Radical Honesty

Have you ever noticed how exhausting it is to keep up appearances—to dodge small truths, to tell half-stories, or to bottle up what you think just to seem acceptable? In Radical Honesty, Brad Blanton argues that this constant act of self-censorship is not only tiring but destructive. The lies we tell—especially the lies we tell ourselves—trap us in invisible prisons of shame, fear, and pretense. According to Blanton, the only way out of these mental jails is through what he calls radical honesty: the bold, sometimes uncomfortable practice of telling the truth about everything.

Through thirty years as a psychotherapist, Blanton observed that nearly every form of stress, depression, anxiety, and even illness could be traced back to withholding the truth. We lie to impress our bosses, avoid hurting our partners, appear competent, or live up to moral ideals that were never truly our own. Over time, these lies accumulate and calcify into a suffocating structure of moralism—a kind of self-imposed prison of the mind that keeps us from being fully alive.

Freedom Through Honesty

Freedom, Blanton insists, is not a philosophical idea but a psychological achievement. When we tell the truth, we break out of the mental cell where our carefully rehearsed roles—employee, parent, lover, citizen—have confined us. The being that exists beyond the mind, what Blanton calls the true Self or 'the Being', wakes up again. It’s the same pure awareness we had as infants before we learned to manipulate or pretend for survival. Radical honesty is a way back home to that primal authenticity.

The path to honesty, though liberating, can feel painful at first. Like detoxing from a powerful drug, facing the truths we’ve avoided forces us to feel emotions we’ve buried—anger, shame, grief, even joy. Blanton likens this unraveling process to a body mechanic hammering out a dent: therapy is less about analyzing the past than about getting the being to function again. Telling the truth might make things feel worse before they get better, but it’s the only route to real healing.

Why Lies Hurt Us All

Blanton draws a provocative parallel between personal dishonesty and cultural decay. Just as individuals deaden themselves with withheld truths, societies built on moralism gradually lose vitality. Moralism, he says, is an overgrown reliance on principles and rules at the expense of direct experience. We trade living for thinking, sincerity for pretense. The result is mass neurosis—a civilization that prizes politeness and propriety over authenticity and joy. He quotes e.e. cummings: “We are human beings, for whom birth is an extremely welcome mystery.” To reclaim that mystery, we have to unlearn our obsession with being good and relearn how to be real.

Modern life’s obsession with control—over our image, emotions, and even inner thoughts—has created what Blanton calls a “bullshit jail of the mind.” Our thoughts are excremental byproducts of past experiences, endlessly reprocessed until they clog our psychic systems. If, as Freud said, civilization depends on repression, Blanton counters that civilization is now dying of repression. Radical honesty becomes the mental cleanup we need to stay alive.

The Radical Path Forward

The book leads readers step by step through this process of liberation. In Part One, Blanton explores the nature of being, contrasting it with the mind and showing how children lose touch with direct experience through moral training. In later sections, he details practical levels of honesty—from revealing hidden facts to expressing current emotions and, ultimately, exposing the very stories that define your self-image. You start, perhaps, by telling your parents about old secrets, then progress to sharing your raw feelings in the moment, and end by admitting who you’ve been pretending to be all along.

The final chapters connect individual honesty to broader human issues—anger, love, sex, therapy, freedom, and change. By the end, Blanton expands his psychology into a philosophy of life: to be radically honest is to become fully human again, to make peace with imperfection, mortality, and the ever-changing truth of the moment. Like existentialists before him (Camus, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche), he argues that acceptance of futility—our inevitable failures, contradictions, and deaths—is the key to joy. Once we stop pretending and start living truthfully, even despair turns into vitality.

In essence, Radical Honesty is not just a self-help manual but a call to spiritual rebellion. It asks you to trade comfort for authenticity, approval for freedom, morality for integrity, and fantasy for truth. “Freedom from one’s own mind,” Blanton writes, “is freedom to create.” Through the practice of honesty, you discover that life’s deepest fulfillment lies not in being right, good, or safe—but in simply being alive.

Blanton begins his exploration of honesty by identifying its great enemy: moralism. He calls moralism a psychological disease—the inherited habit of judging ourselves and others according to rigid standards of right and wrong. It begins innocently in childhood. Parents, teachers, and churches teach us to “be good,” to repress spontaneous feelings in favor of behaving correctly. Over time, we internalize this as a mental voice—our conscience—that polices every gesture and emotion.

According to Blanton, this well-meaning training results in a hysterical loyalty to the mind over the body’s direct experience. We learn to consult ideas—rules, roles, moral codes—instead of our senses. The world becomes an abstraction rather than a living experience. “We are all sick to death from moralism,” he writes, “and the world may die from it.”

How We Become Morality Addicts

Through vivid anecdotes, Blanton shows how professions and institutions reinforce this disease. Law schools, for example, train students to memorize and obey arbitrary rules rather than think creatively. By the time they “make partner,” most lawyers no longer know what spontaneity feels like. Their personal lives, like their careers, are governed by shoulds and shouldn’ts. They become model citizens—and miserable human beings.

He distinguishes between what psychologists call “field dependence” and “field independence.” Field-dependent people, shaped by external authority, rely on others’ approval and established frames of reference. Field-independent people, guided by inner awareness, can orient themselves without needing constant validation. Children start out naturally field-independent, tuned to their senses; moral education traps them in field dependence. The more they learn to do as they “should,” the more they lose trust in their own perception.

Managing, Not Curing, Moralism

Moralism, Blanton says, cannot be cured—only managed. Like herpes, it never leaves you entirely. Once you’ve grown a mind, you can’t unlearn it. But you can learn to use it creatively instead of obeying it blindly. The cure for moralism’s deadliness is, as ever, truth-telling. Children’s raw honesty—their unfiltered reports of what they see and feel—offers a model. Adults can recover that innocence not by purging all morality but by standing outside it, acknowledging its limits, and choosing experience over doctrine.

“We can make a moral resolve that people should let up on themselves and others, but that is just more impotent moralism,” Blanton warns. “Instead, manage the disease by telling the truth like children do—before they lose their innocence.”

This single insight reframes psychotherapy as an experiment in amoral honesty. Instead of judging your thoughts to determine which are good, you notice them all. Instead of deciding whether anger is justified, you feel it fully. Instead of apologizing for your selfishness, you admit it—and discover generosity on the other side. (This is reminiscent of Carl Rogers’ idea of unconditional positive regard: acceptance of your whole experience is paradoxically what allows change.)

Through honesty, moralism transforms from a death sentence into a creative tension. The goal isn’t to transcend judgement but to play with it—to be the being who notices the mind’s moral machinery rather than its prisoner. As Blanton often reminds his readers: you can’t get rid of your mind, but you can stop taking it so seriously.

According to Blanton, the story of human life is the story of forgetting—and occasionally reclaiming—our original state of being. Before we became 'persons' with names, genders, and expectations, we were pure experience. In the womb, consciousness first flickers like dawn: sound, warmth, and heartbeat blend into oneness. That primal unity, he says, is our first truth. All religions and philosophies—from Hindu mysticism to Christian salvation myths—are attempts to remember it.

As we grow, this oneness fragments into individuality. We begin to label experiences, attach meanings, and build what he calls the 'sea of suggestions'—the mind’s network of learned interpretations. At first, these help us survive. But by adolescence, we’re trapped inside them. We replace the living world with the movie of our own interpretations and call it reality.

Getting Born Again

For Blanton, spiritual rebirth isn’t mystical—it’s psychological. To 'get born again' means to see through the self you made up and rediscover the simple experiencer underneath. This process feels like death because it threatens your identity. You lose certainty, roles, and belonging; what remains is presence. Yet this death becomes new life. Many traditions echo this cycle: in Buddhism, enlightenment comes when you stop identifying with your thoughts; in Christianity, resurrection follows crucifixion. Theologically or psychologically, the message is the same—freedom requires dying to your old mind.

Blanton warns that most people would rather die physically than give up who they think they are. Fear of losing control keeps us trapped in predictable suffering. That’s why therapy, he says, often feels worse before it heals—it’s an exorcism of the mind’s false gods. In letting go of the conditioning that made us “good,” we risk chaos; but only through that chaos can we return to being creative, flexible, and alive.

He writes, “Every time we tell the truth, we get a brief vacation from our minds.” Radical honesty isn’t just about morality—it’s a method of remembering. It brings us back to the body, back to breath, and back to the moment that existed long before we had anything to prove.

Blanton describes honesty as a developmental skill with three levels, each one peeling back a deeper layer of illusion. These levels move from outer behavior to inner awareness—and ultimately to letting go of the entire fiction of the self.

Level One: Revealing the Facts

The first step is factual disclosure. This means telling the truth about actions you’ve hidden—admitting lies, thefts, affairs, or secrets you’ve buried to preserve your image. For example, a client named Kathleen had hidden an abortion from her Catholic family for years. After multiple failed attempts, she finally confessed to her parents. Their reaction—relief, not condemnation—transformed her relationships. Even her psychosomatic ailments vanished. The lesson? Secrets, not sins, sicken us. Once exposed, their power dissolves.

By contrast, another woman, Linda, refused to tell her father and husband about her infidelities. She rationalized that it would only “hurt” them. As her secrets multiplied, her body did the hurting instead—she developed chronic pain. The more she withheld, the more her joints stiffened, a physical manifestation of emotional rigidity. When she stopped telling the truth, therapy stopped working. Level one teaches that the first obstacle to honesty is fear—the imagined apocalypse that never arrives when truth is told.

Level Two: Expressing Feelings

After facts come feelings. This level demands revealing what you feel about people as it happens: anger, admiration, envy, love. It’s harder than confession because it threatens relationships in real time. Yet it’s also the level where intimacy begins. Blanton recalls a client, Beth, who forgave her ex-lover through total emotional expression. She met with him, voiced her grief, rage, appreciation, and even made love with him one last time. When the words ceased, only peace remained. Her lover, unable to express his own feelings, later committed suicide. The story illustrates how unexpressed emotion turns toxic. Feeling is not the problem; suppression is.

Level Three: Exposing the Fiction

The deepest level of truth confronts identity itself. It’s admitting that who you think you are—a moral person, a helper, a victim—is an invention. Blanton exemplifies this with startling honesty in his own confession: he admits he writes the book out of vanity, anger, greed, and desire for fame. By exposing even his self-serving motives, he refuses the comfort of hypocrisy. The point isn’t to be pure but to be transparent. “If you’ve never truly embarrassed yourself by what you had to say about yourself,” he quips, “you don’t know shit from shinola about transformation.”

At this level, truth-telling becomes liberation from ego maintenance. You learn to laugh at your mind’s characters—the hero, the savior, the victim—and see them as costumes. Like Nietzsche’s dancing star, you become light enough to play again. Life, once a courtroom, turns into a stage for improvisation. Honesty, finally, is art.

Few emotions reveal our dishonesty like anger. Most of us, says Blanton, are 'heroic fools' when it comes to it—we suppress our resentment to protect others, believing we’re being noble. But every unspoken frustration corrodes intimacy and health. He calls such repression 'anger sickness.' The cure is paradoxical: express your anger directly and thoroughly until there’s nothing left to harbor.

From Suppression to Expression

Culture teaches us to bury anger beneath propriety, especially in families and workplaces. The result? Passive aggression, gossip, perfectionism, and self-condemnation. In therapy, Blanton helps clients move anger from thoughts (“I can’t believe she did that”) to direct expression (“I resent you for doing that”). He insists this must happen face-to-face, not through journaling or 'processing.' In his workshops, couples are coached to exchange resentments and appreciations until emotion is spent. The end isn’t harmony but clarity: once the truth is said aloud, forgiveness arises naturally.

Six Rules for Honest Anger

• Speak directly to the person you’re angry with, not about them.
• Use the phrase “I resent you for…” to own your feelings.
• Be specific—describe behaviors, not personalities.
• Stay with your bodily sensations while speaking.
• Stay present until resentment fades and appreciation arises.
• Don’t rush forgiveness; let it happen after truth-telling.

Telling someone your anger without filters feels dangerous but creates intimacy. One couple, Anne and David, rediscovered affection only after shouting their resentments in session. Another client, Stephanie, uncovered buried fury and sexual shame beneath her overeating; learning to express both freed her to live and lose weight. The point is not 'anger management' but liberation from mind-control. Anger expressed honestly becomes creative energy—fuel for vitality instead of destruction.

“Being honest about anger,” Blanton writes, “puts you on the road back home to being alive as a child again.” The alternative is the polite misery most people call normal life.

Few arenas test honesty more than intimate relationships. Blanton—four times married and divorced, as he admits—earned his expertise the hard way. He argues that couples destroy love not through conflict but through concealment. The antidote to false harmony is ruthless transparency: tell your partner everything you actually think, feel, and do.

The Checklist for Intimacy

Blanton’s couples therapy sounds outrageous: partners must confess their sexual histories, masturbate in front of each other, and exchange half-hour monologues of appreciation and resentment. The goal isn’t shock—it’s undressing the mind. Each secret withheld creates a wall; full disclosure rebuilds connection on truth rather than fantasy. He warns, “There is no such thing as ‘none of your business’ in an intimate relationship.” Brutal honesty might hurt, but the pain cleans rather than corrodes.

Love Beyond Romance

Blanton distinguishes between romance and real intimacy. Romantic love—charged by hormones and projection—inevitably fades. What remains can grow only if partners are willing to tell the truth about their disappointment and boredom. Otherwise, resentment rots the bond. As Kris Kristofferson’s lyric says, “She brightened up my day… and it felt like coming home.” But when that warmth becomes a rule to preserve, heaven turns to hell. Love dies when partners cling to how it used to feel.

Drawing from philosopher Martin Buber, Blanton frames healthy love as an I–Thou relationship—seeing your partner as a being, not an object. Lying turns the Thou into an It. Truth restores personhood. When both partners stay transparent, every conflict becomes a chance to begin again. If moralism kills love, honesty resurrects it—again and again.

Throughout the book, Blanton portrays inner life as a battle between two forces: Being (the spontaneous perceiver) and Mind (the judgmental narrator). The mind’s job is survival—it creates order, predictability, and identity—but when it forgets its servant role, it becomes a jailkeeper. The being, when liberated, uses the mind as a tool rather than a master.

Change and Intention

Real change, Blanton argues, doesn’t come from trying harder but from acknowledging the truth of resistance. When you say, “I want to quit smoking but I can’t,” the truth is that you choose not to. Recognizing that you already create your life—through conscious or unconscious intention—is the key to power. 'Effort,' he says, 'is the opposite of power.' Once you stop pretending to try, you can simply do.

Responsibility, then, is not guilt but ownership. Blanton distinguishes them sharply: guilt is self-punishment to avoid change; responsibility is creative authorship. This echoes existentialist thinkers like Sartre and Tillich, who equate freedom with willingness. Blanton simplifies it into action: stop blaming, stop apologizing, and declare what you will create next. You don’t need willpower—you need willingness.

Liberation Through Awareness

When the being witnesses the mind rather than fusing with it, life becomes playful again. You no longer need to perfect the world or yourself. You simply notice. Blanton connects this to yoga’s goal of 'inhibiting the modifications of the mind.' Radical honesty is Western yoga—a discipline of awareness through speech. Every truth told is a return to presence. Every lie renews the war of control. The ultimate freedom he describes is the clarity of being the observer in the moment, neither clinging to past nor fantasizing about future—a secular enlightenment available to anyone willing to tell the truth.