# The Wounded Healer Podcast
## Series 2: On Becoming a Man, Smalley Style
## Episode 2 Full Package
# Episode Title
Stop Lying to Everyone, Including Yourself
# Episode Description
For years I stood on stages and taught people how to fix their marriages while mine was falling apart behind the curtain. "I'm fine." "Everything's great." "Our marriage is wonderful." Those were not white lies. Those were load-bearing walls in a building that was rotting from the inside.
This episode is about the quiet lies men tell. Not the dramatic ones. The ones that sound like humility. The ones that sound like strength. The ones that keep your reputation intact while your soul disintegrates.
My son David, at twenty-four years old, refused to deny what he was feeling at Army boot camp. He let himself be angry. He cried when he was alone. He laughed when something was funny. He told me he learned that from watching me finally live honestly in the last two years. A kid in his twenties doing what most men in their fifties have not figured out.
If you are exhausted from performing a version of yourself that is not real, pull up a chair. I have been where you are. The exit is honesty. It costs everything and it is worth every penny.
Text me at (303) 435-2630 or visit smalleyinstitute.com
# Full Episode Script
*Note to Michael: This episode needs your sarcasm. The "platform lies" section is where you can be funny and dark about the absurdity of performing wholeness while falling apart. Let the humor carry the honesty. Men will hear the truth better if they are laughing when it lands.*
*Target length: 30 to 35 minutes.*
Last week we talked about passivity. The slow leak that kills you from the inside while you smile on the outside. If you have not heard that episode, go back and listen. This one builds on it.
Today we are going deeper. Because you can reject passivity and step into the hard thing, but if you step into it wearing a mask, you have not actually gotten anywhere. You have just performed courage. And performing courage is just passivity in a louder outfit.
Today is about honesty. And I need to start by telling you about the lies I told for years.
I was a professional liar. Not in any way that would get me arrested. In the way that gets you applauded.
I stood on stages in front of thousands of people and taught them how to have great marriages. I wrote books about relationships. I did radio interviews, conferences, retreats. I was the marriage guy. The son of Gary Smalley. The relationship expert who had the answers.
And my marriage was falling apart.
Not "going through a rough patch" falling apart. Actually, genuinely, structurally failing. And I stood on those stages and said "I'm fine." I sat in green rooms before events and said "everything's great." I looked couples in the eye and told them that the principles I taught worked, and they did work, while privately knowing that I was not applying them in my own home because my home was not a safe place to apply them.
Those were not white lies. Those were platform lies. The kind that keep your reputation intact while your soul rots from the inside out.
And here is the thing that made me sick when I finally saw it clearly. I was not lying to protect anyone else. I was lying to protect myself. My image. My career. My identity as the guy who had it figured out. The moment I admitted the truth, all of that would collapse. And I was more afraid of the collapse than I was of the rot.
So I kept lying. For years. And every lie was a brick in a wall between me and the people who might have actually been able to help me.
I want to make a distinction here because it matters. There is a difference between being honest and being cruel. A lot of men hear "be brutally honest" and think it means they have permission to say whatever they want without regard for how it lands. That is not honesty. That is aggression wearing an honesty costume.
Honesty means saying what is true even when it costs you something. Cruelty means saying what hurts even when it costs someone else something. The difference is who pays the price. If your honesty costs you comfort, reputation, or approval, that is courage. If your honesty costs someone else dignity, safety, or trust, that is just meanness with better branding.
The kind of honesty I am talking about is the kind that is expensive to the person telling the truth. The kind where you say "I am struggling" instead of "I am fine." The kind where you say "I do not know" instead of pretending you do. The kind where you tell your wife "I am scared" instead of going silent and letting her wonder what is wrong for three days.
That kind of honesty will cost you. It will cost you the image of having it all together. It will cost you the comfort of never being vulnerable. It will cost you the approval of people who only liked the performance version of you.
And it will save your life.
Ephesians 4:25 says it plainly. "Therefore each of you must put off falsehood and speak truthfully to your neighbor." Paul does not stutter on this one. Put off falsehood. Not "reduce falsehood." Not "be generally truthful when convenient." Put it off. Like taking off a jacket that does not belong to you.
And John 8:32. "Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free."
Notice Jesus did not say "the performance will set you free." He did not say "the image will set you free." He did not say "having it all together will set you free." The truth. That is the mechanism. That is the key that opens the cell door.
But here is the part they do not put on the coffee mugs. The truth will set you free, but first it will wreck your life. Because the life you built on lies has to come down before the one built on truth can go up. And that demolition phase is brutal. I know. I lived it.
Let me tell you about my son David. Because what he did at twenty-four years old with honesty is one of the most impressive things I have ever witnessed.
David went through Army boot camp. It was brutal. Sleep deprivation, physical exhaustion, drill sergeants in your face, everything stripped down. And in the letters he wrote me during that experience, he was relentlessly honest.
He never denied what he was feeling. He wrote about being angry and he did not apologize for it. He wrote about crying when he was alone and he did not frame it as weakness. He wrote about laughing when something was funny even when the environment said you were not supposed to laugh.
He told me he learned that from watching me. From watching me, in the last two years, finally live honestly. Finally stop performing. Finally say what was actually happening instead of what I wanted people to think was happening.
David, that might be the thing I am most proud of you for in this entire experience. Not the physical endurance, although that was incredible. Not the discipline, although that was real. The honesty. You felt what you felt and you did not pretend otherwise. That is a skill most men in their fifties still have not learned. You are doing it at twenty-four.
I want to talk about what happens inside a man when he starts telling the truth. Because it is not what you expect.
You expect relief. And there is some of that. But mostly what happens first is terror. Because the moment you tell the truth, you lose control of how people see you. The image you spent years building, the competent one, the strong one, the "I've got this" one, it starts to crack. And underneath it is the actual you. The one you have been hiding since you were a kid.
Most men would rather die than let people see that version of themselves. I mean that almost literally. The rates at which men take their own lives versus seeking help tells you everything you need to know about how terrifying vulnerability feels to us. We would rather disappear than be seen.
I get it. I lived it. For decades I chose the performance over the truth because the truth felt like it would kill me. And here is the irony: the performance was what was actually killing me. Slowly, from the inside, one "I'm fine" at a time.
When I finally started telling the truth, to my therapist, to my friends, to my coach, to God, I did not feel strong. I felt naked. Exposed. Like everyone could suddenly see the things I had spent my whole life hiding.
But something else happened too. The people who actually loved me moved closer. Not further away. Closer. Because for the first time, they could actually reach me. The wall I had built with my lies had kept them out, and I thought it was keeping me safe. It was keeping me alone.
Here is the thing about armor. This is important, so stay with me.
Armor protects you from external threats. That is its job. And when you are in combat, armor saves your life.
But you cannot be intimate in armor. You cannot be held in armor. You cannot feel a hand on your chest or arms around you or someone's breath on your neck in armor. The very thing that protects you in battle prevents you from connecting in love.
Most men are walking around in full plate armor in their own living rooms. Wondering why they feel disconnected. Wondering why their wife says she does not know who they really are. Wondering why their kids are polite but distant. The armor is doing its job. It is keeping everything out. Including the things you desperately need to let in.
David, the biblical one, knew something about this. When he went to fight Goliath, Saul offered him his armor. And David turned it down. He went into the fight as himself. No disguise. No borrowed strength. No pretense. Just a kid with a sling and the audacity to believe that who he actually was might be enough.
That is what honesty does. It strips the armor. And it puts you in the fight as yourself. Which is terrifying and also the only way you can actually win.
Here is what I want you to do this week. Pick one person you trust and tell them one true thing about your life that you have been hiding.
Not the biggest thing. Not the scariest thing. Just one true thing.
"I am struggling at work and I have not told anyone."
"I have been drinking more than I should and it scares me."
"I do not feel close to my wife and I do not know how to fix it."
"I am angry and I do not know why."
One true thing. To one safe person. That is it.
You do not have to fix anything yet. You do not have to have a plan. You just have to let one piece of truth out of the vault. Because every lie you tell locks you further into isolation, and every truth you speak opens a door back to connection.
A real man tells the truth about his life. Even when it is ugly. Especially when it is ugly. Because the truth is the only foundation strong enough to build anything real on.
Next week we are going somewhere that might be even harder than honesty. We are going to talk about your worth. Specifically, where it comes from. Because most men derive their identity from what they produce, what they earn, what they build, what they achieve. And when any of that gets taken away, they collapse. Because their foundation was performance, not identity.
I collapsed when my marriage ended because I had built my entire sense of self on being the marriage guy. When the marriage ended, so did my sense of who I was. And it took God speaking to me in a grove of Aspen trees to show me what I had been missing my entire life.
That is Episode 3: "You Are Enough. Stop Trying to Earn It."
Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.
Text me at 303-435-2630. Email me at [email protected].
Visit smalleyinstitute.com to learn about marriage intensives, coaching, and the Sojourners community.
See you next week.
*End of Episode 2.*
*Show Notes:*
*Text Michael: (303) 435-2630*
*Email: [email protected]*
*Website: smalleyinstitute.com*
*Next episode: "You Are Enough. Stop Trying to Earn It." dropping next week*
*Subscribe and follow wherever you get your podcasts.*
