Conscious Choice Seattle: Honest To Closeness

YOUR RETREAT CARE KIT

Getting Into and Getting Over Your Anger

Every EM Mini-Retreat is accompanied by a care kit you can “open” by yourself, with a partner or in a small group. Here is your “mini-course” on handling your anger, which is integral in the Radical Honesty program:

Being honest about anger puts you on the road back home to being alive like you were as a child. You will no longer be mind-deadened by what you have learned to lie about.

Telling the truth about your anger gets you back to loving yourself—and having something left over to love someone else.

An important point: Your anger is unreasonable and unfair. Let it stay that way. Trying to make it seem reasonable—which usually consists of trying to make the resented person wrong—is the source of all the judgments and explanations that remove you further from the person and further from the anger sensations that arose in your own body.

Some quick rules of thumb regarding anger:

Whenever possible, talk face to face to the person with whom you are angry.

Start your sentences as often as possible with “I resent you because…” or “I appreciate you because…”

Speak in the present tense.

Eventually, get specific.

Focus as much as you can on what did happen instead of what didn’t happen.

Stay in touch with your experience. Stay there with the person beyond the time it takes to exchange resentments.

Try this exercise of getting into and getting over anger:

Step 1: Close your eyes for a moment. Picture a person you don’t like, then have an imaginary dialogue with him or her. Tell him your judgments about him. Tell him what he did that you resent. Then imagine his response and respond back. Pay attention to your body sensations as you engage in this imaginary dialogue. If you are working with a partner or in a small group, each person can discuss the body sensations. If doing it solo, write down your body sensations.

Step 2: Call that person you just had the imaginary conversation with and make an appointment to tell him your resentments in person (you may also tell him your appreciations). Tell the person when you call that you want to meet and tell him why you are mad and get over it. Ask to meet as a favor to you. Persist until he agrees. Report back to your partner/group or write about the encounter.

—Brad Blanton

March 2005

Honest To Closeness

EM Mini-Retreat

The path to intimacy in your relationships is paved with telling the truth all of the time. No more white lies. No holding back. No worries about hurt feelings. Just Radical Honesty.

For more than 25 years, Brad Blanton has been counseling his psychotherapy clients to tell the truth 100 percent of the time. He recommends bluntness whether the people in your life like it or not.

He calls it Radical Honesty.

It might seem a reckless behavior, especially for a psychotherapist, but Blanton has enough success stories to fill three books (check out www.radicalhonesty.com). He has counseled clients on the verge of divorce who not only revived marriages but became shining examples to other couples. He has helped dozens of adult children finally confront parents about childhood abuse.

Blanton even had one client who worked for a federal agency as a top-level official. The man decided to be radically honest at work, telling supervisors exactly how he felt about their leadership, accepting he would likely be fired. Well, the client did get relieved of his duties—only to be invited back and promoted within the month when his bosses and coworkers decided he was right.

On a practical note, Blanton says Radical Honesty will save you a phenomenal amount of energy because you will no longer be drained by all of the attention you are putting into “the lies you’re telling and secrets you’re keeping.” His work can be validated with a spin through psychology research literature showing keeping secrets has an adverse effect on health.

The second edition of Blanton’s “Radical Honesty” book is due out this spring. This EM Mini-Retreat highlights Blanton’s straightforward program. Here are some questions and answers that might at first put you off but then pull you back in. More intimate, open, loving relationships could well hang in balance.

What is lying and why is it stressful?

Blanton: Lying is saying or withholding information in order to manipulate someone’s opinion of you. It captures your attention by bringing your focus to the story you’re telling, the image you’re preserving and the secret that you’re hiding.

You’re no longer able to focus your attention wherever you want to focus it; you’re only able to focus your attention on the lies you’re telling and the secret you’re keeping. This captured attention creates stress. In Radical Honesty, I attempt to demonstrate that this secrecy, withholding and lying is the primary source of modern human stress, the primary cause of most anxiety and of most depression.

Does everyone lie?

Blanton: Yes. We are always telling some kind of story, building a case for ourselves and trying to put on a best face. We’re trying to prove we’re good little boys and girls and that we’re knowledgeable. In a nationwide survey titled “The Day America Told the Truth,” 93 percent of Americans admitted that they lie “regularly and habitually” at work and 35 percent admitted they have had or were currently having an affair which they were keeping secret from their mates.

Is it possible to be completely honest without hurting a person’s feelings?

Blanton: Probably not. If you are in an ongoing relationship with any person there will probably be times when you hurt their feelings. Probably the most often used rationalization for lying is “I didn’t want to hurt anybody’s feelings.”

I recommend you hurt people’s feelings and stay with them past the hurt. I also recommend that you offend people. We can all get over having our feelings hurt and we can get over being offended. These are not permanent conditions; they are feelings that come and go. On the other side of that reaction is a conversation in which your mutual honesty creates an intimacy not possible if you are hiding something for the sake of someone’s feelings.

What if I get mad at someone’s reaction to my truth telling?

Blanton: Tell them you are mad. Say “I resent you for...” and be specific about what visible, audible part of their reaction you resent. People can actually get furious at other people and get over it in 15 or 20 minutes. People can avoid being angry with someone else for 10 or 15 or 20 years, and if they actually got angry at them, they’d probably get over it in half an hour.

Do you feel we have to be honest with ourselves before we can have a relationship with someone else?

Blanton: You can’t be “secretly” honest. Being “honest with yourself” is simply not separable from being honest with another. A person who says, “I was honest with myself, but decided not to tell...” is just another miserable liar and will have to suffer the consequences. Sharing honestly, with others present, is the way we can have an authentic relationship with another person.

Why do you require your therapy patients to go and tell the truth about things in their past to parents, siblings or spouses?

Blanton: What I’ve discovered in 25 years of working with people as a psychotherapist in Washington, D.C., is that the primary source of their misery is lying. When I coached them to clean up their act and tell the truth they had a hard time going through it, but right on the other side of that hard time they were no longer depressed, they were no longer anxious. They were happier.

They had their relationship worked out or a new job with a promotion. They had a brand-new relationship with their spouse or a better relationship with their family. What actually occurs is that when you open up and share by telling the truth it frees you up from the jail of your own mind, which is the source of all human stress anyway. It’s just simply more efficient not to work so hard at all those poses.

In the case of someone who was abused as a child, they are supposed to go back to their 70-something parents and tell them they resent the abuse?

Blanton: Absolutely right. I often have people bring parents in such cases into my office and tell them in front of me. We have two-hour sessions with the parent and the child. The child begins first by asking the parent to keep quiet and listen. Then the child tells them everything they specifically remember they resent and everything they appreciate. If there’s something they did, like stealing the car at 2 a.m. when they were 16 and took it out and got a dent in the front fender and brought it back and covered it over and got by with it, I have them tell the truth about it and other things they got by with too.

Then I coach the parents to tell the truth to their child about what they resent and what they appreciate. And it works out quite well. It works out for a renewed relationship between the parent and child. As long as there are hidden issues and agendas and feelings, you can never be yourselves with each other..

Why do people have such a hard time being honest about sex?

Blanton: It’s one of the big hurdles for everyone to get over because sexuality is such a taboo subject. I tell people when I’m attracted to them and they tell me when they are attracted to me. We make sure that nothing is going on disacknowledged, that is, an avoidance of reporting feelings. That’s what we’re trying to cure.

Suppose you met someone whom you found unattractive. How do you handle that?

Blanton: If the person’s outstandingly ugly, then that’s an issue I’m certainly going to bring up to talk about right off. I would say, “I think you look kind of ugly and this is what I think is ugly. I think that big wart on the left side of your face is probably something that puts people off and that you don’t have much of a love life, is that true?”

Then we’ll have a conversation about it. That ugly person has probably always felt the negative unexpressed reaction from people. The idea is that they end up not avoiding the damn thing instead of living a life that’s dancing on eggshells. They live life out loud and it’s a whole lot better life.

What if you want to be honest and you don’t even know the truth yourself?

Blanton: What’s true, then, is that you don’t know. So you say that.

Sometimes it might be more honest to say, “I don’t know,” and you’re willing to be with not knowing; that’s where creativity comes from. But more often than not, when people say “I just don’t know,” it’s a protest, it’s a whine, it’s a not wanting to take responsibility. An authentic “I don’t know” is a great place to be.

Is there one central point that you would like people to know about Radical Honesty that they can incorporate into their lives?

Blanton: I think the focus of what I have to say is not so much some moral taboo against lying as it is that I am in favor of people having fun in their lives, and having joyful, playful lives, serving each other.

I’m not morally condoning telling the truth or saying that it’s immoral to lie. I’m just talking about a pragmatic thing. If you go out and tell each other the truth you’ll be happier. You’re better nurtured in a world in which you’re telling the truth than you are in a world in which you’re cowering, hiding and lying.

For more information about Brad Blanton’s “Telling the Truth” workshops and courses or to subscribe to the “Radical Honesty Rag” e-zine, visit www.radicalhonesty.com or call 1-800-EL-TRUTH.

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