September/October 1997
Telling it as it is
Radical honesty and relationship
An interview with Brad Blanton, Ph.D.

To Brad Blanton, lack of personal honesty is "the major source of all human stress." In fact, he says, "Lying kills people."

Blanton, in private practice as a clinical psychologist in Washington, D.C., for 25 years, believes that we make ourselves sick by not expressing our anger. "Your body stays tied up in knots and is susceptible to illness," he says, from skin rashes to lower back pain to allergies, high blood pressure and insomnia. His book, Radical Honesty: How to Transform Your Life by Telling the Truth, explains how we can liberate ourselves from what he construes as carefully sculpted personnas. "People choke the life out of themselves by tying themselves to a chosen self-image," he says.

"Our suffering comes from the belief that we are who we are in the eyes of others," he adds. "We live in our imaginations, thinking about how our act is going over, instead of being there with others."

Radical honesty, he explains, is a kind of communication that is direct, complete, open and expressive, an authentic sharing of what you think and feel. "The point of radical honesty isn’t to invoke another oppressive morality, but to get in touch with our insides, to nurture a clear-headed foundation for being alive," he says. "If you are grounded in your experience, you can forgive yourself and your fellow beings and love life. If you really want to make your life work, stop being such a liar!"

Founding president of the Gestalt Institute of Washington, D.C., Blanton trained in Gestalt therapy with Fritz Perls. He established the Stress Management Science Institute and the Center for Radical Honesty. He is at work on a new book, Radical Parenting: How to Raise Creators. He lives in Virginia with his wife, daughter and son. He spoke with Nexus publisher Ravi Dykema at our Boulder offices.

RD: You’ve described yourself as "an old hippie," meaning you were - and are - part of a revolution, one that began in the ’60s. What does that revolution have to do with radical honesty?

BB: Radical honesty is about no longer being dominated by our minds. It’s not just a revolution within one cultural context. In the ’60s, we were discovering that there wasn’t any particular reason to trust authority. That’s where we came up with the phrase, "If someone is over 30, don’t trust them." We realized that there was no reason why dead people, like traditional philosophers or thinkers, should have more votes about how we live. And there is no reason why even older people should know better about how we should live than we do. We all need to question authority and to recognize that you ultimately are the authority in your own life, period.

What we learned from the ’60s is that mind itself is a problem. The mind will always recapture the space of breakthrough. That’s why I say in Radical Honesty that yesterday’s liberating insight is today’s jail. Yesterday’s true revelation is today’s bullshit. The mind tends to recapture the space.

NEXUS: What do you mean, "recapture the space?"

BB: When you experience something, you know it’s true. But when you believe something you experienced, it’s a lie. The same thing believed is a lie, unless you experience it.

NEXUS: Give me an example.

BB: Let’s say that I have a particular "should" that I believe has the stature of reality. I believe, let’s say, that I should always be honest. I discover that when I have been lying, I tell somebody the truth, we have a little bit of trouble about it, but on the other side of that trouble we love each other. And I make this resolve, "By God, the truth is always the best policy." You should always tell the truth. So then, a Nazi knocks on the door and I have Anne Frank in the attic. He says, "Are there any Jews in this house?" If I operate according to that great breakthrough I just had I say, "Yes, Anne Frank is in the attic." But I don’t think you should tell the truth there. I think you should lie.

I think you need to remain aware and alert and alive and that the person you are as a "noticer," the one who notices, needs to be in the foreground. The memory and the case history and the records and your personality and your story are in the background. You are always led by the noticer. The mind is always like a reporter at a funeral. It goes around saying, "Who died? Did you know him? Are you grieving?" It’s a completely inappropriate jerk who has no compassion whatsoever. In the West we have highly over-valued thinking.

NEXUS: So, I can tell from what you are saying that you are really passionate about this overthrow of the mind. But you are saying that telling the truth as a means to get there is really effective?

BB: Right. It is the first step.

NEXUS: Why did you pick telling the truth? How is that going to help us overthrow the mind?

BB: Truth is the truth of our experience. Three things you can depend on, what’s radically honest, is that you know what you feel, you know what you think when you are observing your thoughts, and you know what’s going on outside of you. You can arbitrarily break awareness into three parts. I can report to you as a witness what’s going through my mind. I can report to you as a witness what I am noticing outside of me, and I can report to you as a witness what I notice within the confines of my own skin. When I am making such reports I am telling the truth. That’s what radical honesty is. And true intimacy is sharing with somebody what you notice.

So, radical honesty is the fundamental necessary first step to being able to have an intimate relationship with another person, one that’s nourishing and satisfying.

NEXUS: How do our minds interfere with such a clear, simple process?

BB: It is impossible to exaggerate the distortions of the mind. Because of mind you cannot plumb the depths of human ignorance. There is nothing so stupid that you can dream up that some human being hasn’t done while they were lost in their mind. Did you hear the story about the computer programmer who died in the shower?

NEXUS: No.

BB: He read the shampoo bottle. It said "Wet hair, lather, rinse, repeat." So he got caught in the "do loop" and shampooed himself to death. That’s exactly the way the mind works. We are all out here shampooing ourselves to death, running around in circles on some illusion we thought up the day before yesterday.

NEXUS: A typical one in an everyday life might be what?

BB: Let’s say I am mad at you. You showed up an hour late and I got mad at you and I don’t tell you. I suppress it. You go home, and then I don’t ever call you anymore or have anything to do with you because in my mind you can’t be depended on to show up on time. Or you show up, and I am mad at you. I say, "I resent you showing up an hour late. I wanted to get to that movie. Now I have to go to the 9:30 showing, and I have to stay up late tonight. So you say, "You didn’t say anything about being here by this time." You holler at me and cuss, and we holler and cuss. We don’t walk away, we just stay at it. We keep talking. After a while we go out and get a beer and wait for the movie, and we are good friends because we told the truth about our resentment. We experienced it and got over it. So, at 8:00 p.m. it was true that I resented you but by 8:20 it was no longer true. The truth changes, particularly the truth of feeling.

NEXUS: How do you recommend we use honesty to improve intimate relationships?

BB: The first step for an intimate relationship is to be honest about what you have done. The second step is to be honest about what you feel and what you think, and keep current with it. The definition of intimacy is sharing your life the way it is for you. If you are not willing to share your life, what you are doing is performing in front of another person. I think it’s one of the reasons we have a 53 percent divorce rate and that most of the rest are miserable. People are in miserable relationships where they really hate each other’s guts, but they are more terrified of being alone than they are of staying together. So, they put up with the suffering of staying with somebody instead of splitting. I’d guess that only about 23 percent of people are in authentic intimate relationships.

NEXUS: Do you think they are all telling the truth?

BB: I’d say about half of that 23 percent, maybe 11 or 12 percent of the people, are.

NEXUS: Do you think you can have intimate relationships without telling the truth?

BB: No, you can’t. You can have phony relationships. You can have some degree of intimacy, but the problem is that you are always ignoring something. If you have a dead horse in the living room, and you keep walking around the horse and nobody mentions it, the relationship is actually defined by the dead horse. But nobody ever talks about it, and it gets to stinking something awful.

In a relationship, everything eventually is dominated by what’s being avoided. Everything you say is caused by what you are avoiding or not talking about, so you have no power in the relationship at all anymore.

NEXUS: How does the concept of radical honesty translate into reality when two people are in relationship? Say one of them has an affair?

BB: Telling the truth is a very simple thing, but a very hard thing to do. It is particularly hard, given our cultural background, to tell the truth about our resentment. It is perfectly permissible to be hurt, but is not permissible to be angry, particularly if you don’t get over it quickly. I’ve been married four times, and I’ve been divorced three times. I have been with Amy for 20 years now. I am a slow learner. It took me a while to figure out how to do this stuff. I, eventually, have been able to forgive women at whom I was angry for their falling in love with and having sex with a friend. It is a lot of work, and I was a little late on it. I forgave them after we split up. So it is a very difficult problem.

Forgiveness is one of the big issues of human beings. What you need to do to forgive another human being is to tell the truth about what you are experiencing until that comes and goes with regard to experiencing anger. You have to get resentful and get over it. That’s what forgiveness is.

If a woman has an affair it’s in her partner’s enlightened self interest to forgive her. The reason that forgiveness is important is because I forgive you for my benefit, not for yours. He needs to be able to forgive her for his benefit. He’s got to find out in detail exactly when she met the guy, what they said to each other, when they went out to eat, what they said, when they went up to the room what they did, every single little detail.

NEXUS: Why do they need to know every detail?

BB: Because by finding out every detail, he will de-romanticize it in his own mind. When you don’t find out the details, what you think went on is the most idealistic, most wonderful truly in love, multiple-orgasm experience the woman has ever had. When you find out the details, you find out that he couldn’t get the rubber on, and he lost his hard on, and he felt guilty because he is married, too, and when they did get it on it was real good but then, he fell asleep and she got mad because of his snoring and he fell asleep before she came. You find out all these details, and you find it was a very human situation. It wasn’t like "Tammy and The Bachelor" or some old 1960s vintage movie. It was a human situation, and you have some empathy even for him, even for the person you consider to be your enemy. You have some empathy for her.

What happens when you do have those experiences has to do with forgiveness. They have shared that experience with you in such detail that you practically have had that experience yourself, and you love her for being willing to share with you in that degree of detail.

NEXUS: Sounds like agony to me.

BB: You know, agony has a bad rap.

NEXUS: But if my partner has an affair, I know that if I just wait six months I am going to stop thinking about it. It won’t come into my mind much at all.

BB: You won’t be able to do that. The mate always wants all the details, even though they try not to find out. Curious inquiring minds want to know. And you will want to know, no matter what you say. You are going to have that sort of drivenness about the way they went about it, so you might as well get to it, and get all the details right off in the beginning.

NEXUS: It sounds like it would take a tremendous amount of stamina and strength and skill and some wisdom that a lot of couples don’t have.

BB: Let’s compare it to the alternative, though. There is a book that came out about five or six years ago called The Day America Told the Truth. It was a survey of 40,000 Americans, all done in one day with electronic magic. There was a random stratified sample arranged in age from 18 to 60 years of age. It represented every ethnic group, every socioeconomic group, every religious group. They guaranteed anonymity to all the participants. When they analyzed the data they found out that 93 percent of the people admitted that they lied regularly and habitually at work. Of all the people in the sample who were married, 35 percent of them either had had or were currently having an extra-marital affair and not telling their spouses about it. So that is of epidemic proportions now. That is the alternative to sharing.

NEXUS: People figure that if they have an affair on purpose they can get away with it because they don’t have to tell the other person.

BB: They can get away with it. That phrase "get away with it" already assumes the mind has some "shoulds" which it believes are right. It believes you shouldn’t get caught, and you shouldn’t let the person know what’s really going on in your life because your job is to get away with what you can and keep control of the circumstance, to manipulate the person whom you are living with in such a way that you are keeping them happy. That’s pretty much the standard.

NEXUS: But most people are quite convinced that if they don’t do that nobody will love them.

BB: That’s right, they are. The truth, however, is that as long as they do that nobody will love them because even if someone loves you, you can’t receive it because you know you are doing the con job in the first place. They are just loving your "act." You know when people are loving your act and not you. The only way you get loved is by coming off your act. I’m always amazed when I hear people talk about all the things they did to make somebody love them, like buying the woman flowers, giving her a valentine.

NEXUS: But if she tells me she wants me to remember her birthday, and she wants me to buy her flowers when she’s really hurting or anxious, and I want to make her happy, what’s the alternative?

BB: The alternative is to have one "being" relating to the other "being." It’s what the Sufis call the Holy Human Prototype. When I look you in the eye and I see something very much like me, it’s like looking in a mirror. I can be as one "being" with another. If you can do that with somebody you’ve been married to for 10 years, you have really done something. What people usually do when they’ve been married for 10 years is they look over there and it’s nothing but a trigger for some memory they have safely categorized in their mind. They remind themselves, "I know the kind of things she likes, and I know the kind of things she doesn’t like, so I better make sure I don’t tell her the things she doesn’t like, and just tell her the things she does like so I can stay in control of this relationship and simulate intimacy. I can play like I care about her and she can play like she cares about me and we can both have our little affairs on the side and stay out of each other’s business."

NEXUS: But a lot of people figure that’s better than total aloneness.

BB: They do.

NEXUS: It’s not great if you really analyze it.

BB: Right. That’s because all their life they’ve been taught to be manipulative. From the very beginning we are taught to lie all the time. We are told not to lie, but we are taught to lie. We’re told to play like you are a good little boy or girl, play like that performance is your life itself. If you have any real life do it in secret and on the side. That’s the reason why, when you walk down the street and you look at people’s faces, most of them range from being preoccupied to downright miserable. They are being devoured by their minds because the system they are operating out of is a whole dead system of categories and ideas that have no life to them.

NEXUS: A reader of this might wonder if telling the truth as a whole lifestyle might lead to this dethroning of the mind.

BB: Yes. And what you would find out is that people love you for telling the truth and giving up on your pretense. If you say to somebody, "Listen, I was acting like I was really great and I knew what I was about, but I don’t really know anything about this, and I am scared to death." They will say, "Well, God bless you, you sweet little thing. I appreciate your telling me." They will put their arm around you and say, "Don’t worry about it. It’s all right, I sometimes feel that way too."

NEXUS: What about a person who doesn’t go the whole nine yards, who is not adopting the whole program, who implements the truth-telling in one arena or another?

BB: I don’t see how they could do that. I don’t think you can. You can start out with an experiment. You get a friend or your mate and say "Look, for a month I want to tell you the complete truth about everything. I will bring you up to date and tell you everything I’ve ever done, and I will tell you the truth about everything that I think and everything I feel as I go, including what I think and feel about you. You do the same with me and let’s see whether this works or not." I think you will find that you will be irresistibly drawn to doing it across the board. It’s always risky, but it’s a risk you’ll take over and over.

NEXUS: It seems like that’s part of the deal.

BB: That’s right. That’s part of the deal. That’s what the revolution of consciousness is about. It’s about not being tricked by your mind, into suckering and compromising your life for the sake of an illusion of security. There isn’t any such thing as security anyway. The best you can do is fly by the seat of your pants.