The anger you keep to yourself still gets delivered, usually as a forgotten promise.
Your partner makes a remark at dinner that stings, and you let it go. You haven’t lied. You may even have been kind: why start a fight over one sentence? Most of our moral training would call that good behavior. Brad Blanton, a psychotherapist, calls it the most dangerous lie there is. His word for it is withholding: keeping back information from someone you think would be affected by it. And his claim goes further. Lying in this sense, he says, is the major source of human stress.
How can saying nothing be worse than saying something false? Blanton’s answer is that the withheld thing doesn’t go away. It goes somewhere else.
Where the withheld anger goes
Take the sting from dinner. Blanton distinguishes three levels of truth: revealing the facts you’ve hidden, admitting what you think and feel right now, and finally exposing the act you’ve been performing. The dinner remark lives at the second level, which is where most people stall. They will admit they feel “upset” but not that they are angry. The distinction matters because anger expressed is a momentary event, but anger withheld becomes the permanent architecture of your personality.
You can see the architecture in how withheld anger leaks. You forget an agreement, criticize mildly, have an accident, say something hurtful “accidentally,” forget a name. Helplessness is another sign (“I can’t,” “It’s no use”), and so is perfectionism. When you find yourself trying and trying without results, Blanton suggests looking for whom you are trying to please, because you are probably mad at them. Withheld anger destroys relationships by sucking the aliveness out of them. Through carefulness and politeness, people choke themselves down to being bored, burdensome, stressed-out and miserable.
The suppression also can’t be selective. Affection is repressed along with the anger, so the person who swallows tonight’s remark, and every remark after it, ends up not hostile but flat. Blanton calls this deadness, a low-intensity form of suffering that comes from staying on guard against imagined greater dangers. It works, in the sense that it prevents the acute pain of exposure. The price is a life lived under anesthesia, and getting out costs exactly what deadness was built to avoid: it is only your willingness to feel worse that will allow you to feel better.
How children learn it
Nobody starts out withholding. Blanton traces the habit to the way we raise children inside the same jail of moralism we live in ourselves. A child forced, out of fear, to pretend he is better when seen than when unseen learns that suppression buys approval. When we train children to be moralists, we train them at the same time to be liars. Oppression masked as “concern” provokes in the child hatred, severing of communication, and withdrawal from those closest to him.
The adult who results keeps trying to improve. Instead of examining how he actually operates, “trying” followed by self-sabotage, he assumes he isn’t trying hard enough and redoubles both the effort and the resistance. In Blanton’s sharpest line on this, we really do get what we want, which is struggle rather than results. The struggle protects the status quo while looking like an attack on it. This is why the third level of truth, admitting that you built your act so as not to appear lost and that you are still lost and faking it, turns out to be the way out rather than a humiliation: Everyone who ever successfully made a change that worked first accepted themselves the way they were. They gave up the struggle to get better. Then, finally, they were free to change.
Honesty comes first
The usual picture of intimacy has the order reversed. Most people believe that once an honest and loving relationship is built, people can be honest with each other. This is backwards. Honesty is what allows the relationship to be built. You can’t choose to trust or love someone, so emphasizing trust and love mostly teaches people to pretend. Honesty, by contrast, can be chosen.
Back at the dinner table, the chain runs like this. When you reveal more, you have less to hide. With less to hide, you worry less about being found out, and so you can pay better attention to the person across from you. The dishonest arrangement runs the other way: every withheld remark has to be maintained, and the maintenance compounds. Honesty in this fuller sense is alignment: the story you tell matches the life you are living, so there is nothing to keep track of. Truth is simple. It does not need to be remembered. The honest person’s burden is heavier at first but does not grow. The weight worth carrying is the one that frees the soul, not the one that binds it.
Is this just cruelty with a license?
The strongest objection is that radical honesty is cruelty dressed up as authenticity, a philosophy for people who enjoy saying the hurtful thing. Blanton’s reply is that the cruelty is already happening, as the slow suffocation of every relationship where the truth is managed instead of expressed. But his scope is narrower than the slogan suggests. He says to stop withholding from the people you are in relationship with, not to tear down every social fiction. Some fictions are load-bearing, and honesty without judgment about which walls hold up the roof is just demolition.
Kevin Kelly’s rule of thumb holds the tension: always be radically honest, but use your honesty as a gift, not as a weapon. The beginner practices honesty to break out of the jail. The mature practitioner uses it to reach someone. Blanton would add that the first stage is unavoidable, because coming alive always feels like dying: you are giving up the self you organized your life around. Which leaves the dinner table. The remark you let go last month is probably still in the room, showing up as forgotten errands and a certain flatness. Saying it now would feel worse. Blanton’s bet is that feeling worse is the only door out.
References:
- Brad Blanton, Radical Honesty: How to Transform Your Life by Telling the Truth