TRANSCRIPT
Is it important to be a hundred percent honest to express what you feel to everyone in all situations? How can an authentic self survive in such a lying and dishonest society? Somebody recently emailed me these questions, and I want to try to answer them to the best of my ability.
Well, fundamentally, I believe in using discretion. First of all, not everybody deserves my a hundred percent honesty. Also, my own represent honesty can have really nasty consequences in my own life. I don’t want to hurt myself by being with honest with people who don’t necessarily deserve it.
Yet, in another way, I’m all for a hundred percent honesty, but with myself. I don’t want to have blind spots. I want to be honest with me, warts and all. I want to know who I am. And yet, I am full and well aware that when I am a hundred percent honest with other people—because I’ve actually tried it, I’ve tried it as a method of functioning in the world—what I’ve noticed is it creates chaos. It creates problems in a lot of my relationships, or I should say it created problems in a lot of my relationships.
Because what I learned is that when other people are less honest with themselves or have less of a capacity for dealing with honesty, or people have really big blind spots and I happen to see those blind spots, and I happen to talk about those blind spots with them, or when I happen to talk about similar blind spots that I’m aware of in my own life—talk about my traumas, talk about certain painful things in my healing process, talk about my point of view in ways that contradicts where they are in their own development or in their own level of self-honesty—well, people don’t like it.
And what I learned is that I did have to use discretion, and I had to assess who is it that I’m interacting with, who is it that I am talking with, and how honest can I be? How much honesty can they handle? Trying out honesty, trying out small honesty and seeing how they deal with it. Do they like it? Do they dislike it? Do they reject me for being a little bit honest, or do they kind of reject me? And the more they’re able to handle my honesty, handle the little tests of honesty that I put out, the more honest I’m going to be, the more real I am going to be.
And what I find is the more real I can be with people, those are the people I want to be around. The more honest, the more easily I can just be myself without having to censor myself, well, that’s the better I feel in a relationship with someone else. That’s the more that someone really gets to understand the full range of my character, and it’s also a sign of somebody with whom I really share values.
Now, I do know people in this world who have gone forward with the philosophy in life that they need to be honest a hundred percent of the time. I’ve met people like this. The problem is sometimes what I’ve seen with them is when they are being honest a hundred percent of the time, it doesn’t mean they’re right a hundred percent of the time.
I’ve seen people who take great pride in saying, “I’m being completely honest with you,” and they are, to the best of their ability, being completely honest with me. But what I’ve also seen is that they’re not being honest with themselves first, and sometimes they’re dead wrong. So even though they get a sense of feeling very gratified that they can be so open and honest and direct with me, often in a critical sense about me, I’m listening to them and I’m like, their arguments are off. And that’s something that I want to be careful of also—not just to assume that because I feel it, it is right.
But then there’s one other thing, and that’s when I’m honest about my healing process, honest about the traumas I’ve gone through, honest about some of the steps I have taken to allow myself to heal better. For instance, being honest about breaking from my parents, being honest about, “Wait a second, those people were terrible to me once upon a time,” and continuing to be around them was a bad thing for me.
Well, what I have discovered is out in this big wide world of ours that in so many different environments, when I tell people that very simple thing that I can say in 30 seconds or less, a lot of people don’t like it, and they criticize me. “Oh, you’re wrong,” or “That’s not the right way God would have you be,” or “That’s not what the Bible says,” or “You have to honor your parents,” or “You have to learn how to forgive them.” And they’re being quote/unquote honest back with me, but I see them as totally wrong. Not only do they not understand my situation, they’re not even trying to find out about my situation. They’re actually not even hearing any of the background, we’re not even asking me anything about why I have made such a decision. All they’re doing is reacting out of what I consider to be their own unconscious, out of their own limited experience.
But the bigger point that I’m making is, again, I need—I believe we need to use discretion when we are honest.
Then one might say, “Why do you talk about these things so publicly on the internet? You don’t know who’s going to listen to this. People might reject you. People will criticize you. People are going to say you’re wrong.” And it’s true, and this is part of the risk in life that I have chosen to take.
Another thing is I consider the possibility, especially on the Internet, but even in person with people, that by me being honest in ways that they don’t like or that they criticize me for, there is the possibility that my honesty, even though they reject it now, is actually planting a seed inside of them. And that maybe someday they will consider it. Maybe someday it’ll gnaw at them, and they’ll look at it more self-reflectively. Maybe they’ll even change their mind. Maybe it’ll be in a year or five years or twenty years, but maybe that makes it more worth it.
However, I have to acknowledge that in my interpersonal relationships with people out in the world, I have a vote too—that I’m not necessarily only here to be helpful to other people, that actually I’m here to be helpful to myself. I’m here to allow myself to grow. I am to have peace in my life. I don’t have to have relationships with people who treat me badly. And also, I acknowledge that I’m a person who is still vulnerable in different ways and that being attacked hurts. And I don’t want to bring harm to myself, especially harm that is for no purpose. I don’t want to have pain for no purpose. I don’t want to have interpersonal conflict for no purpose.
Now, if someone is really worth it in my life—someone whom I love, someone who I really value, someone who is a friend or really could be a friend—then I will take the risk of being more and more honest, even if it becomes uncomfortable or risks becoming uncomfortable. But that person really has to give me some indication that they’re worth it, that they’re worth it to me, that they’re worth it to the world in some way, and that it’s not just going to create problems for me, problems in my life.
Now that second question: How can an authentic self survive in such a dishonest world? Well, I guess maybe I did address this question. How can an authentic self survive? I think the most important thing is to honor ourselves, to realize that our job primarily is to love ourselves and to be honest with ourselves and to protect ourselves, to have boundaries. We don’t have to open ourselves up to everybody, especially not to people who haven’t proven that they’ll help us in some way, proven that they care about us, proven that they have respect.
So for me, in this world that’s so troubled and so dishonest, part of it is, yes, I need to use discretion to protect myself, and I really would encourage other people to do the exact same thing.