💭⚖️ What Matters More: Reality or Your Truth? How to Re‑tell the Past Without Lying to Yourself

1. Reality vs. truth: they are not the same

difference between truth and reality

In philosophy, objective reality is what exists independently of opinions or feelings: what actually happened in the external world. Subjective truth is how your mind organizes that fact: emotions, interpretations and the inner story you tell yourself about what you lived.

So when someone asks “what is more important, truth or reality?”, they are really asking: “what weighs more in my life — what happened, or what I do inside myself with what happened?”.

2. One fact, two (or more) truths 👥

subjectivity of experience

Picture a fight: one person attacks, another is attacked. The external reality is a fact: there was aggression. But the inner truth of each person is another story: the aggressor rationalizes; the victim feels fear, humiliation, rage; each assigns different motives and meanings.

Years later, a couple tells the same early‑relationship episode over dinner with friends — and their two versions of that night are quite different. Reality was one sequence of events; their memories and inner truths are several, colored by each person’s emotions and perspective.

3. Why do two people remember the same past so differently? 🧠

memory and interpretation

Memory is not a security camera; it is a reconstruction process. Every time you recall something, you add new pieces: what you felt, what you learned later, what others said about it.

Psychological research shows that changing your perspective on an event (for example, viewing it from the outside, as an observer) changes both the emotion and the meaning attached to that memory. That is why the “truth” you feel today about something from ten years ago is not identical to what you felt back then.

4. You cannot change the fact, but you can change the meaning 🔁

reframing the past

You cannot erase historical reality: what happened, happened. But you can reframe it — change how you understand that fact and the role it plays in your life story.

The emotion‑regulation strategy called cognitive reappraisal shows that when you mentally re‑interpret a situation, your brain shifts its emotional response: the same memory can move from raw wound to lesson, boundary or turning point.

5. Re‑telling the past is not lying; it is maturing your truth 🌱

personal narrative and identity

Many authors talk about narrative identity: who you are is largely the story you tell about what you have lived. Rewriting that narrative — with more responsibility, self‑critique and compassion — does not mean inventing facts; it means adjusting the focus:

• stepping out of the role of pure victim or pure villain;

• recognizing nuance, context and human limits on all sides;

• updating the place that event holds in your life today.

When you do this, you do not change the external past, but you change the inner truth that guides you in the present.

6. Subjective truth is not a license to deny reality 🚫

subjective truth and responsibility

Saying “this is my truth” cannot become an excuse to deny hard facts (“I never hit you”, “that never happened”) when there is clear evidence. We live in community, and shared reality is the basis for justice, safety and boundaries.

The point is not to choose between truth or reality, but to understand their interaction: respect the facts, while also recognizing that each person has their own path to process and integrate those facts.

7. How to change your truth about what you lived (without erasing what happened) 🧩

practical reframing

Some practical steps for working with your own truth around a hard event:

1. Name the fact: what, objectively, happened? (no adjectives)

2. Name the emotion: how did it make you feel at the time? (sad, scared, angry, ashamed…)

3. Update your resources: what do you know and what skills do you have today that you did not have back then?

4. Review the interpretation: is there another way to look at this that is fairer to you and others, without denying the pain?

This revision does not alter the timeline, but it changes how heavily the past sits on your present.

8. Truth, desire and balance: which story are you still repeating? 🎯

mind behavior balance

The way you tell your past shapes what you desire, how you behave and what kind of life you believe is possible. If your narrative is “I always fail”, “no one ever chooses me”, “I only attract trouble”, your desire shrinks and your behavior self‑sabotages.

When you update your inner truth (“I did the best I could then”, “today I have more tools”, “I can choose differently now”), you do not erase mistakes or hurt; you stop using them as a permanent sentence. That creates balance between honoring what happened and allowing something new to grow from here.

9. Call to action: put one story from your past on the “witness stand” 📝

reframing exercise

💬 Invitation: pick one episode that still weighs on you — a breakup, a fight, a big decision. Then:

• write down the bare facts in a few lines;

• write the “truth” you tell about it today (the emotional, loaded version);

• imagine the scene through another person’s eyes from that time, or through the eyes of your older, wiser self.

Ask yourself: “What new truth could I build about this without denying what happened?”. The answer may not come instantly, but simply asking opens space for a story that is more honest and less hurtful.

10. Conclusion: you cannot change the past, but you can change the past that lives inside you 🧠⏳

retelling the past with balance

When someone asks “what matters more, truth or reality?”, the most honest answer might be: there is no healing without both. Reality sets the limits (what happened); truth translates how it lives in you now — and it is on that second layer that you have room to move.

Changing how you understand your own past — resizing, reconditioning, re‑interpreting — is not about denying your experience; it is about finally honoring what you felt, while acknowledging that you are no longer the same person. Life does not give you the power to go back in time, but it does give you the power to choose which story you keep telling about that time — and that choice completely changes how you live right now.

Constructive critique of the conclusion 🧐

The conclusion rightly stresses the need to integrate external reality and inner truth, but it may sound too optimistic for people living with severe trauma, violence or complicated grief, where “reframing” alone is not enough. It also underplays that in abuse contexts, the first step is often validating the objective reality (“this happened, it was wrong”), before inviting any narrative change.​

To make it more balanced, the article could:

• explicitly highlight the role of therapy and professional support in trauma work;

• remind readers that reframing is not about blaming the victim (“just change your truth”);

• emphasize that some external realities (like structural violence) do not change with narrative alone, but that working on inner truth can still strengthen people to act, set boundaries and pursue real‑world change.

Research sources 📚

• Philosophical texts on subjectivity, objectivity, truth and reality.

• Research on cognitive reappraisal, perspective shifts and their impact on emotion.

• Articles on personal narrative, identity and rewriting the past as a growth tool.