I've run into many people over the years who claim that they are "brutally honest," as if this is some sort of virtue. I've tried to be understanding about it; after all, I generally appreciate honesty. But, although they claim this is honesty, it really isn't. Instead, they say whatever thought pops into their head. They do not consider the impacts of their statements, and they can say the silliest or most vile things with a completely straight face because they don't even care about how it will sound to someone else. Not everyone who has no filter chooses to defend what they initially say: some people recognize that they have said something silly or hurtful and apologize and/or try to fix it. But the brutally honest person never apologizes; they claim that they were "just being honest". This is one of Jack's favorite ploys.
Dr. Daniel Amen suggests in Healing ADD: The Breakthrough Program That Allows You to See and Heal the 7 Types of ADD that some people tend to default to saying whatever thought pops into their head. This is fine as long as they can reflect and switch tracks, "Whoops! That sounded better in my head. May I rewind and try that again?" But some people choose to defend what they said no matter what it was. Dr. Amen thinks this might be because they find a tiny bit of stimulation (from dopamine perhaps) for their brain when they do this. Defending what they said creates a valuable (and rather addictive) spike in their brain activity. Dr. Amen points out that if no one reacts to whatever they say, they don't get any spike of energy and so they don't get the stimulation that they were after, which may help stop the cycle.
Brutal honesty can look like, "Wow, that shirt looks like it came out of the rag bag." Or, "That has to be the stupidest opinion I've ever heard." It can also look like, "I'm just going to tell you my honest feelings: I feel like you are a controlling w*tch..."
We are suddenly verbally slapped with a rude, judgemental oversimplification. Sometimes there is a grain of truth to it and sometimes it's blatantly hostile or untrue. But if the author of this brutal "honesty" chooses to defend it, he or she is like teflon: whatever we say, whatever response we come up with is dismissed as "overly sensitive" and/or "overreacting", or the ever classic dismissal, "Oh, don't take it personally."
In How Emotions Are Made, Lisa Feldman Barrett writes that we share an emotional world with others. We see it when our breathing matches, our emotions shift to match others and our ideas are shared and modulated so that they can more closely match one another. Each of us can share directly with other people complete ideas, thoughts, and feelings by using shared concepts and cultural ideas, and these interactions not only change how we feel, they influence what we think about ourselves and the world. (Other sources call this "co-regulation").
When I read about this, it changed how I thought about these "brutally honest" interactions. I realized that co-regulation is being weaponized. Instead of bringing us together, brutal honesty is used as a way to push a personal agenda without any co-creation from the recipient. The "brutally honest" person then uses defensive tactics to cement their feelings and interpretations of events, effectively hijacking the interaction, stealing the shared space for themselves, and leaving the other person scratching their head, wondering why they can't get along. The target may even end up feeling that his reality is fraying or dissolving. In this type of interaction, we do not co-create anything. "Brutal honesty" hijacks the interaction and pushes their emotions, and memes onto the other person. Even (or maybe especially) when done in a subtle way rather than a blatant way, it is damaging to the person that is denied access to the public space or conversational arena.
But I posit that this form of interaction is also damaging to the person doing it.
Most of us know that our first thoughts can be wildly inappropriate. Instinct is not always beneficial to our future selves or to those around us. We can see it in the story of the boy who cried wolf. The boy cries wolf because he is bored and he wants to be entertained. That desire leads to him making poor choices and hurting others. Those choices lead to him damaging his relationships with his fellow villagers and his sheep being eaten by a wolf. A little self reflection at any point might have helped this boy not make a "brutally honest" mistake by acting on his first impulse.
If you had asked the boy to explain why he had cried wolf, he might have said, "I don't know," not reflecting at all. Or he might have been dismissive as in, "Because it was fun," not reasoning past his instinctive desire to keep boredom at bay. And yet, he is essentially creating a person he doesn't know: A false self.
When we speak without thinking and are hostile to reflection, we place ourselves in a feedback loop where we are at the mercy for our own first thoughts and actions. With self reflection, we can make better choices. We reflect so that we have a chance to choose a different path that will lead us towards better actions in the future. But when we choose to skip reflection and put our first instinctive thoughts into the driver's seat, we do ourselves a huge disservice. This disservice is compounded when we again choose not to reflect afterwards. Not reflecting takes the next choice out of the picture, creating a feedback loop of bad choice, leading to us making the same choice, leading to the same choice … again and again. This essentially traps us in a false self that we don't know or like.
I often have interactions with Kitty where Kitty pops out with some crazy thought like, "Someone stole my socks!" and I know that if I say one word against that idea, she is going to fight me tooth and nail to make that thought real and prove me wrong–even though she doesn't want there to be someone who stole her socks. I don't want to inadvertently help her internalize the "first" thought that pops into her head. She may cement that thought pattern into part of "who she is", not because she wants to be that person, but because she won't recognize that she has a chance to choose a different pattern.
I have learned to be like water in my interactions with Kitty, to let anything that she says that makes no sense or is crazy, rude, controlling, or off putting, slide past me and fade. This can be as simple as refraining from reacting, validating her feelings ("I can see you're having a hard time. Do you want a hug?"), then moving onto other things.
I have found that choosing not to react is helpful because any push-back from me will give the brutally "honest" a spurt of energy to fight zealously for whatever craziness they've popped out with. (Not reacting to his "brutal honesty" is only somewhat effective in interactions with Jack because I often flinch instinctively when he says truly awful things, which he takes as encouragement to defend his position vociferously. I can manage to avoid reacting in written communications. Sadly, though, Jack takes offense at my lack of reaction as well ... (sigh!))
I keep in mind that Kitty's behavior is not about me. As long as I don't focus on the content of her bizarre claims, I can avoid many arguments. More importantly in the long run, it is better by far for her not to get in the habit of avoiding self-reflection.
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