“There is something in every one of you that waits and listens for the sound of the genuine in yourself. It is the only true guide you will ever have.”

Howard Thurman

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Cover art and all art by Andrii Kateryniuk

There’s not many ideas in my 20’s that rapidly and significantly changed me more than the idea of ‘radical honesty’. I was going through a bit of a rough patch… feeling a bit lost and wanting to find solace in books so I began visiting my local library more frequently. This was the late 00’s (probably 2008ish) just before the smart phone and certainly before it became regular practice to just google what ailed us. As luck would have it, I just happened to come across a book in my local book shop called Radical Honesty: How to Transform Your Life by Telling the Truth by Brad Blanton.

I can’t overstate how much this book actually did radically change me and irrevocably set me free forever thereafter. The immensity of the impact it had on every relationship, friendship, family or otherwise after felt incredible, to put it lightly. I suppose I was genuinely fairly regularly honest and blunt before but certainly in a few important instances, I wasn’t clear enough either in my boundaries or my true feelings which inevitably led to needless pain. Mostly, I had stayed in undesirable situations longer than I should have stayed, paralyzed by the idea of hurting someone. My biggest issue was in actuality just simply not being honest with myself. My threshold for dealing with pain from others at the expense of myself was too high, probably from self-worth issues throughout grade school and beyond that plague many of us.

To summarize… I essentially became so transparent in all of my close relationships and vice versa, expected transparency, to a level that brought about closeness in those relationships (and current ones) that felt and feels much more authentic, healthy, sustainable and reciprocal. It took my personal relationships to a place that is… tribal and the way I think we are meant to feel in relationships. We know from life experience, we can be sitting in a crowded room and still feel lonely and the same can be true for personal relationships when we aren’t able to consistently and regularly speak and be our own truth. I think this idea is more important than ever considering the possible unprecedented epidemic of loneliness many people are experiencing in the modern world.

From a specific dating perspective, it usually (not always) allowed me to establish healthier boundaries much sooner and I think it led me to waste far less time with people that weren’t right for me. Those first few months to a year were times of deep introspective analysis, being utterly completely open and honest with both myself and them. Real and true connection doesn’t take any or much convincing on anyone’s part. A lot of this process… the vast majority of it actually goes unspoken. It’s mostly doing two things actively.

Firstly, it’s watching and listening attentively to their actions and allowing that truth to be internalized. Let actions speak more than words. I like to think of it in terms of actions being 90% of the relationship and 10% being the rest. A lot of people are just really good at talking and unfortunately don’t mean the entirety of what they’re saying. Half-truths are also the most challenging to sort and make amends with within our nervous system. Half-truths are also some of the most viscerally damaging. This is the crux of why the work of cultivating honesty and recognizing it (in ourselves and others) is so important… because a half-truth wrapped in well-meaning words but not backed by action, can be far more damaging than a full on ‘bad’ truth. In other words, “You’re just not for me.” or “Let’s just genuinely be friends.” is not arguably that damaging.

However, someone oscillating between expressing deep love but absent when you truly need them or otherwise, any fakery at all where it concerns intimacy is diabolically terrible and incredibly damaging over time. This is because they’ve said and done enough for us to let our guard down, but not enough to actually calm our nervous system. The level of pain this sort of relational dynamic brings about can best be described as dying. Conversely, the peace and depth of love felt through genuine intentions, which authentically calms us, feels like heaven on earth. It feels like you’re leaning against a mountain of strength… immensely safe, and therefore unabashedly full, free and wildly alive. You become thankful for even your worst days. You’re psychologically nearly impenetrable by negativity and what an astounding gift that is to give to one another. This is not fresh naive love speaking, but insight from lived experiences that has aged like a very fine and delicious wine.

These rare, beautiful connections facilitate how we were meant to live. They can only be manifested through truth and matching that truth with the reality of what is being lived through that connection over time. The way we wish someone would be doesn’t make a partner. The way we wish that relationship would look like doesn’t make a relationship. The reality of the relationship exactly how it’s been lived and experienced over time makes the relationship. Full stop. This is exceptionally true when we’ve been honest about our feelings, concerns, future dreams etc. and they are incapable of meeting us where we are. Their presence and how they show up in love, sometimes simply doesn’t match ours. Too often, we’re supplanting and projecting our own version of love onto someone else and losing ourselves in highly damaging ways. In other words, we love the version of them we’ve made in our heads and not the actual real version of them.

Why do we lose ourselves? Because we’re choosing to accept a version of ‘close’ relationships that isn’t authentic to our soul’s desire or choosing. This can go both ways of course. Over my life, I’ve been on both ends of this. Radical honesty allowed me to be tactfully honest at every juncture, the very immediate week my feelings shifted, to stop and deeply reflect on why and how rather than to continue moving forward blindly. I started to practice addressing things immediately, not in an accusatory way, but coming from a place of emotional vulnerability and maturity. Maintenance is needed on relationships in the same way maintenance is needed for every other facet of our living world. Some aspects of relationship are unavoidably painful, but at least we can aim to do the least harm as possible by being transparent and real. How these experiences are navigated throughout life is especially important to our collective personal growth. Clearly, given the climate of today’s dating world… people are increasingly severely traumatizing one another. Sometimes the better route is to get out of someone’s way so they can find their true love.

If we can do this while also still being a support somehow, there is something rare and magical in that. I’ve witnessed this firsthand when I broke up with someone and consoled them the best I could, saying how I genuinely felt. I told them I knew in my bones they’d meet someone perfect for them (they did and are still married to them), that I truly thought they were incredible and describing other truths such as that they were deserving of a deeper love than I could offer at the time… and despite my own best wishes to feel more, I couldn’t. We didn’t have enough commonalities. I explained how it was actually a kindness for me to let them go as the amazing, beautiful man they were. Ultimately, they agreed and could see and understand my reasoning more fully and therefore… were able to heal more easily, or so they expressed to me. People will, lie, cheat and barter sometimes before they’ll just speak the truth on their heart and all parties involved suffer chronically… needlessly. I find some people don’t practice being honest enough and therefore in those situations where honesty is really important, often fail to give true closure and do the least harm.

To avoid having to further deal with the pain of a manipulative person, and to get to the real truth, have I withheld information (lied) about myself to find out what I needed, to know the truth? Yes, I have. However, I’ve never done that for even a moment without serious provocation and multiple genuine reasons to over a critically, longer period of time. In other words, we were entering a realm of ok, enough time has passed, I’m really investing myself here and they weren’t showing up in the ways they said they wanted to, would or could. My health started failing… and my hair was falling out. Also, if anyone has kids, all of these issues of self-abandonment, trying to cope with unseen manipulation and lying would become incredibly compounded as now the lack of integrity is impacting more than just yourself and therefore, much more viscerally felt. Energy is ultimately our most valuable and sacred currency.

There’s something to be said for the morality behind lying to prevent harm (genuinely and not for manipulative reasons). When I say ‘for manipulative reasons’ I’m talking about people lying as a nicety to prevent harm can actually be very harmful because the people around them will never know where they truly stand. They’re always just going to tell you what they think you want to hear. Back to the point… if I was asked to lie to save someone’s life that was falsely accused, I would absolutely do it. To save an innocent animal from harm and being taken to a high kill shelter, would I lie and say it was mine instead of a stray? Again, absolutely. So… there are times when lying or withholding truth is not meant to harm, but to help and is morally appropriate. These are relatively rare occasions, but very real possibilities. I think every person ever to exist that went looking for information their partner was not being loyal or honest in their intentions and found what they suspected can relate to all of the above. People can only deal with gaslighting for so long before it starts to have genuine and possibly permanent repercussions on their nervous system. This is also usually, a very slow progression and rarely an immediate predilection to poking around. The first signs something is amiss is the way someone reacts when we question them or tell them our worries… and that brings me to an important facet of this discussion.

How can we reallllly tell if someone is truly into us or is for us? —-> By asking the following to ourselves:

How do they react when we express worry? How do they react when we need genuine support?

This is nearly everything to close romantic relationships, friendships, family relationships and otherwise. Do they feel like a safe person to express worry to on all levels?… Worry about yourself, your relationship, the world, them, the good and bad, ALL. of it. They will relax your nervous system and quell all of the anxiety to where the same topic might never need to be brought up again. If the worry has to do with them, they’d fix the thing they were doing or explain the truth of their own needs or intentions that were misunderstood. Part of radical honesty is also realizing that we may have interpreted something wrong and if we did, that’s as important to admit as it is to address the issue that triggered worry in us. We risk pushing good people away through jealously and this is also where true honest reflection comes in handy. Are we being jealous or genuinely trying to gather more information or context to prevent further harm in ourselves and others?

People that are invested in you as their person will pull you in closer while people that are not will subtly push away and then pull back on repeat instead. They will be busy, make excuses and then turn things around to be a pity party for themselves as to why they’re not able to be present instead of just showing up in every possible way they have available to them. They might be there a little but only so far. They wouldn’t get on a plane for you though.

Vice versa, who are we willing to show up for completely and entirely? Who would we jump on a plane for that was in crisis? Would both parties react in the same mutual way? Answering these honestly is where we will consistently find our own personal heavens in relationships. We can’t build a sound and resilient house on top of a fragmentary foundation. We can have as many pie in the sky ideas about saving someone as we want and in being someone’s emotional solace and lifeboat. The day will come when we need them too, they’re not there and we slowly start to break. How can we expect to build something real with someone who continues to subtly, cyclically and semi-regularly break us down? Or more apt to the point, continues to break the relationship down little by little, consistently enough to never facilitate true relational health.

Cycling back around here… Secondly, (on the importance of relational truth) it’s as already mentioned in examples given above, important to tell the truth with complete authenticity in a tactful, sensitive and supportive way. If we want the truth, we have to give it just like giving respect to get it. The truth can hurt terribly but it’s nearly always better than not being truthful. We have an innate responsibility to ourselves, our partners and children if we have them to be honest in all the ways we can, in as many ways as we can. Everything tends to bloom and grow where integrity holds strong value. High trust societies thrive on honesty. The best worlds we can make here desperately need it consistently. The truth isn’t always nice or clear either. The truth lives in both, statistics and science but also in spirituality and personal autonomy. The truth isn’t always convenient or easy or easily understood. It can be messy and amorphous. I think the fact that we’re striving for it, is the crux of what ultimately matters.

My biggest personal blind spot from adopting radical honesty is assuming honesty of others for possibly, much longer than I should have. This is why once you start to adopt radical honesty, it’s important to pay attention to actions above all else as already mentioned. You become possibly at greater risk of being manipulated despite the better capacity of spotting lies at the same time. We often can only understand someone else from our own lenses and capabilities. If we’re not really capable of lying too badly, certainly not on significant feelings, we can’t understand how someone else that says they love us would do it so frequently. Along the same lines, and semi-related, when we’re a positive person and constantly try to see the good, we genuinely can sometimes see the good longer than we should. Again, vice versa, if we’re an overly negative person, we could be assuming the worst and not giving chances to people, again, friends or otherwise that genuinely might surprise us. And again, this is where honest self-analysis comes into play where we’re observing ourselves actively and frequently and therefore keeping our blind spots in careful check.

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This is ultimately a very rich topic that draws on psychology, philosophy, and spirituality all in one. In further summary outside of my own musings, here are a few of the major ideas that came out of this book…

Honesty with Others Builds Real Intimacy

The kind of lying that stands in the way of most relationships is withholding… keeping back information from someone we think would be affected by it. When we hide behind a false image, even the love we receive feels hollow because it’s directed at the mask, not the real person. Surface relationships are built on managed impressions, where we present edited versions of ourselves and receive edited versions of others in return. Genuine intimacy requires the risk of being truly seen. When we tell the truth about who we are, what we feel, and what we need, we give others the chance to actually know us rather than a comfortable fiction we’ve constructed. This vulnerability is the foundation of trust.

Without it, even long relationships can feel hollow… two people living alongside each other’s masks rather than each other’s souls. If you calculate and put on phony behavior to please others, they may love your behavior, but they cannot love you, because you have hidden your real existence behind artificial behavior. Genuine connection requires genuine disclosure. Honesty also creates accountability in relationships. When we can say “that hurt me” or “I was wrong, I’m more to blame here…” conflict becomes repair rather than accumulation. Relationships that tolerate raw honesty are far more durable than those built on avoidance. Repressing anger and bitterness is unhealthy as it builds resentment and fractures relationships over time.

I personally believe that authenticity is more often than not, stronger than love. It is the true measure of connection. I can love someone but not feel bound to them whereas honesty, vulnerability and authenticity is what actually binds us together.

Honesty with Ourselves Creates Depth in Character

Lying is ultimately a huge root of personal stress and suffering. Blanton argues that a lot of the stress we experience stems often enough not from our environment but from our own dishonesty, and that our tendency to deceive ourselves and others compounds our emotional burdens. This includes not just outright lies but withholding, omitting, and half-truths. Self-deception is subtler and harder to confront than lying to others. We tell ourselves stories about why we stayed, why we left, why we reacted the way we did and often those stories protect our ego rather than illuminate the truth. We make excuses instead of choosing to change and growth.

Carl Jung called this the shadow… the parts of ourselves we refuse to see. What we don’t acknowledge in ourselves doesn’t disappear. It shapes our behavior from the unconscious, driving patterns we can’t understand because we won’t look at them directly. Radical self-honesty means sitting with uncomfortable questions: What do I actually want? What am I afraid of? What have I done that I haven’t fully owned? What is my energy truly going to? This kind of honesty is not self-punishment, it’s self-knowledge. Self-knowledge is nearly always the beginning of genuine healthy change and also, in making our dreams come true. Dreams don’t have to be hugely material but rather, energetic. They can surround simply cultivating and calling in authentic and strong relationships. ‘Success’ starts to look entirely different when we’re in touch with the honesty our own soul offers.

Honesty as Spiritual Practice

Across traditions, honesty is treated not merely as an ethical virtue but as a spiritual one. Genuine truth-telling is an act of care, not cruelty. Honest reckoning with one’s inner life is considered essential to spiritual growth. The common thread across traditions is that dishonesty keeps us fragmented. We expend enormous energy maintaining false narratives about ourselves (and larger collective societies around us) managing how we appear and suppressing the facts we don’t want to face. That energy is then unavailable for growth, connection, or presence because it’s not based in something real.

The Connection Between Inner and Outer Honesty

Blanton identifies three layers: first, admitting what we’ve done… no matter how embarrassing; second, expressing emotions openly (“I’m angry,” “I’m afraid”); and third, aligning your entire life with what you feel and believe, accepting yourself fully and showing that real self to others. The connections between our inner and outer honesty are not separate. We tend to lie to others about what we haven’t yet admitted to ourselves. If we don’t know or won’t acknowledge what we truly feel, we can’t communicate it honestly. Conversely, the practice of honest speech often forces us into self-examination. When we become dedicated to truth, before we can say something true, we want to figure out and make absolutely sure what’s actually true for us. Through this practice, speaking truth and knowing truth grow together. This also encourages a consistently resilient and healthy feedback loop within our inner and outer worlds and by extension, all of our relationships.

Honesty and Morality

Blanton argues that some versions of moralism create a warped sense of right and wrong, disconnecting us from our emotions and experiences. Instead of navigating the far too often gray complexities of real life, we feel forced to seek absolutes. For as many situations in life there is a definitive right and wrong answer, there are many more where there is not a perfectly right answer. There is a particular kind of courage in honesty that recognizes the importance of the willingness to be wrong, to be uncertain, to be seen as you actually are rather than as you wish to appear. Ego thrives on image maintenance. Spiritual and emotional maturity involves loosening the grip of that need. Honest people tend to be less defensive, more curious about their own errors and more genuinely open to other opinions, to an extent and within reason. They have less ego to protect and therefore more freedom in the analytical playfulness of life as it plays out for each of us.

The paradox is that what feels like weakness/vulnerability… being honest, being known turns out to be where real strength lives. The person who can say “I don’t know,” “I was wrong,” or “this is what I actually feel” is far more grounded than the person who manages every impression. Honesty, in this sense, is not just ethically important. It’s the practice by which we become more fully ourselves and therefore, more fully alive. Only when we’re fully alive can we live each life to its fullest potential. The path of radical honesty requires courage, persistence, and emotional strength. We will all face discomfort, awkward conversations, and tough decisions but what lies on the other side is genuine freedom, real love, and authentic peace.

A note of caution… the book and idea itself has genuine critics. Some find the approach reckless, and Blanton’s workshops have been described by some participants as aggressive. The core insight, that honesty reduces stress and builds deeper connection I personally find incredibly valuable, but the “say everything always” application isn’t always ideal either. Honesty shouldn’t translate to insults or put downs. Speaking and acting in supposed honesty when angry doesn’t usually end up well either. In reality, I find true radical honesty requires emotional maturity, a willingness to be entirely and authentically personally accountable for our own faults as well and being devoted to growth. This includes the growth that comes from practicing how and when important truthful things should be said and expressed.

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