From Radical Honesty:
[Radical Honesty] was founded by a sixty-six-year-old Virginia-based psychotherapist named Brad Blanton. He says everybody would be happier if we just stopped lying. Tell the truth, all the time. This would be radical enough — a world without fibs — but Blanton goes further. He says we should toss out the filters between our brains and our mouths. If you think it, say it. Confess to your boss your secret plans to start your own company. If you’re having fantasies about your wife’s sister, Blanton says to tell your wife and tell her sister. It’s the only path to authentic relationships. It’s the only way to smash through modernity’s soul-deadening alienation. Oversharing? No such thing.
Yes. I know. One of the most idiotic ideas ever, right up there with Vanilla Coke and giving Phil Spector a gun permit. Deceit makes our world go round. Without lies, marriages would crumble, workers would be fired, egos would be shattered, governments would collapse.
And yet…maybe there’s something to it. Especially for me. I have a lying problem. Mine aren’t big lies. They aren’t lies like “I cannot recall that crucial meeting from two months ago, Senator.” Mine are little lies. White lies. Half-truths. The kind we all tell. But I tell dozens of them every day. “Yes, let’s definitely get together soon.” “I’d love to, but I have a touch of the stomach flu.” “No, we can’t buy a toy today — the toy store is closed.” It’s bad. Maybe a couple of weeks of truth-immersion therapy would do me good.
I e-mail Blanton to ask if I can come down to Virginia and get some pointers before embarking on my Radical Honesty experiment. He writes back: “I appreciate you for apparently having a real interest and hope you’re not just doing a cutesy little superficial dipshit job like most journalists.”
I’m already nervous. I better start off with a clean slate. I confess I lied to him in my first e-mail — that I haven’t ordered all his books on Amazon yet. I was just trying to impress upon him that I was serious about his work. He writes back: “Thanks for your honesty in attempting to guess what your manipulative and self-protective motive must have been.”
Read more: http://www.esquire.com/features/honesty0707#ixzz1mRnRSYnb
Wow. Hang this one up there with the 21-Day No-Complaint Challenge under “Things I Want to Try But Am Too Chickenshit To Do.”
But yes, this article is definitely worth a read! Very interesting, though I’d imagine it’d be EXTREMELY hard to implement at first and it’d be exhausting to deal with all the mini-confrontations you’d face in a day.
But damn, some of the benefits in the article are attractive: liberation from untruths and resentment, the thrill of social candor, the OPEN and genuine communication, and the “creation of possibility.”
And Blanton is hardcore about this. He even chastises the author for confronting him with the truth via email:
Blanton responds quickly. First, he doesn’t like that I expressed my resentment by e-mail. I should have come to see him. “What you don’t seem to get yet, A.J., is that the reason for expressing resentment directly and in person is so that you can experience in your body the sensations that occur when you express the resentment, while at the same time being in the presence of the person you resent, and so you can stay with them until the sensations arise and recede and then get back to neutral — which is what forgiveness is.”
Whew.
Shef and I went through a period in our relationship where we were diligently, ruthlessly honest with each other. Some confessions were cringe-worthy. Discoveries were, at times, painful.
And we had never felt closer and more intimate with each other than we did then.
My hesitation in either of these challenges reveals to me something about myself (and perhaps most people?), however: I avoid confrontation through demonizing my adversities (i.e. complaining) and cushioning people’s feelings. I cling to the “safety” of complaint and the safety of white lies. Doing one of these exercises (though implementing them as part of your actual lifestyle seems like more of a good idea) would definitely be a good way to chip away at that fear of confrontation.
Now to grow the balls to take on either of these challenges ..
