childhood is described as safe, loving, and disciplined, words that carry steadiness though not warmth. “Emotional safety,” he admits, isn’t a term he’s familiar with. His world was made up of respect, order, and obedience to his mother, who raised him alongside his sister. “I was just a kid being a kid,” he says. Love was shown through structure, not speech.
It wasn’t until he stepped outside his home that he began to see how the world treated him differently. He learned early to observe more than he revealed. The result was a quiet, polite distance, what he calls being “shy, reserved, and respectful.” His reflections pause there, with honesty wrapped in hesitation: there’s so much to unfold, he writes.
Intimacy, too, has been a long lesson. He once thought intimacy belonged only to the physical, that it was something shared between a man and a woman, nothing more. But over time, faith reshaped his definition. “I’m still learning how to be intimate without physical touch, learning someone, being vulnerable, and seeing someone else in their vulnerability and loving them the same. Only God helps me with that.” His words reveal humility and repentance, a man in process. “Even when I realized how flawed I am, with desires of the flesh and thoughts that dishonor God, He is still patient with me and loves me.” The depth of God’s love, he says, teaches him how to love others who are as imperfect as he is.
Culture, in his view, plays a smaller role than parenting. “The upbringing of our parents matters more than culture or tradition,” he writes. “How a parent reacts or chooses not to react can mark a child for good or bad.” He remembers love being taught through action, not conversation. His mother’s silence became its own form of instruction. She hid emotions to stay composed, and he learned to do the same. “If someone offends me,” he admits, “I catch the slick comments but choose to ignore them. I’m a person who does not enjoy confrontation.”
Encouragement comes easily to him, confrontation does not. “My ability to express emotions when uplifting people is great. The issue is expressing emotions when I disagree with someone or confronting them on the spot.” Emotional honesty, he says, means transparency, though tempered with discernment. “We have to be wise; transparency isn’t something to practice before every person. I feel safe, but I’m still selective about what to share and with whom.”
His restraint is careful, almost ceremonial. He recognizes the value of honesty yet continues to measure how much truth feels safe to give. He stands close to vulnerability, without fully crossing into it, as though he’s been here before and learned to stay near the edge.
Proverbs 29:11 (AMP)
“A [self-confident] fool always loses his temper, but a wise man uses self-control and holds it back.”
For him, restraint has long been mistaken for peace. Yet in faith, he is learning that control without openness can keep healing at bay, that God’s patience is not only toward him but within him, softening what was taught to stay composed.
My Thoughts
As I read his words, I could almost feel the restraint in them, as if he were choosing what was right to say rather than what he truly felt. It’s not disingenuous, but practiced, shaped by years of answering safely. His responses rest close to vulnerability, but not within it. He sounds like many men I’ve spoken to, steady, thoughtful, guarded. They answer with reason before emotion, as though too much honesty might unsettle the balance they’ve learned to maintain.
Perhaps this, too, is what emotional inheritance looks like, restraint passed down through reverence and quiet survival. I wonder how many other men read these words and recognize themselves, speaking just enough to be understood, but never enough to be exposed.
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