TRANSCRIPT
Speaker: Honesty is something that I treasure. I value it so highly in myself and in others. I think the reason I value it so highly is I grew up in a family system with parents who were very dishonest in a lot of ways, very much in denial, which is a form of dishonesty—dishonesty to the self. But also even liars in lots of ways. They knew what they were saying was not true, and that was the system in which I grew up. That was the world in which I was raised. That was the water that I drank and the food that I ate. There was a lot of dishonesty in there.
And what happened to me when I was 20? I started really breaking away from my family. I started traveling on my own. I started hitchhiking. I started meeting people who were much more respectful of me, not playing the games of high school and college—the games of fakeness and hierarchy. I started making friends who were five years older than me, ten years older than me, and I started opening up and blooming. My honesty started coming out about how I was feeling and what I was really thinking and my real opinions. And it was wonderful! It was like, oh my God, I have a whole new reason to live. I have hope. I’m becoming a person that I want to be. It’s the most wonderful thing ever. I was thrilled.
But there were limitations to this honesty, and that’s what I’d like to talk about now. The problem with my honesty when I was 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25 even, was that I was under the impression that honesty was a black or white thing. And I had the black part, which was to be shut down and dishonest, especially dishonest emotionally as a child and young adult. I knew that so well. That was very, very familiar to me. That was reflex. That was second nature, burned into me by the traumas and norms of my family system—primarily my family system, but also my school system, my culture.
And then I had this new example: being honest, saying what I thought, saying what I felt, just letting it out—think it, say it, express it, feel it, say it. And it felt wonderful! It felt so great. But as time went on, I started realizing that this wasn’t necessarily so good. This black and white doesn’t mean that the white was just necessarily perfect, because it wasn’t.
And there are two main limits with the honesty that I observed. And so now I would say in my life, decades later, almost 30 years after I woke up, I’m almost 50 now. One, just because I felt it and thought it didn’t mean it was necessarily true. And back then, I didn’t know that. I thought if I thought it and I felt it, therefore it must be true, and therefore it’s good to say it. And so I was still a lot more traumatized than I realized. I didn’t even barely know what the word trauma was. I didn’t know what dissociation was. I didn’t know about the healing process and grieving. I just thought that I was healthy because I had woken up.
I thought even for a while, deluded, I guess a bit—was that I was well, probably more than a bit—that I had become enlightened. And in a way, I had, because light for the first time was coming in, and light was coming out of me. I thought I had made it. I thought I was done. I thought it was just like a snap your fingers, I am healed. The truth is, a lot of healing had taken place in a real burst, but the real work was still ahead of me—the real sorting out of who I was, sorting out my childhood traumas, grieving, going through tons of anguish and suffering, rebuilding my relationships completely, distancing myself from my insane family.
I thought I could go back and heal my family with my honesty and my truth now that I was strong enough to speak the truth. Oh, I was deluded there. That did not happen. But I thought my honesty was true. And the thing is that I realized is I was allowing myself a voice to speak what I thought and I felt, but that doesn’t mean it was really fully honest, because the problem was I was still so traumatized and so unaware of it that I wasn’t really being honest with myself. I’m still partially traumatized, and I’m much more aware of that now. Thankfully, I’m much, much, much, much, much less traumatized because I’ve done so much healing.
But the parts of me that are still hurt, needy, unconscious, unresolved, they still do infiltrate what comes out of my mouth. And so I try to be much more aware of what I’m saying and, in a way, filter out the stuff that I’m much more aware is not true. Because in a way, it sounds kind of maybe impossible, but I think there’s a truth in it to learn the ways in which we are still in denial and to be conscious of that and to be mindful of that. So in a way, to have a third eye—different parts of myself that are watching myself, reflecting what’s coming out of me and who I am on the inside, reflecting to myself my own healing process, how far I’ve come, and knowing, approximating to what degree I still have to go, how far I still have to go, and what parts of me are still harmed.
Well then, there is part two of the limitations of honesty, and this is the part that most poignantly hurt that I figured it out. That sometimes when I was being honest, it actually was true. Some of the things I was saying to other people about how I was feeling, how I was feeling about them—sometimes even criticisms of them—that I could really hurt people. I could cause people a lot of pain and suffering, unnecessary pain and suffering. Not in a way that would necessarily wake them up in a good way—not that it was my job to do that—but that I could be very hurtful with my honesty.
And I think of a couple examples of women in my life who I was involved with romantically back then in my early to mid-20s and how I caused them to cry, thinking that my honesty was such a great thing. And it was just like I broke people’s hearts for no good purpose at all, just thinking it was good to be honest. Oh, my parents were never honest. They were never honest with me. They never allowed me to be honest. Here I am being honest about maybe some critical things or negative things or pulling—it could be very abandoning.
My honesty, and it’s like I had to learn that honesty can actually be very hurtful to people. And I think I had to go through that. In a way, I had to learn about how to be more kind with my honesty. My honesty, I thought of it as such a wonderful thing, but sometimes it could be a flaming sword that harmed people. And I see other people who get stuck in that place when they learn that they can express what they think and feel, that they have a conscious ability to actually speak the truth, but they can really hurt people for no good reason.
I’ve seen communities based on everybody just being honest with each other all the time without really thinking about the consequences of how this will affect other people. I know therapists who are like that too. And then I think of people who aren’t therapists or weren’t therapists back when I was a therapist who told me, “Oh, being a therapist is easy. You just have to tell it like it is to people. Your job is to be honest with people. That’s what they’re paying you for. You tell it like it is.”
And what I learned as a therapist is, oh right, not true at all. It’s like people think they want honesty, but it doesn’t mean that they can handle it. Actually, honesty sometimes can be like a grenade, and it can just explode people. People can even become suicidal if they get too much honesty too fast. It’s overwhelming. It can break their dissociation way too fast. Much better to be gentle. And that’s what I would say where I am now, much more, especially interpersonally. Now I would say I come here and I’m pretty bluntly honest, but this isn’t a YouTube video where people can turn it off.
If they don’t like it in an intimate relationship, like a friendship or a romance— not that I’m in any romances now— but when I have been in ones in the last 15 years, let’s say, or when I was a therapist talking to people in a therapeutic way, to be much more gentle with my honesty.
The key for me is that I want to be honest with myself. I want to be honest about my point of view. I want to know who I am, how I feel, and what I’m thinking. I want to make sense of it.
But in terms of my relationships with others, I want to know who they are also. And as a result, I feel I now can use my honesty much more gently, in a much less harmful way, in a much more thoughtful way, in a much more caring, loving, compassionate way.