Radical Honesty by Brad Blanton

I was blown away by this brilliant book; it totally had me hooked. The author puts the boot straight into the curse of moralism as the cause of our obsessive self-critical thinking and resulting inability to be free to be ourselves, and act instinctively instead of regimentally. He cites two modern-day institutions as prime examples that perpetuate moralism: lawyers and the legal system, and the Catholic church; both of which are rich sources of clients in his psychotherapy practice. By pushing doctrines and sets of rules about what’s right and wrong, and how people should behave, these institutions and others like them enslave people to black-and-white thinking that goes against the inherent contradictions of life as a human being.

The result is that we end up stuck in our head, beating ourselves up over natural behaviour and trying to work out analytically what behaviour we think is right, rather than actually living authentically. Along the way, we learn to lie when what we want to say and do differs from what other uptight people around us seem to deem acceptable. We end up thinking this will gain us approval from other people and give us a problem-free life. In fact, we end up dissociated from ourselves, disconnected from other people, and stressed out… all in a vain attempt to avoid offending people whose opinion doesn’t really matter anyway, and the resulting conflict which we imagine will be unbearable.

Liberation of our beings from the constraints of our mind turns out to be simple: start telling the truth, and deal with the consequences. Blanton breaks truth-telling down into 3 levels:

1. Revealing the facts
2. Honesty about current thoughts and feelings
3. Admitting that we are not who we have been pretending to be

Each succeeding level leads to greater openness, vulnerability, connection with others, and authenticity. Along with greater potential for conflict with defensive people operating out of fear on a lower level. Staying at level 3 all the time is hard work, and pretty much impossible. Level 2 is achievable, and gives you huge relationship breakthroughs. Most people don’t even operate at level 1 most of the time.

My family of origin didn’t even do level 1 very well. Most of my parent’s arguments were disagreements about facts revealed in previous arguments. That meant they never even got close to level 2. If you’re attacked about your version of the facts, you’re not about to reveal feelings which are even more intangible and open to ridicule, if that’s what your opponent is into. So I grew up learning that being fundamentally honest wasn’t really a good thing. I fooled myself into thinking that I was an honest, nice guy; when in fact I held back so much that I was downright deceptive and even manipulative. I didn’t know that a man can get his needs met by being open and honest about them, so I learned to withhold and lie instead. I just did it in a way that seemed nice enough and wouldn’t fit most people’s definition of a lie, but really I was holding back big time; something I’m still learning to break out of.

The chapter on dealing with anger was particularly illuminating for me. If you find yourself never getting angry, it’s possible that you’ve repressed your anger so much that you barely even feel it. This has definitely been the case for me, as my mother was verbally abusive and my father violent when they were angry; so I vowed never to follow them as role models. But men who are incapable of expressing anger act like unattractive wimps. The antidote to this is to start expressing your resentment to people, and get over your fear of how they will respond. I recently told a woman that I resented her for keeping me waiting when I turned up for a lunch date; something I previously would not have done for fear of offending. Not only did she apologize, but even though it clearly made her feel bad, she became much more engaged in our interaction as a result.

A key point that Blanton makes is that emotions are transitory when they are freely expressed. They only hang around when we bottle them up. So if we express anger towards someone else in a constructive manner, it dissipates. We need to be aware of this when we’re on the receiving end too; just because someone is angry today doesn’t mean they will still be tomorrow. This has been another big learning for me, having experienced many family arguments where an emotion, opinion or attitude expressed at one point in time is used as ammunition for all future arguments. Don’t take other people’s feelings personally. Someone can be angry with us right now, and loving us a minute later. This sharing of emotions, even of seemingly negative ones, builds intimacy, trust, and allows opportunities for forgiveness. Of course it needs to be done constructively, and the book gives a formula for doing this especially with anger, since it’s the emotion we often struggle with expressing constructively.

Radical honesty can be disarming, but is ultimately attractive to other people. We end up having more respect for someone who is honest and straight with us, even if they disagree with them or find their opinions or emotions questionable, than someone who is hard to pin down or changes their tune according to other people’s views. I highly recommend this book to anyone who finds themselves holding back around other people, and wants to live a more connected, less self-critical life. It’s absolute gold.