The Plaster That Needs to Come Off
On truth, righteousness, and why we choose comfort over freedom
The Plaster That Needs to Come Off
On truth, righteousness, and why we choose comfort over freedom
Can I start honestly?
There is something most of us know, in the quiet, in the middle of the night, or in that still moment after a difficult conversation, that we are not quite saying. Something in our relationship. Something in our team. Something within ourselves.
We know it is there. And yet we leave it alone.
We call it keeping the peace. We call it being kind. We call it choosing our battles. And sometimes – genuinely – it is all of those things.
But sometimes it is something else entirely.
Sometimes it is the plaster that needs to come off.
You know this feeling. You know you need to do it. You know healing only happens when air reaches the wound. But still, your hand hesitates. Because you also know it is going to hurt.
What We Actually Mean When We Say ‘Righteousness’
In the church world, righteousness can sound like a performance. A standard to reach. A box to tick.
But the Hebrew word “tzedek” carries something far more relational. It is not about being morally correct. It is about being in right relationship. With God. With yourself. With the people around you.
Righteousness, in its truest sense, is not a position you hold, it is a position you live from.
And truth is what makes that possible.
“Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.” John 8:32
What strikes me about this verse is the context. Jesus said this to people who already believed they were free. They were not in chains. They were not in crisis. They were managing. Functioning. Getting through.
And yet truth, Jesus said, would release something in them they had not yet found.
That is the invitation. Not to become a different person. But to finally become who you already are.
Why Is It So Hard to Face?
I know this cycle well. I have walked it many times myself.
There is a moment in every healing journey, and in every leadership journey, every team, every family, where the truth becomes undeniable. Where you can feel it pressing against the surface. Where the discomfort of not saying it starts to cost more than the fear of saying it.
And yet, even then, something in us resists.
What is that?
Psychologically, avoidance is not weakness. It is your nervous system doing exactly what it was designed to do, protect you from perceived threat. Uncomfortable truths register in the brain the same way physical danger does. The body does not distinguish between a difficult conversation and a predator. Both feel like survival.
So we avoid. Not because we are cowards. Because we are human.
But here is what avoidance does not tell you:
Avoided truth does not disappear. It goes underground. It surfaces as resentment, as reactivity, as the slow erosion of trust, in teams, in marriages, in our relationship with ourselves. What we refuse to name continues to run the room.
“Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.” Carl Jung
That sentence has stayed with me for years. Because I have watched it play out, in my own life, and in the lives of people I walk alongside. The patterns that feel like fate. The cycles that feel inevitable. The dynamics in teams that no one talks about but everyone navigates around.
What we do not name, names us.
Keeping the Peace, or Keeping the Problem?
There is a difference between peacekeeping and peacemaking.
Peacekeeping manages the surface. It smooths things over. It says ‘it’s fine’ when it is not fine. It keeps everyone comfortable – including you – for just a little longer.
Peacemaking does something different. It is willing to disturb the surface in order to reach something real beneath it.
“Wounds from a friend can be trusted, but an enemy multiplies kisses.” Proverbs 27:6
This is not a call to be harsh. Please hear that.
Everything I have come to believe about transformation – is not about confrontation as a weapon. It is about truth held in love. The gentlest, most courageous thing you can offer someone is the truth about what you see.
In teams, I have watched this dynamic play out over and over. The thing no one says. The elephant in the room that everyone politely walks around. And slowly, that silence becomes the culture.
Psychologist Patrick Lencioni writes that the first dysfunction of any team is the absence of trust – not strategic trust, but the kind of trust where people feel safe enough to say what is real. Without that, conflict goes underground. And underground conflict does not heal. It festers.
Keeping the peace feels like kindness. But it can quietly be the most unkind thing we do to the people we love and lead.
The Darkness We Would Rather Not Look At
Here is where it gets tender. And I want to stay here with you for a moment, because I think this is where so many of us quietly stop.
Facing the truth in a relationship or a team is already difficult. But facing the truth within yourself – the patterns, the shadows, the parts of you that you would rather attribute to circumstances or other people – that is something else.
It requires something I can only describe as courage and self-compassion held together. Because without compassion, truth becomes self-condemnation. And without truth, compassion becomes self-deception.
Brené Brown’s research on shame helps me understand why so many of us stop short of real self-honesty. Shame tells us: ‘I am the problem.’ And if I am the problem, the safest thing is to hide. To manage. To project a version of myself that keeps the truth at arm’s length.
But the prodigal son’s story does not begin with his father running toward him.
It begins with a phrase I return to again and again:
“When he came to himself…” Luke 15:17
That moment, when he came to himself, was the turning point. Not the father’s embrace. Not the robe or the ring or the feast. Those all came later. First, there was a moment of radical, honest self-confrontation. He stopped running from what was true.
Truth preceded freedom. It always does.
Awareness is the doorway. You cannot walk through what you cannot see.
What Resists in Us – and Why That Is Not Failure
Our brains are wired for homeostasis. The nervous system is designed to return to the familiar, even when the familiar is painful, even when the familiar is the very thing we say we want to leave behind.
This is not a character flaw. It is biology. It is survival.
The patterns of behaviour that once protected us do not simply dissolve when we decide we are ready to change. The system that learned to survive in certain conditions will resist the unfamiliar, even if the unfamiliar is freedom.
I think about this with the plaster. You know it needs to come off. Every part of your rational mind agrees. And yet, your hand hesitates. Not because you want to stay wounded. But because every previous experience of pain has taught your body: this is what happens when something gets close.
The anticipation of discomfort is often worse than the discomfort itself. Research in psychology calls this affective forecasting error, we consistently overestimate how much something will hurt and underestimate our capacity to cope with it afterwards.
You are more resilient than your nervous system has had the chance to discover.
And healing – real healing – is not the absence of pain. It is the willingness to let what has been protected be exposed to air. To light. To the truth that, held with grace, does not destroy. It restores.
What Truth Makes Possible
I want to close with what I have seen truth do, not in theory, but in real lives.
I have watched someone name, for the first time, a pattern they had been carrying for thirty years, and feel not shame, but relief. Like something put down after a very long walk.
I have watched a team finally say the thing everyone already knew, and felt the air in the room change. Not because the problem was solved, but because the pretending had stopped.
I have experienced it myself. The terrifying and quietly miraculous moment of saying what is real, and discovering that I was still standing on the other side of it.
“Speaking the truth in love, we will grow to become in every respect the mature body of him who is the head.” Ephesians 4:15
Truth in love. Not truth as a weapon. Not love as a cover for silence. Both, together.
That is what righteousness, in its deepest sense, makes possible. Not performance. Not moral perfection. But right relationship, with God, with yourself, with the people you live and work alongside.
The plaster that needs to come off.
It will hurt. Briefly. And then air will reach the wound.
And healing, the kind that is real and lasting and ripples outward, will have somewhere to begin.
A Few Questions to Sit With
→ Is there something you have been not-saying? In a relationship, in your team, within yourself?
→ What is the plaster that has been in place long enough?
→ Are you keeping the peace, or keeping the problem alive?
→ What position are you living from right now: truth or survival?
If something in this post stirred something in you, and you are needing help. you can Book a Discovery Call. The brave step is rarely the dramatic one. Sometimes it is simply this: acknowledging to yourself that something is true.
That is where the journey of transformation begins.
