I sort of promised myself and you that I take a little time off…
And you are loving your time off.
Totally.
I am losing my mind.
I am loving our life.
I am in a really space.
If you turn on any episode of the show Modern Family,
there’s a good chance the set-up for the story revolves around one character
not communicating something to another.
That's nice.
I was down here reading the paper and I heard this commotion up in your room.
And this mangy raccoon had busted through your screen.
Most often this is because they have a particular fear, hold a hidden resentment, or feel ashamed.
I'm the only one.
The other character then is not given the truth, but is instead presented with a mask,
or to put it more simply; a lie.
What say we take five?
In the show House M.D., the maverick doctor Gregory House often finds his diagnostic work
is challenged not so much by the mysterious nature of the illness,
but by the one simple fact, - that everybody lies.
The only variable is about what.
So what are the things people lie about?
Well, everything.
The lie is a fundamental element of storytelling, and one of the most common driving forces for conflict.
You take two characters; let one withhold a piece of information from the other,
and you have a pretty basic recipe for dramatic tension, and a good starting point for a story.
It is understandable then that so many films and television shows keep returning to this form of conflict
again and again, and again.
The lie is so ubiquitous that it almost seems like we take it for granted,
that we accept it as normal, even though perhaps, we shouldn’t,
as Brad Blanton observes in his book Radical Honesty: How to Transform Your Life by Telling the Truth:
I am sixty-four years old.
I have been a psychotherapist in Washington, D.C., for 30 years.
This is what I have learned: We all lie like hell.
It wears us out.
It is the major source of all human stress.
Lying kills people.
It’s a pretty bold statement, but one that I think is worth exploring.
After all, it’s an issue that pertains to us all.
I’m lying, and so are you.
And now I'm having anxiety and I have to confess.
No, you are not gonna confess.
You're gonna smush that anxiety into a little ball
and you're gonna push it into that little tiny hole in your soul where childhood trauma's go.
As Brad Blanton explains, lying is basically a form of neurosis;
a refusal to accept what is happening in the present.
We tend to deny the truth about feeling embarrassed, about feeling angry, or sad, or happy,
or any form of excitement really.
I'm aware when someone has a crush on me and he does not have a crush on me.
Why do we do this?
While we may tell ourselves we do it because we want to protect others,
Blanton argues that what we’re really protecting is ourselves and our self-image.
Living in any organized society means we are inevitably conditioned to make certain assumptions
about who we should be and how we should act,
and these roles and rules, once attached to, become very hard to change or let go.
The stress that kills or cripples most of the population comes from people being too hard on themselves
when they don't live up to their own imaginings about how other people think they should behave.
We don't know who we are,
and we try to guess who we ought to be in order to do the right thing and be happy.
We get lost in the process and beat the hell out of ourselves before we even know we're hurt.
So what would happen when we start being more honest?
Where would we even begin?
Blanton distinguishes three levels of telling the truth.
The first level is; revealing the facts.
We had some budget cuts at the office and a bunch of us got laid off.
Now, I didn't tell Cam because I was embarrassed,
but also because I knew, I knew I would get another job like that.
It's been a month.
This one seems simple enough, you communicate things as they are.
If you lost your job and have been hiding in the park
because you were too afraid to tell your spouse what happened, it’s time to come clean.
I got laid off. - You lost your job?
I'm sorry, I couldn't tell you that I was out of work again, I feel like such a loser.
And mind you, this is not just about the revealing the lies that seem relevant now,
it’s about revealing all of them.
You have been maintaining an image in the eyes of others to sell yourself to them in a certain way.
Now you have to untell those lies.
If you never have told your mother and father that you stole the car at 1:00 am
to visit your boyfriend when you were 16, go tell them and face the consequences even if you are 40.
It was 20 years ago, what? You think he's gonna ground you?
It was you?
Yes. Yes, I left the top down and I let mom take the fall.
The second level is; honestly expressing feelings and thoughts.
This is the level where we reveal our emotional truth
and the true nature of our judgements and feelings.
You begin here the practice of admitting how you feel when you feel it,
speaking your secret judgments of others out loud,
and constantly revealing your own petty and condescending ways.
I cannot believe you Phil! How could you!?
What? What is happening? What did I do?
The third and final level is a little more complicated.
It is where we admit that who we are is not who we have been pretending to be.
It is where we admit that we don’t really know who we are,
that beneath the story about our stable and sensible selves we present to others,
we are an utterly irrational mess of ever-changing and often conflicting and embarrassing beliefs and feelings.
The process of demythologizing yourself is begun by bragging about all the things which,
in your false modesty, you were pretending you didn't care about.
Oh my God you got it!
All this time I said I didn’t care but I do care, I care so much!
You have to go through your vanity and the suffering associated with it.
You have to acknowledge being a secret hero to yourself and confess the putrid vanity
of all of your usual phony self-denigration.
You have to admit what a worm and a liar you are
and go through the feelings that come up when you tell the truth about all of this.
If you have never truly embarrassed yourself by what you had to say about yourself,
you don't know shit from shmola about transformation.
It should be noted that this level is mostly an ideal to strive towards rather than a realistic state of being,
as a lot of the lies we live by have become such vital cornerstones to our identities
that we wouldn’t even be able to discard them if we wanted to.
And if we could, if you were to reach level 3, you wouldn’t be there for long
as our self-images are bound to fall back into storytelling and role-playing,
and therefore, your revelation will mostly likely lead to a new narrative of the enlightened self
from which you will yet again begin the posture qualities that conform to it and hide others that don’t.
Getting born again feels real good for a while, until we get to thinking that who we are is
someone who got born again.
That someone who got born again needs to die again, and get born again, again.
And so forth.
So if we cannot escape ourselves,
if living in the continued truth of the present moment is ultimately unattainable,
what then is the real meaning and purpose of radical honesty?
I think the best way to look at it is not as a path towards absolute self-transcendence,
but as a path towards deeper intimacy.
A lie is essentially a wall, and walls prevent us from being close to each other.
It’s only by being more honest that we can break down these walls,
or at least acknowledge them so that we can navigate them more easily.
The person capable of intimacy - that is, the person capable of telling the truth -
still has roles to play, but is no longer trapped in them.
The person is then in charge, rather than the role.
This takes tremendous courage,
and you must be willing for things to get worse before they get better,
especially when you want to be more honest about the emotion we generally repress the most, which is anger.
Blanton argues that the reason we tend to avoid confrontation,
that we condition ourselves to think rather than act when we get angry,
that we tell ourselves it’s a virtue to communicate in non-violent ways,
is that we are simply too frightened of our anger.
And, as is the case with any other form of emotional excitement that we repress,
we pay a price for it.
The result, at least in our culture, is that most people don't express anger directly.
We carry a lot of anger.
Most of it is irrational, but it is there nonetheless.
And the problem is that by swallowing it,
a simple frustration becomes a relentless plague on our thoughts,
turning what should have been a brief moment of honest self-expression
into a prolonged experience of growing resentment that, given enough time,
might destroy the very thing you sought protect in the first place; be it a relationship, an ideal, or a memory.
And there really are lots of things that indicate unexpressed anger.
If you gossip or criticize someone’s behavior behind their back, you are angry.
If you break a promise that you intended to keep,
if you are struggling to do your best without getting any results,
try and find those who you are trying to please,
because you are probably angry at them.
If you are a perfectionist for whom nothing is good enough,
most likely, you are also angry at someone else.
And as hard as it is to admit it, we even get angry at people for dying.
Your mother is dead.
Why did you have to die?
One of the things that makes getting over the loss of a loved one take a long time
is the refusal of people to admit that they are furious at the dead person for dying.
I hate you for leaving me.
It doesn't make sense to hate someone for dying - they didn't do it on purpose. We do, though.
Mom!
I hate you!
Every one of us hates people we love who die on us.
It makes perfect sense that we are afraid to truly express our anger,
just as we are afraid to truly express many of our other thoughts and feelings,
even the good ones such as love and appreciation.
For telling the truth means to put yourself out there,
to make yourself vulnerable, and open yourself to harm.
As such, honesty can be painful, it can even be destructive,
but as we see in so many of our stories, for better or worse,
the truth is always cathartic.
It always breaks the mental chains that are keeping us trapped and in denial of what is true.
One way or another, it always helps us to better understand each other.
And this a continued process of liberation, for what is true now may not be true forever.
Life goes on, and the truth changes; this just happens to be the way life is.
What was once true is often no longer true just a little while later.
Yesterday's truth is today's bullshit.
Even yesterday's liberating insight is today's jail of stale explanation.
The real meaning of radical honesty then lies not in a one-time revelation,
but in its repeated practice,
in the never-ending process of falling down the pit of lies, and climbing back out of it.
Like the endless cycle of life, death and rebirth, the struggle towards truth begins anew over and over.
A struggle that might get a little easier, if only we dare to be more honest.
I first listened to Radical Honesty a couple of years ago.
As you might already have figured out, the book is narrated by Brad Blanton himself,
who’s no-nonsense language I found really refreshing and fun to listen to.
It’s not a perfect book, and neither is its author;
There is not only something wrong with this book, there is something wrong with me.
I cuss too much.
I contradict myself.
I have great ideas and a lot to say, but I'm not much of a writer.
Unfortunately or fortunately, this mess is the heart of what I have to offer to the world.
Nevertheless, the concept of radical honesty stayed with me all those years
and eventually led to the creation of this video.
Still, it was impossible to cover the entirety of it and the book itself has a lot more to offer,
which is why I reached out to Audible,
the world’s largest audiobook service that exclusively offers Brad Blanton’s Radical Honesty,
and they’ve kindly agreed to sponsor this video.
With the Audible app, you can listen to audiobooks anytime, anywhere, and on any device.
And if you go to Audible.com/likestoriesofold, or text likestoriesofold to 500 500,
you can do so as well with a 30-day Audible trial
and listen to one audiobook, and two Audible Originals, for free.
So if you want to dive deeper into the concept of Radical Honesty,
or simply explore Audible’s vast collection of audiobooks,
be sure to check out Audible.com/likestoriesofold,
or text likestoriesofold to 500 500, and start listening today.