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1 Chapter 1 Progressing Within African Family Intricacies: Confronting the Truth about Yourself and Understanding the Problem Confronting You Knowing that it is not my story per se that is important here, but the lessons learnt and drawn from it, I will like to go with the story behind the lessons rather than the lessons behind the story. You cannot know yourself until you can confront the truth about yourself and also about those you deal with. If you are not afraid of your own truth, you will hardly be scared of someone else’s truth. Those who tell the truth about themselves do not do so to get pity and/or praise; only those who tell lies do. You do not hurt by telling the truth; it is the truth (that you have learnt to embrace) that hurts. If you learn to embrace the truth, you will seldom be hurt by it. This book, for example, could still have been written as a fictional story but I think that would be a big lie since I would be telling you my story without actually letting you know it is my story. There are certainly many other facts of my life that cannot all be brought in and must be left out, not with the intention of hiding them. There is no part of my complex life that I am ashamed of. On the contrary, I take a lot of pride in my multi-dimensional life, an invaluable source of strength for me. If much has not been brought in here, it is simply because of “the well-known fact from Davidson that the writing of history [moreover one as multifaceted as mine] would in any case become a hopeless venture if it involved explaining everything” (Fossungu, 2013a: 5).I cannot even begin to tell you just how hard it has been to sift through it all to come out with just what you now have in front of you. When you know what you are up against, you will often correctly anticipate problems before they actually come. There is thus nothing as easy as solving a problem that pops up when you are ready for it. 2 What makes a problem really bad and daunting is when it takes you by surprise. You are caught off guard. Once you know who you are, it becomes very easy to know who or what you are dealing with. For instance, if I already know myself, there is no need to get angry or become bitter if someone describes me exactly as I am. Concretely, if I have a big clock-ticking head, and you tell me that I have that, there is no need for me to be angry about that. But if I did not know that, then I might be really angry. If I know exactly the type of head I have, and you tell me: “You are really making good use of that your big clock-ticking head,” then I will be happy that I am not wasting God’s gift to me. On the other hand, if you describe me as what I know I am not, there will still be no need for me to get annoyed because your description can never change me from what I know to be me to your description. Thus, describing my head that I very well know as “small, empty and oblong” does not need to make me angry because your saying so can never change the shape and content of my head as I know it to be. With an outlook like this on life, you will hardly have problems facing the truth and with others because you will know as well that telling them that they are what they are not, will never make them what they are not. Furthermore, a good knowledge of yourself and situation reduces your reliance on a lot of professionals. I am by no means saying that you should never go and see a therapist, for example. All I am saying is that your therapy (if not the cure itself) begins with you understanding yourself and situation. This is great wisdom that I have gained over the years; and would next be sharing with you through my large extended royal family generally but particularly my two sets of parents. Two Sets of Parents Most people traditionally have just one father and one mother; I have more than that; not to mention the complex...

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