The Transformative Power of Truth: Overcoming Lies and Embracing Authenticity

"One of the things you talked about growing up not to make light of People's childhoods and what they may or may not have experienced. I always tell my kids, that the truth shall set you free. And what they tell me is they no, dad, the truth shall get me punished.

The?truth?shall get you punished.. And so it's like when my mom used to tell me and I was probably, as a kid, I was probably normal until around age 15 when I lost my marbles. And we'll talk more about that. But at At age? Probably age 10, 11, 12. I started getting in, in a little mischief behavior.

And my mom would tell me whenever she said this, I knew there was a problem. She said, now tell me the truth. I promise I will not. Get upset if you tell me the truth. And I'm like, no, I'm not gonna fall that. And my mom and I joke about that to this day. But it's absolutely the case. The truth shall set you free.

The Bible, the Old Testament, the New Testament the the Koran, the Do Ching, the. The, all of the Confucius, all of the ancient philosophies and spiritual teachings they all point to the truth. And if you can own up to what's actually happened, couple things happened.

Josh, maybe you can comment on this. A couple things happened. First of all you bring it out verbally and by doing that, there's a cleansing that happens within your own. Within your own being, if you will, your own aura. There's a cleansing. Because otherwise we live in denial. If we are not sharing the truth.

Now mind you, there are certain people you wanna share the whole truth, nothing but the truth. Then other, you share the truth, but always do your best to share. People can use that against you. So there's always a, there's always a little nugget of Of caution that we wanna always throw into all these situations.

So there's a cleansing that happens and then also the people around you, they feel your sincerity and it's easier to build that bond and that teamwork. Has that been your experience?

Truth attracts your tribe? It's, I don't know who I heard say it or if I made it up, but it is true because I look at it like this.

I remember trying to live a lie and I was an asshole with money. Like I had a lot of money before I ended up losing everything. It was just built on deception and greed and lies. And even my friendships were, I wanted the people around me to enable me, I, cuz I was still in, I, I, as what we talk about in the Devil Inside Me book and film.

Is, I struggled with a chem sex addiction for almost 20 years, and I needed the people around me to help me keep that lie going. So I was the one picking up, I was buying the drugs, I was picking up the bar tabs. I was picked buying the dinners. I was buying the hotel suites because I needed people around me because I didn't want to be alone.

I was so insecure and so codependent that I was buying friends ultimately. Just to be able to try to control them ultimately is what it was. But I needed them in my life. I didn't want them to leave. I wanted them to be loyal. So I was trying to buy 'em off. And those weren't my real friends, cuz where are they now?

Because as soon as I lost everything and ended up homeless, as soon as I was bankrupt, there was no one around. I was alone. And yeah. Sorry. I wanted to say one last thing to that though. For me when I turned my life around, it's right around the time I'd met you. The secrets that I was still keeping was having H I V and two of the six reasons that I'd been in jail and I had an audience that started my talk show was building a following, but I wasn't being honest with my audience about everything.

I was sharing a lot of the other stuff, right? But I heard that someone say this, that 98% of the truth isn't the truth. And if you want God to bless you and your dreams and your vision and all the things that you want to do, you need to tell the truth. Not half of it, not 98% of it, not even 99%, 100% of it.

And that really resonated me with me. And so my moment for me of just finally coming out and just telling all the truth was on my show. And I told the world that I had hiv. And I told the world that two of the six times I'd been in jail were for domestic violence. And it was awful. It was the most embarrassed like I was horrified to do this because all my fears were, no one's gonna like you anymore.

People are gonna leave you, no one's gonna trust you, no one's gonna book. And you know what happened? Yeah. I had a lot of people quit following me. A lot of people called me an abuser. A lot of people called me some really ugly names that are related to H I V and aids and. Being gay and other things and and it wasn't nice, what happened?

I got stronger and I got one step closer to knowing my identity. And now years later, I know my identity because I told the truth and I kept sharing the truth. And even sometimes when I wasn't really sure what was true with me, which is very common with people with Disassociative identity disorder.

I started walking out what I believed to be true, and if I was wrong, I confessed, Hey, I was wrong about this. It wasn't true. Or maybe this wasn't true for me anymore. But being able to even share that was very powerful because once I understood my identity, there was nothing anyone could take from me.

It didn't matter what I did 10 years ago. Doesn't even matter what I did yesterday. I know who I am. I know who I was created to be, and I get to be that every day now. And with that, believe it or not, is un uncertain as life can be. The fact that I know my identity gives me all of the peace in the world to go out and do everything I've always dreamed of doing."