Full Transcript for S0107: Brutal... Honesty?

human being in the world who's who's going to teach me something, you know? Those are my thoughts on that. Any anything else about about how dumb kids are? Mak: I think we've said all there is to say. Linds: Okay, so that is the paragraph basically helping us understand what Brad thinks about how the being becomes dominated by the mind. The book then jumps into chapter four, which is the chapter where Brad describes the levels of telling the truth. The beginning of the chapter is talking about a client of his and all of the ways in which she was making herself unhappy in her life. And so he uses this client as an example of the ways to go through the different levels of telling the truth to transform your life. Mak: Level one. The first level of telling the truth is to reveal the facts. It is a matter of clearing up the lies from the past and false presentation of self being maintained through withholding. We all lie casually and habitually and are largely unconscious about it. We all learned to lie innocently as we learned the ways of being grown up and how to impress our friends. We have to develop and organize the lies we pretend to be. Am I, is that right? We have to develop and organize the lies we pretend to be, okay. It's not our fault that we have trouble reading this stuff because it's so weird. Yeah. I remember trying to transcribe what Brad said in the Get Over Shit and Be Happy course. And once I actually wrote out what he would say with his mouth, it was nonsense. It was so incoherent. Linds: Right. Mak: You got the sense of what he was saying by listening to him. You were able to stitch it together. But if you just read the words, it's like listening to Trump. ⁓ Linds: That doesn't surprise me, actually. Yeah, and you know, it makes me think of the audiobook. He read this out loud, and I wonder if when he was reading it, if he was getting caught up in the same ways that we were. Like, wait, what was I trying to say here? I've been told by many, many people that it's pretty hilarious to listen to because you can just, he's in his yurt, you can like hear... Yeah, like his mouth noises and like a fan in the background. Mak: The bird's chirping. ⁓ god. Linds: So yeah, there's that. But anyway, continue if you're able. Mak: ⁓ God, okay. Where am I starting from? I'm gonna start from the top. We all lie casually and habitually and are largely unconscious about it. We all learn to lie innocently as we learn the ways of being grown up and how to impress our friends. We have to develop and organize the lies we pretend to be and complete that job and feel okay about it before we can give up that identity. Linds: And then you can keep going. Mak: All right. We have to go through adolescence and develop an identity and answer the question, who am I? Having established that identity, we have to give up our attachment to it and remember who we are at the beginning, before we developed that identity. Who we still are, the being from back in the womb, and who we have come to know ourselves as, the identity we have developed, have to be integrated. Then when we relate to other people, We can come from a consciousness of our whole beings and have a personality rather than be had by our personality. The first level of this process is revealing deceptions and withholds. You have been maintaining an image in the eyes of others to sell yourself to them in a certain way. Now you have to untell those lies. If you never have told your mother and father that you stole the car at 1 a.m. to visit your boyfriend when you were 16, go tell them. and face the consequences even if you're 40. It must be done. Linds: It must be done. So, any immediate thoughts about level one, revealing the facts? Mak: Well, first of all, I like recognizing that you are not the personality that you have developed, but that it is a part of you. And as part of the developmental process, there's something about integrating the being and the personality and kind of being able to, like he says here, have a personality rather than being had by your personality. Linds: Can you recall, like, after you read this book or after you did your first workshop, did you go do any of this? Like, how seriously did you take this go tell your parents about the bad things that you did when you were young and... Mak: To the letter, I followed this. I made a whole list, was shitting in my boots, ⁓ and I sat the whole family down ⁓ at Christmas or whatever when we got together, and I read that list line by line, all of the horrible things that I did. Linds: I would probably say you did it wrong then since you read from a list. Were you experiencing your experience during this, Mack? Were you feeling your sensations in your boots? Mak: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I would say there was a lot of good that came out of that. And I also think that it was really inappropriate to share some of that stuff. I mean, especially like sexual things. There's no need for me to share that kind of stuff with my folks or my sisters. You know, the... Linds: How did they react? Mak: They were surprisingly accepting and not so weirded out by all of that stuff. I even feel like they got kind of bored after a while, like, you know, when is this gonna be done? Get it, you know? Yeah. Linds: How long do you suppose the conversation was? Mak: Maybe an hour, I don't know. Maybe hour and half max. There was only really one thing, I did one bad thing, you know, that I told them about that mom and dad were like, ⁓ my God, I just can't believe you did that thing. Yeah. And for me, that was like, really? I like told you about all of this other stuff. And you're like, yeah, okay, whatever. Me too. Like we get it. We also had funny weird stuff. There was that one thing I was like, huh, that's the thing that like really disappointed you. Linds: Yeah. Now I want to know just myself, if not for the podcast, what that thing was. Mak: I'll tell you but I don't want this in the podcast. Linds: I

got caught for chapstick. And they called my mom from the security office at the Farmore shop that I was at. And I think I had a car, so I was 16. And I bought other things. I didn't need to be stealing that chapstick. don't really know what was going on for me. That's why I chose to do that at the time. But my mom either was in real denial about it or believed my story. Mak: ⁓ my god. Linds: I did not go back and talk with her about that as an adult to tell her like I actually was intending to steal that chapstick. Anyway, at the eight-day radical honesty workshops, one of the things that we do is tell our life stories. I think we have, depending on the size of the group, about 45 minutes to do that. And it's recorded so that we can watch it later ourselves so that we can take that home with us and show it to the people in our lives. And so I think of this as basically the same step. Part of the intention is to take that and show it to the people in your life, revealing the facts, level one. I also did not do that. I didn't take it on to the letter like you, even though I like took all of this pretty seriously. Like I think even then I was like, well, yeah, I'm going to tell my mom a lot of stuff. I'm telling like my friends and the people who are currently like in my daily life. stuff about myself. I'm like doing that in a way that feels challenging and edgy for me. And I'm not going to go tell my dad who I don't even talk with anymore, like all of this stuff. I'm not going to like sit my brother down, you know, whatever. could. It's not like I think it's wrong or bad to do it in plenty of cases. But in whatever ways I like justified back then like, I'm not going to totally take this on the way that Brad is suggesting. And I'm still going to be really like open and honest in my life. And I'm still going to like challenge myself to reveal more than I, you know, I'm comfortable with. And still, I didn't take this on. I don't think I showed that video to one person. Do you remember using the video in that? Mak: I never got mine. It was lost somehow. Which is why I think I ended up doing that in person. Got it. Yeah. But I would say, think that you were much wiser, I would say, in that regard. That you weren't so militant and hardcore as I was. Like taking everything that was in the book or everything that Brad said kind of to the level. I was very extreme in my approach. And so now I like... to caution others against doing that sort of thing. I don't think it's at all appropriate to share all of that stuff. ⁓ There are right relationships that need to be considered. What I share with you is gonna be different from what I share with my mom, different from what I share with my best friend. Those are all different relationships. It's right, it's appropriate, it's healthy to share different things in different ways to different people. Linds: Indeed. Any other thoughts about revealing the facts? Mak: Well, yeah as a general rule like if you're speaking to people that are very withheld and very not Expressive of who they are and they hide so many aspects of themselves then yeah, this is great advice Yeah, open up take some risks share more than you normally do Yeah, but not share everything to everyone all the time in minute detail Yeah, that's just far too extreme and there's why what's the what's the point doesn't? Just because, you know, just because I want to be radical or extreme in some way. Linds: I'm going to send you... Mak: Level two, honesty about current thoughts and feelings. The second level of telling the truth is to begin to speak forth the emotional truth and the truth of one's judgments to reveal one's constantly active secret mind. You begin here the practice of admitting how you feel when you feel it, speaking your secret judgments of others out loud and constantly revealing your own petty and condescending ways. Linds: And I'm going to add to that a little more. The second level of telling the truth, revealing the emotional and judgmental truth on a moment to moment basis is damn hard. And it's work that never ends. Therapy ends, but this work never ends. Therapy ends when the person takes over the task of telling the truth, steady as she goes, as her own task and as her own alternative to manipulation. Manipulating and strategizing and having secret plans and conspiracies is one way to operate in the world to create the appearance of a successful life. The appearance of success is a performance in which you are cut off from contact with the audience except through your role. A successful life in contrast is one in which you can share with others openly as your life happens without all that rehearsal. The contrast is between performance and sharing. I'll just leave it at that. He does a lot of talking about how Pretending, strategizing, manipulating, all of these things are never going to lead to getting what we actually want to get. And then, you know, we feel the ways we feel when what we're doing is manipulating and strategizing all of the time instead of simply just revealing what's so for us. And I do really like that, ⁓ being able to live without all the rehearsal. I know that like so many of us in our lives think about how we are going to conduct ourselves in something that is coming up in the near future. And then after something happens, we often are really stuck in our minds about how that thing went. run through the conversation where we are like redoing the conversation with somebody after the fact because we were pissed but we didn't say how pissed, you whatever it might be. And in just a real simple way, I like this. Going ahead and being the emotional self that you are from moment to moment, being real about what's happening for us. Mak: I think it's a great message for people who lose touch with who they are behind the mask and need a little bit of encouragement to drop the pretending, be a little bit more real, be a little bit more messy and a

little bit less rehearsed. Linds: And as we've talked about in other episodes, the way that we took that on in our relationship when we were together was over the top, almost constant. Mak: And not just us, that was actually how Brad instructed us to do. So I would bring in some nuance here when he says, speaking your secret judgments of others out loud. Some secret judgments of others, sure, fine. About people's behaviors that you don't like. Great, share that. don't like the way that you talk to me. I don't like that you broke your agreement with me. Yes. Sharing your secret judgments about... who people are rather than what they have done, that is very, that's some very different territory. Then you get people justifying, sharing stuff like, think that you're fat. I think that you're ugly. I think that you're stupid. think, you know, none of that needs to be shared in most situations. Most of the time, the way that I have seen that, it doesn't help you to get over those judgments. It helps to say that kind of stuff out loud to somebody, but in the right setting. Like to a therapist or to somebody who's going to point out that this is a you problem. It's not actually a problem about the person that you think is ugly or stupid or fat. They are who they are. Your own petty judgment, you have not so great of a chance in getting over that stuff by sharing that directly with the person. There's a high risk of hurting the other person's feelings, of triggering like a backlash of shame, you know, because you say this and it's just getting, you're reinforcing this kind of social dynamic. Like those kinds of thoughts don't even come from you to begin with. They aren't yours. Those are imposed on all of us by our social context. So we're just regurgitating them. Linds: Right. And I do imagine that like some of Brad's take would be that's part of the point of getting it out of your system. That's part of the point of saying it to the person you're thinking it about is so that you can get over it. You know, these might not even be your thoughts or your ideas originally, whatever. So go and share it to the person so that, you know, use that person. They're giving you a gift sitting there listening to you telling that you, you know, judge the size of their body or whatever it might be. Do it so you can get over it so you can be with that person. Mak: I bought into that notion, you know, and it doesn't work in general. It doesn't play out that way. It turns into the people who are already the social punching bags because they're overweight or because they're, you know, not as smart or because they look a certain way or because they're not white or whatever it is, because they don't live up to, you know, the social norm that has been propped up. All you're doing by sharing that stuff is reinforcing the same thing that they've heard their entire lives and reinforcing it in your own mind. Linds: couple things that I want to say about this. The way that some people have taken on this step, which is honesty about current thoughts and feelings. So basically like revealing what you're thinking in the moment. This is why so many people think of radical honesty as brutal honesty. Because a lot of people who take this on are like, ⁓ great, this is permission for me to say just everything you're saying, to just dump my judgments on people and walk away like, hey, I'm just revealing what's so for me. I'm just revealing the I also know that we have personal experience with this kind of thing. When we were involved with each other romantically, there was a period of time that I was pretty obsessed with how I thought of your physical attraction to me. And over time and a couple of times, pretty much just insisted, demanded that you were honest with me about your judgments about my appearance. And so we did that. Like we went there. You didn't want to initially. And you did very begrudgingly, think, you know, at one point and kind of then just like spit out like a list of judgments about my appearance. And yeah, holy shit, it didn't do us any good. know, like, in fact, the opposite, like, I think we both suffered a lot over that after that. And it wasn't something that I got over in the time that you and I were still together, you know, there was just sort of no going back. from that. And in fact, think I became, I mean, not I think, I know, I became a lot more self-conscious around you. I didn't want to like undress around you. I didn't want you to like look at me and you know, like there was just, I try to imagine situations in which that would have worked out better for anybody. I think like, I don't know what maybe that says about my self-esteem or whatever it might be, but like I can't really imagine. somebody hearing all of those things and just being like, great, you got it off your chest. Now we can just like get past it and let it go. And I don't think it had that effect for you either. It wasn't just like, I'm going to say these things out loud for you so I can get over them and they just go away. I obsessed over it. I continued to bring it up. Mak: the contrary, it did zero good and it did a bit of harm, both to you and to me and to our relationship. Like I said before, the result for me was like, fuck, shame. I'm a fucking asshole now. Not only do I think these things, but I actually said them out loud and they did even more harm and she will never recover from that and that's going to always be part of our relationship now. Yeah. Go ahead. Linds: I was going to say it is interesting to me though, because I still have some faith in some way that there is some way that a conversation about physical attraction with somebody. So our relationship was one particular thing. I think we came to realize that we wanted very different things. And I think that had an impact on how that conversation landed for me and that kind of thing. But I still like to think that there is some way that two people who really

want to be together, they're like, deeply in love with each other, have a lot of care for each other, intend to be together into the future. But there are some attraction issues and like one of the people is kind of hung up on some particular things about how the other person looks, but they're like very committed to, want to work through everything and we are partners in life, we want to be together. That maybe in that sort of configuration, it can happen. Mak: Yeah, I completely agree. It depends on the context. It depends on the personalities involved. It depends on the attachment that the person has to those judgments. You see it all the time in like in movies where you have some couple and they say like shitty things to each other. You're old fat saggy ass and stuff. They both laugh and they love each other and they don't care. You know what I mean? That's their particular relationship. They can... say those kinds of things to each other and it doesn't do any harm, right? They're not attached to whatever. But in a situation where somebody like, I cared so much what you thought about me and about particular kinds of things and hearing you confirm that you didn't feel towards me the way that I wanted you to was very painful. You could say, well, get over yourself, okay? But easier said than done. Linds: Yeah. Mak: And at some point in my life, in a certain situation, ⁓ in a certain relationship, yeah, maybe I get over those things. But just telling me that I should get over those things right now and that I shouldn't care what this person that I'm deeply attached to thinks about me in this very particular way that I'm really insecure about, it doesn't help me to pummel me over the head with that thing and say like, ⁓ you're sensitive about this. you don't like when I touch you here? Let me go here and touch you here harder so that you get over it. Like, how does a wound heal when you continue poking it with your dirty finger? Linds: Yeah, brutal honesty. It's so easy for me to think about how that was tough for me to be on the receiving end, but then thinking about your position and I like immediately turned it around on you as you should be ashamed. I was brutally honest right back to you about just what a fucking typical dude you were, you know, just like all my judgments and that was on top of a bunch of other difficulties we were already having. Yeah, I want to encourage people to take healthy risks when it comes to communication in your relationships and when it comes to sharing yourself and when it comes to creating intimacy in ways that are real. And also just to slow down and check in on what's your motivation here? What are you doing? How is the other person doing right now when you wanna have this conversation with them? I don't know, are so many different ways that conversations like that can happen that they could work out in a healthy and connected way that doesn't have to be so fucking painful. Mak: Yeah, and you and I had some friends who were a lot more reasonable about their radical honesty practice and their romantic relationship. I remember them telling us, like, yeah, we get together every Wednesday and we have our, you know, radical honesty session where we share the things that we... And I remember you and I being like, what? Once a week? Yeah. an... What? Linds: Yeah, how are you possibly being honest enough with each other if that's all you're doing? Mak: Because for us it was like every moment. We almost didn't have a break. Linds: Yeah, I actually just had like a physical reaction to that. You saying like every moment or whatever I felt this sort of like shutter in my chest like, ⁓ god, that was hard. That was a hard way we were choosing to live and do our relationship. my god, that was intense. Holy shit. Mak: Little buddies. But coming back to this thing, like, yes, share the ways that you are phony when it would be beneficial for you to do so, to give up the act. Share when you don't like people crossing your boundaries or doing things that upset you. But sharing your petty judgments about who they are, how they look, you know, there's not much benefit to be gotten out of that. And if you feel like desperate, like you have to share that kind of stuff in order to get over it, and you need to just know what that's like to hear yourself say those things out loud, do that with a therapist. That's the safe container for that kind of thing. Linds: Yeah. And particularly like give yourself that relief of being able to get that stuff off your chest with someone like a therapist. If you are having like recurring or obsessive thoughts in that direction about someone in your life who's important to you, something you need to work on there. know, like, sure, depending on what your relationship looks like and how that other person feels about it, you could share some of that with them in a way of like taking a step back. I have these recurring thoughts about yada yada, whatever. Absolutely, see if you can find some other sort of dedicated listener to support you through that. Because I'm not saying deny the things that you think, deny the thoughts that you have, pretend they're not there, whatever. If you're kind of torturing yourself with something like that, yeah, see if you can get it off your chest in some way that isn't going to be being brutal with somebody else and just dropping your shit on them to deal with for you. Mak: Absolutely. I think that the systemic perspective is so important in this regard, is because none of that stuff comes from us naturally. Right. All of that stuff, the origin is received ideas from the outside world that we're just regurgitating. And we end up like taking on so much shame for those ideas when it doesn't even really belong to us, because they didn't generate within us. They didn't start with us. Linds: All. Mak: We're kind of like a vessel for them. I mean, of course, we have some responsibility for attaching to those ideas and

propagating those, but not for like having them in there in the first place. Linds: is. Agreed. Mak: Level 3, exposing the fiction. This is the third level of telling the truth, the place where telling the truth and living the truth become the same. The third level of telling the truth occurs when you admit that who you are is not who you have been pretending to be. What you have been selling other people on and selling yourself on is not who you are. You don't really know who you are. You confess disillusionment with beliefs you used to stand for and various sales pitches you did and still do for your act. The process of demythologizing yourself is begun by bragging about all the things which, in your false modesty, you were pretending you didn't care about. You have to go through your vanity and the suffering associated with it. You have to show off and be embarrassed, both of which are egotism, and you can't skip, dodge, or get around this step. You have to praise yourself openly rather than manipulate to suck praise. You have to acknowledge being a secret hero to yourself and confess the putrid vanity of all of your usual phony self denigration. You have to admit what a worm and liar you are and go through the feelings that come up when you tell the truth about all of this. Linds: Indeed. Any thoughts so far? About what a worm you are? Mak: Yeah, I mean, it's kind of fun. Like if it's, if the intent is for this to be a little bit tongue in cheek, then I like it. Like it's, I find ⁓ it kind of fun in like a, in like a masochistic way. Linds: Yeah, I don't even have much more to say about it. who you are becomes more a description centered in the here and now and less of a story about your life. When you admit your act, you also admit your ignorance. You confess that you developed your act in order not to appear lost and in hopes of finding your way by faking it. Then you admit that you are lost and faking it most of the time these days as well, not just in the far removed past. Before you acted smart, now you acknowledge ignorance like it is gold. Nobody I know stays at level three constantly. Continuous waves of freedom and new egotism, one liberation after another, keep just getting you back to the same place. But if you are in a community which supports you in telling the truth, you get to level three more often. Level three is sharing with other people in ways that occasionally allow you to overcome your own egotism, including the egotism that comes from thinking you are great for telling the truth. Mak: As with anything easier said than done, if I would love for Brad to take this to heart before you acted smart, now you acknowledge ignorance like it is gold. Linds: ⁓ I don't know. I think about how I took this on a lot at the beginning of my facilitation. I had to do a good amount of admitting to the group, I'm really nervous. I don't know if I'm going to do a good job at this. I don't know if I'm going to remember the things that I'm supposed to be here facilitating. And then also revealing things like, and also I think I'm pretty good at this. And even though I'm scared, I think I can still do a good job. you know, like, I'm there as the facilitator and I'm saying these things to the group. That is a huge part of how I then became comfortable facilitating the work and felt more confident doing it. And I think of it as like a very, very necessary step in getting to the point of feeling more comfortable being a facilitator. I know that you and I have talked a lot more now about what's appropriate and what's ethical when it comes to like, what are we sharing with the participants who we are facilitating for? And so I guess I wonder if you have any take on me revealing to participants, ⁓ I feel a little out of my depth here or stuff that's more emotional. Like I'm kind of doing this for myself. I need to get off my chest how nervous I am. I need to talk about the ways that I think I'm inadequate so that I feel like I can move forward. But know, like that's going outside of what my prescribed role was supposed to be in that moment. Mak: ⁓ I do think that in general, if you're doing any amount of using the group to do your emotional processing is kind of stepping outside of your role. They're not there to help you process what's going on for you in the moment. It's the other way around. So when you inverse those roles, I'm using you all now in order to emotionally process my own stuff for my own growth. You know, so I step into this role as a leader, which you're all paying me to do. That's a bit backwards, right? Linds: Yep. Mak: I think that ⁓ there's something kind of beautiful in teeny tiny doses when you do that and you kind of peel back the curtain and let people see that, ⁓ yeah, there's a human behind there. Okay, good, I know that, but now let's close the curtain again. I'm paying them for the role, actually. I'm paying them for their persona in this case, not to be here as a participant who is revealing their own internal process. So there's a... Those are my thoughts as a general rule of thumb. admitting that you're phony in these various sorts of ways, like all of that stuff is good, again, in small doses. And when you're not doing it as a way to emotionally process that in the moment, but as in some service to the participants at your workshop, when you're saying like, by the way, I'm not telling you from a place on high, I'm with you too, like I struggle in these same kind of ways. I also pretend blah, blah, I'm not better than you. And I'm not going to step into the participant role and show you my process of any of those things, but I will admit that I struggle with these things as well. Linds: I think we're pretty much in alignment with that. do, it's been years now since that's the way I've approached the beginning of a workshop, get those things off my chest when I'm first beginning with a co-facilitator, of course. And I think I still pretty much am accepting

of the way that I did do it when I did and do think that it was like brief glimpses of that and not me needing to go through a whole process with it or be coached by my co-facilitator or anything like that. And yeah, I don't know, it's tricky. Like I'd love to be able to look back on that and see how that would occur for me now. Cause I do think there's definitely a way I was using the group to get over or process some of my own shit. And I want to walk that line in a way that is having a lot of care. And also, I don't know if it can be helpful, you know, to be. at least in moments and glimpses, an example of what it can look like from time to time without it crossing the line into, I'm dumping my emotions on you and wanting you to sit here and support me while I'm processing. I do think there's value in people being able to see what it looks like in real time, a glimpse of it at least from us. Mak: I think that it's very delicate, actually. There's always the danger then of participants developing a kind of emotional attachment to you because they feel like they know you rather than just seeing you as the role. It's very useful to have somebody playing that role that they don't have to, that you as a participant don't have to think, ⁓ I have to worry about this person's experience right now, because then you're taking them out of their own experience. So I think generally, Ethically speaking, the guiding principle is whatever is happening, is it happening in the service of the participant or the client and not in the service of the coach or therapist or workshop. Linds: Yeah. Which all makes a lot of sense. And because we are talking about radical honesty and we are going through Brad Blanton's book, it's kind of impossible for me not to think how he would respond to any of this that we're talking about. Mak: He would completely disagree with everything I just said. Linds: Yeah, yeah. And we will get into a little further in the book a lot of how he talks specifically about himself as a therapist not wanting to maintain that role that he very much thought was of service to his clients. You know, I am doing this for the good of my clients. helping us both by not just maintaining these roles that we think we're supposed to be in when I'm the therapist and you're the client. And that's who taught us and that's the place we were coming from. Mak: ⁓ It's completely different paradigm and it sounds very seductive to people who don't know any better. You and I didn't know any better. We didn't have experience with psychotherapy. We didn't have any training in psychotherapy or even in coaching at the time. So that whole thing about, and we considered ourselves, yeah, we're adults and we're independent and we were critical thinkers. We can take care of ourselves. You don't need to treat me with kid gloves or like hold anything back from me. And I think that you and I, and a lot of people who get into radical honesty, are also a bit masochistic in the fact that we want to see ourselves as tough and we're kind of hostile towards certain softer aspects of ourselves that we wanted to really keep at bay and pretend we're not there. Linds: Challenge me. I want to be challenged. I want to take on things that are intense and risky and yeah. There's a little more to read. Mak: Owning up to the fact that there is no virtue in owning up is the continuation of the third level of telling the truth. Linds: Just have to read it three times. Mak: What you end up with if you drop your new pride is innocence, much like you had before you developed an identity. What you have then is an identity without much attachment to it. There is less to learn at the third level of telling the truth, but it takes more work and practice than other levels. Linds: You know, hearing you read it makes me think of how seriously we took on all of this telling the truth all the time, you know, and revealing, revealing, revealing, like moment to moment. And I think we did feel, I did feel pretty dang cool. Like we are being so radical. This is a revolutionary way of being. Which I, yeah. there are bits of that that I still buy into or believe in some ways. And still, I think this is place where we were falling short with level three. I think we had a ton of pride and definitely weren't revealing as we're exposing ourselves in these ways to different people. Part of my motivation right now in doing this is that I feel pretty fucking cool. And I feel pretty edgy and you're going to think I'm edgy and cool and yada yada. We're, think I was doing a lot of failing at level three in the way that Brad described it here. Mak: And I would say that there was an entire culture built around that kind of badassery, know, that was baked into the cultural norm there. Acting and feeling tough was valued and reinforced. like, of course that's something we were going to miss. Linds: Yeah. And so after describing these three levels of telling the truth, according to Brad, he goes on to write a section in the book called the truth about why I'm writing this book. And I think I mentioned it too, during our last recording. There are like three ish, three or four pages where he goes on and on about all of his motivations for writing the book in a way that I'm sure he thinks of as like, I'm going through, you know, these steps. I'm being honest about wanting to be famous. I'm being honest about wanting to be rich, wanting my legacy to carry on, wanting people to know my name, wanting radical honesty to be a household phrase in a way that I think a lot of people would think of as really radical, in a way that most authors aren't doing in their books. Here's why I'm writing this book here, all the ways I want to be perceived. Mak: Right. And if you had somebody who is writing this book who doesn't do that step, what would you think then? So once again, just like he says in here, there's no virtue in doing it the way that he does it in the book. It's to be

expected. Linds: Yeah. What would keep me trapped would be withholding fantasy on the basis of fantasy. Like if I didn't tell you the truth about my delusions of grandeur, so you wouldn't think I was an asshole and not buy my book. But I also know that if you are looking for a book that wasn't written by an asshole, you've got a long search ahead of you. Every asshole who writes a book is a neurotic megalomaniac just like me. Most other writers have enough sense to withhold fantasies on the basis of another fantasy that it is politic to withhold fantasies. Most writers are trapped in their minds. You are politic in this way when you imagine yourself a good person because you don't tell your wife about jacking off while thinking about her sister, or don't tell your boss about your secret plans, or don't tell your mother you pissed in the chicken soup when you were 12. This is being so lost in illusion you can't possibly ever reach young adulthood. Tell your wife the truth about your fantasies about everyone else, including her sister and all those animals and things too. Tell your boss about your plans, your mistakes and all that marijuana you smoked. And for God's sake, tell your mother about the soup. If the truth is told, you'll feel relieved because you have been anxious in some vague way for so long, you forgot where it came from." And then he talks about depression and yada yada for a couple of pages. ⁓ Mak: Don't listen to this guy, Jesus Christ. Linds: Learning to balance consciously the daydreaming and living requires a clear distinction between lying and the truth. What clears the space for the distinction is getting to where you don't care what anyone knows about you. Fuck them if they can't take a joke. When you don't care what anyone knows about you, your clients, your participants in your workshops. Mak: It's, you know, when I first read the book, the thing that terrified me was that, yeah, I could be extremely honest in this way and share everything with everybody all the time and not give a damn what anybody thinks. I'll probably end up jobless and on the street. Linds: Or living in a yurt in a field in Virginia. Mak: Bingo. Consider the source. Brad, in a certain kind of way, he did live up to his own philosophy of, I'm gonna do my own thing, fuck them if they can't take a joke. And he continually shot himself in the foot by adhering too strictly to that principle. He probably avoided a lot of financial opportunities that he could have taken if he hadn't been so rigid about doing things his way and been more open to collaboration and stuff. Linds: Yes. Mak: And I think that he took that as a virtue, like, well, now I'm going to do it my way. But there's no real virtue in that, assuming that just because an idea originated in me, it must be best to hell with everybody else. Linds: I do have curiosity about this at this point in his life when he's around 85 years old and I assume still living on his own in his year in Virginia. Would he say, I still stand by everything I said, I still stand by how I did everything. To me, I have lived a successful life. The state of my life right now is as I want it to be. I did the things the way I wanted to do them and this is success for me. I've achieved what I wanted. Mak: He might say those things and I know that he has that he has told many of us about reluctantly or admitted to I guess I don't know. It's probably not be sharing this dirt or whatever but it's ugly stuff and like regardless of what he says that's not like something that I would stand behind and say that like Yeah, this is what most people would consider to be a healthy, good, virtuous kind of life. Linds: But he's free. He's free from the jail of his mind. Mak: I don't know. Yeah, yeah. But that whole shit, remember that shit with the guy who's like 50 or something by now? Who is the son of the... patient that he had sex with? That he denied, not my son, not my son, until he was court ordered to do a DNA test. And of course he claims it like, yeah, I was always willing to do it. But the actual son said... and you didn't do any back payments. My whole fucking life, you denied me, you didn't pay child support. And he should have been. Linds: Okay, yeah. Okay, God, I did not know these things. You did? ⁓ my. Mak: You did, you were on the email chain. Linds: Did I read or respond to any of that? Mak: You should go back and read it. It's horrifying. And the way that all of the trainers respond to him on that thread... Linds: Holy smoke. Wait, were trainers responding to him directly? Okay. But it wasn't like a bunch of people were dumping on their opinions on him about... Okay. He had sex with a patient like... Mak: No, No, no, no. No, ⁓ I don't know if it was. Linds: Holy shit, okay. I don't know if I somehow like blocked this out. I don't know, but that sounds shocking to me. Yeesh. All right. So ⁓ after describing the three levels of telling the truth, he then goes into a section called, Who Do You Think You Are? The purpose of telling the truth at all levels is to gain the power to use our minds as tools rather than as machines for the defense of who we think we ought to have other people think we are. Does that make sense? I'm feeling like kind of, I feel a lot in my body right now from what we were just talking about. ⁓ God, that makes me sick. Trying to take anything seriously. that he's written about how people should be in the world after just talking about that is sickening. I just literally feel sick right now. Didn't somebody more recently, years after I've been out of the picture, maybe even when Radical Honesty called for people to tell us if there's anything that happened free with Brad. Mak: was ****. I had a couple of conversations with him. This was back in the late 80s, early 90s. He said that Brad smoked pot with him in his office and gave him the key to have sex with his secretary in his office at a party that Brad threw. Linds: Yeah, I think

that's what I'm thinking of. If I did know that other story, it completely left my mind because that just like struck me as like a completely new learning. Mak: It felt new to me as well when I revisited it. was like, what? This is something that I saw before, but it registered in a very different way. Linds: Yeah. And it all, like, there's a way I feel shocked right now and also like it actually is not surprising based on everything else. Yeah. And so then this next part I want to read about his motivation for writing the book. He says, you see all that I just said about myself is true. All of what I just said about myself is also a joke. All of what I just said about myself is just a memory kept alive for a few seconds again, so I can feel consistent about who I think I am. So I get what he's saying here about the identity stuff and like how we can benefit from like not continually identifying ourselves in the same way throughout our lives and instead like being this moment to moment electric being whatever. And also like when a therapist is saying this kind of thing and when this is the person who's facilitating your workshops where you're like exposing yourself and being really vulnerable. I pretend on the one hand to be an authority. and on the other to have no authority. Both claims are true. And who I am right now doesn't have much to do with the evaluations and judgments that make up the role of authority or the role of authority who simultaneously claims no authority. The value of acknowledging these meaningless poses is that the limitations they impose on my way of being are lifted. yeah, cool, great in some ways for some people not holding a role of major authority in workshops. Like this feels like particularly perfect to be reading right now with what we're just talking about. Mak: You can see how this whole paradigm of like, well, I'm not actually an authority. Like you believing that I'm some authority on something is your thing to get over and it's not my responsibility. Linds: Right, and really releasing ourselves from these roles is more beneficial than anything else we could be doing as therapists and clients. Mak: That's so insidious. Sure, if someone does not see you as an authority or grows out of that on their own, good for them. But you pretending that you don't have authority when the entire social context and everything that they are in, like positions them in that way. You pretending that that doesn't exist and that you have no responsibility is immoral, unethical, irresponsible. It's a recipe for harm. It gives you license to do all manner of bad stuff and to not take any responsibility or accountability for that. Linds: Yeah. And I mean, in some cases to truly believe that there is no harm being caused. It does bring me back to what we talked about in one of the other episodes of like, did he intentionally set this up so that he could do these things he wanted to do, know, give himself license and be given license by

others around him? Or did he create this thing that he believes in and really believe that there's no harm cause because there couldn't be, you know, like he's responsible for himself. The other adult is responsible for for theirself. Like. And in terms of like the result, it doesn't matter, you know, you know, we we started this episode talking about the mind and how the being becomes dominated by the mind. And what we talked about in the last episode, don't just stuff about like moralism and principles and yada yada and like it being so much more creative and good and cool to just be this moment to moment person experiencing what you're experiencing and not be attached to these principles and ideas and yada yada. Mak: Pretty ironic, right? Linds: Yeah, totally. So yeah, drop all your bullshit, all the bullshit so that you can have sex with your clients and so that you can smoke weed with them in the office and Mak: Harm is bullshit. It's just a matter of opinion. It's just sensations in the body, and those are temporary. Whether it's conscious or not, the entire system is designed to be free of any kind of responsibility for one's own actions. I'm repeating someone else's phrase here, which is why it has been called the white boy privileged package. Linds: It brings me back around to what I said in my own words during one of these recordings. I haven't thought of this as a cult because the way I related to it to me in my mind didn't occur for me as a cult-like way. I didn't have that experience, you know, and so many people can say the same kind of thing about anything that's harmful but wasn't particularly harmful to them, which I'm not saying it wasn't harmful to me because it was harmful to me in different ways. I think I have taken it on as not as harmful as other people have. Okay, cool, but like for all of these other people, all of these other things were happening. There was harm happening. There were ways that it was cult-like, that it was like participating in a cult for different people. And that's totally legit, you know? Like I didn't have that experience, so that's not what it was. Mak: Bullshit. Your subjective experience of something doesn't define it as a whole at the systemic level. Linds: That right. Yeah, totally. And so, again, like talking about roles and things, I don't know how much transparency I should be having about like, yeah, it's interesting to me to be going through this process of making these recordings with you and to kind of see in real time what comes up for me, know, skating like in a pretty like... honest way whatever I did during one of the first recordings, like, ⁓ it didn't occur for me that much as a cult. Yeah, it's interesting to like kind of come around to more of an aha moment about, ⁓ yeah, and you know, that was my experience, other people had their experience. And is it cool to be sharing that? How will we edit this? How? Mak: Yeah. we just had a lot of conversation around as a facilitator, how much of your own process is it ethical to share? And I think that any time that you and I are dissecting our subjective experience with radical honesty as an organization, as a thing, we're always going to bump up into that question. How much of this is appropriate or ethical to share ⁓ with that we might be working with? Linds: ⁓ Mak: at some point. Linds: Yeah, cool. So we're, this is where we're at. This is what we're doing. Mak: And it's funny too that like many people who come to, especially people who have read the book, would come expecting the facilitators to be just as open about their own personal process. And it's been something that I've had to push back against to like kind of reframe the whole dynamic. Look, I'm not here to be radically honest with you. I'm a facilitator. I'm here to support you all in being radically honest. And I best do that by staying in my role and maintaining the boundary. Linds: Yeah. All right. Well, I feel pretty drained. I actually feel like I might be getting a migraine or something. I'm having some sort of like... Lord. At some point, we got to start like actually listening to these and editing them. okay. Well, good going. Thanks. Farewell. Mak: Ahem. You'd go on you. Talk to later. All right, bye.