Think about the last time someone started a sentence to you (or you started by telling someone else), “I have to be honest with you…” Following that beginning, when has there ever been something said that made you feel good– or was anything other than a criticism? When we preface what we say with, “I need to be honest,” that’s basically code for this is going to suck or you are not going to want to hear this.
Similarly, we use the expression, “Be honest with yourself” to denote hard, unpleasant truths that we would rather avoid. If we said to someone, “you need to be honest with yourself, how likely are you to go to the gym?” what we are actually saying is, “You’re probably not going to the gym.” When we talk about being honest with ourselves, what we are really talking about is difficult internal work.
It is a funny observation that honesty has such a painful connotation, if not one that is outright negative. Why should telling the truth be painful?
We talk about honesty when we are talking about the difference between reality and what we perceive as reality. We are actually highlighting the gap between what we believe about ourselves and what our behavior indicates. When talking to others, “I have to be honest with you” points to misalignment between what we say and what we do.
We tell ourselves and others that we will stop using drugs, but we take no concrete steps to do things differently. We tell ourselves and others that we can’t stand this job, but then we take no action to find a new one. So people tell us, “be honest” and what that actually means is that there is a huge gap between what we say and what we do.
Confronting the fact that we are not who we want to be is painful, so whenever “be honest” gets pulled out, it's really a conversation about misalignment in our life. Given that, it is no wonder that “be honest” is bad-news bears.
Last week, I wrote about treating ourselves less harshly, about turning kindness inwards. This practice of kindness turned inwards is particularly important when we are looking at parts of our life where there is discrepancy between what we do and what we say.
When we look directly at the gap between who we say we are and what we actually do, when we are “honest,” we don’t usually stop at observation– instead, we escalate to judgment. Instead of just noticing, I haven’t gone to the gym. We conclude, I’m lazy. We don’t notice, I’m still using, or I keep relapsing. We conclude, I’m hopeless. The pain of honesty has as much to do with the facts themselves as with the judgment we attach to them.
Behavior is data, but it feels like judgment because we link the two in our mind. If we pause long enough to see the data and the judgment as two different things, honesty would feel less like a courtroom and more like a lab. In a lab, we observe what is happening so we can adjust variables. Experiments are about getting information. When we look at our lives as a lab, the gap between intention and action becomes useful. It tells us something about motivation, fear, skill, environment, and readiness. It gives us material to work with.
The irony is that self-attack widens the gap we are trying to close. When we label ourselves as deficient, we trigger defensiveness or avoidance. This causes us to turn away from the very information that could help us change. If honesty reliably results in shame, we resist it, distort it, or avoid it altogether.
If we want honesty to become a regular practice, we have to separate clarity from condemnation. We can say, This is what I’m doing, without adding, and therefore I am fundamentally flawed. That shift allows us to look again tomorrow, and the next day, without flinching.
If honesty is going to be useful, it has to be paired with compassion– with kindness. This is true whether it is directed to others or directed inward. Compassion is not indulgence and not excuse-making. The recognition that we are human, that behavior reflects a complex mix of habit, fear, reward, narrative, environment, and skill.
There’s another layer to all of this. We treat honesty as if its primary purpose is to expose our failures. We pull it out when something is off, when something needs correcting. But honesty is not inherently negative. It is simply alignment. And alignment includes the parts of us that are working.
And here’s the curious thing: we apply the same avoidance to positive truths about ourselves and others. We struggle not only to say, I am avoiding this, but also to say, I am proud of this. We hesitate to admit admiration. We downplay joy. We soften love. In both directions, we distort reality. We hide the gaps, but we also hide the goodness.
If honesty is going to be a practice, it has to apply to the whole picture. The parts where we fall short, and also the parts where we are growing. The parts where we feel gratitude and respect and love. Honesty is not a weapon. It is a commitment to seeing clearly — without flinching, and without attacking.
When we pair clarity with kindness, honesty stops feeling like bad news. It becomes stability and integrity and the relief of not having to pretend.
Love,
Doc
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