Objective truth does not exist, as it is created through the subjective lens of human interpretation.
I've been processing some layers of my personal experience this past week, and I received a personal message from one of my mom's sisters in response to one of my posts because her perspective of events was very different from my own. . . .which is precisely the point of what I've been blogging about. Because even within my own self there are multiple perspectives on how I could have interpretted a given experience, so why is it that I choose one over another?
I have read statements in family development books about how each child is raised by a different parent, and I completely agree. The oldest child definitely has one set of parents, and by the time the youngest child rolls around, the parents have developed into completely different people and parents. Another way of saying this is, no two children are raised exactly alike.
I once had a conversation with my brother, this was about 10 years ago. We were processing various pieces of how we grew up, and I said something to the effect of how we didn't have a childhood until the year that we lived with an aunt and uncle. His response to my statement was, "No, YOU didn't have a childhood, but we did. . . . you gave us a childhood." His response stopped me dead in my tracks because he was right, although I had never thought of things that way. . . .but while I was inside taking care of my mom and the household duties, my brothers were able to go outside and play or do whatever it is that little boys do when they're growing up. And the point of this is simply that even given the fact that siblings grow up in a relatively similar family environment, their experience of that environment is still completely different. There is no objective truth to be found in the way that we grew up, even with my siblings.
So experience is what it is, in and of itself, with the truth of that experience changing with each observer and participant.
There have been many studies done on this precise fact of human perception. Police officers know this fact very well, because if you have ten witnesses, they will have ten different versions of what happened. Some pieces may overlap, but essentially people perceive events in their own unique ways.
For me, I have spent my life perceiving events through the lens of feeling inherently unwanted and unloveable. And each time I do, I reinforce this skewed way of interpretting the world, but my lack of awareness of this fact is what causes the problem. Becoming aware that I do it is what will give me the foothold into making changes to the negative way I interpret events and experiences. Another factor to changing this belief is taking into account how other people perceive and interpret the events and experiences, as well.
And that is what makes sharing personal truth so important, because if I had held all of this process inside, I would still be working with the same skewed perspective. Listening to how my aunt perceives and understands the course of events and experiences adds new layers of possible ways to interpret and create meaning, because the fact is that my mom's truth died with her all those years ago. So all I have left are these fragmented artifacts of experience that I hold, and the multiple perspectives of how the rest of us are interpretting them.