Making Radical Honesty Your Best Ally

" Intense emotional attachment to any value, any virtue, any set of "shoulds" is a disease, a mental illness, a condition of self-murder and cultural assassination. " ― Brad Blanton

The moment I walked into my first psychology course at Uni, my stomach was flooded with butterflies. It became that much more clear how much I was excited for this class when the teacher said (upon defending us to use the content of the course to diagnose our friends and families with all the illnesses of the DSM) that "some people are just not ready to hear the truth. "

We All Want The Truth, Yet How Many Of Us Are Willing To Speak It?

Truth-telling is one of the most important rules to live by, and in my own eyes, it is worth any sacrifice. I stand by the premise that it is essential to tell one what they need to hear, rather than tell one what they’d like to hear. While the latter may please the party receiving it – it is only a temporary moment of pleasure as one day, hearing the truth may hurt them even more deeply, especially after having became comfortable living under layers of lies.

I firmly believe that in the end, the cost of having told the truth (even if it’s a cold hard one) will always outweigh the inconveniences and pain that may occur from such truth-telling.

Honesty isn’t only the best policy – it’s our best ally. I’m a big preacher of authenticity, and I believe that to be authentic with others, we need to start being authentic with ourselves first and foremost. How can we claim we are capable of catching others in their own lies, when we are unable to grasp the ways by which we are insincere toward our own selves? Profound self-introspection may lead the path to the discovery of a lot of things that we don’t see on the surface layers of our being.

The fact is that we may over the years have internalized a lot of messages, about ourselves, others or the world around us, that are perhaps covered with lies. Yet until we bring those lies to our conscious awareness, we ought to keep carrying them, and ultimately confuse them as truths.

There’s a difference between speaking the truth v.s. speaking the language of contempt and disrespect. There is a way to be honest and respectful at the same time. The response of the receiving party is not to be always taken as an accurate evaluation of how well our attempt at being truthful worked. Sometimes, in fact, many times, the truth hurts, no matter how kindly it is being expressed.