Get Comfortable With Being Uncomfortable
Taking Radical Honesty home with you after a workshop, isn’t about trying to replicate the workshop. Work on getting comfortable with being uncomfortable.
It was wonderful to be back in Pelion this year (for the 6th time!) for our Advanced Radical Honesty Workshop, 7 years after I attended my first workshop with Brad Blanton in 2015, and discovered the tools to help me change the course of my life.
I tell myself that this year’s group was one of my favourites: a fascinating mix of personalities, backgrounds and skills, that kept me curious and engaged for 11 whole days. There’s nothing quite like the experience of seeing people making momentous discoveries about themselves, allowing themselves to be entirely vulnerable and open in a group of others, and experiencing being seen and held for maybe the first time in their lives, and I tell myself that this year’s group gave it their all.
Such was the feeling of connection that I imagine a lot of us felt a real sense of loss going back to our own lives. In our WhatsApp Group we’ve talked about feeling sad and lonely for the company of the others, about what life would be like to live in a community like ours all the time, and — a favourite post-workshop topic — how we’re doing now that we’re back home, trying to put into practice some of what we’ve learned.
And yes, this is the really tough part.
Transporting the lessons we’ve learned back to our ‘real lives’ and implementing them with our non-RH friends and family, is the meat of this work. The conversations that we want to have are probably not going to go how we want them to go. The decisions we made about how we want our lives to change are probably going to feel harder to put into motion. Instead of supportive, enthusiastic, excited community we’re going to be surrounded by people who may be confused by how we’re acting, who might label us ‘weirdos’ or — as I was on return from my first Intensive — having been “seduced by a cult”.
And if it’s weird to want to be seen and accepted, and live without a bone-deep fear of being discovered and rejected, then I’m very happy to be a weirdo.
Unless you’re very lucky indeed, you — like the vast majority of the population of Earth — live in a society that functions using thousands of well-known and widely-accepted social contracts. We ask “how are you?” when we’re not really interested, we say “I’m fine!” when we’re in pain. We function, an awful lot of the time, on a surface level, using a common language our friends and family recognise, and without thinking too deeply about how any of them really relate to our present-moment experience.
Trying to act in opposition to these social contracts, and notice and report what is really going on for us, will seem strange at first to most people you interact with. You’ll likely be met with confusion and some annoyance, maybe even derision. You can tell yourself that this is likely fuelled by fear, and that the changes in you are probably difficult for them to accept, but the fact is that all these reactions still look (and feel) like rejection.
And rejection is the absolute opposite of what you were aiming for, wasn’t it?
Making ourselves vulnerable is a scary prospect for most people. We developed all our social contracts for a reason, and disregarding them and attempting to spend every minute of every day honestly reporting our internal experience would be — I tell myself — utterly exhausting for everyone concerned.
So maybe the specific relationships we want to work on, the connections we want to deepen and improve, are the best place to start.
Practicing honesty and vulnerability is probably not going to go as you plan. So forget planning and start noticing instead. Trying to control the outcome of a conversation and get a specific result will only take you out of your own experience, and back into your old habit of trying to manage the other person’s emotions.
Concentrate on noticing and honestly reporting your own stuff, and let the other person figure out theirs.
If you’re scaring yourself with what you imagine they’re thinking (and perhaps not telling you), you can say that and invite them to share.
If they get angry with you, instead of defending yourself or apologising as usual, you can say that you notice you want to defend and apologise, and then don’t do it.
If you notice a judgment that you’re a bad person or ‘mean’ or ‘petty’, you can tell them that too. You can tell them how often you judge yourself and stop yourself from speaking up with a story that ‘it’s not important enough’ or that you worry about upsetting them.
And most importantly of all — you can screw this up. You can get mad and throw Radical Honesty out the window, revert to your old way of being, cry and get defensive or apologise for everything you just said, and notice all the discomfort that comes up with having ‘tried and still got it wrong’.
And then you can just go ahead, and have another go at being honest and vulnerable.
Instead of heading out to change all your relationships and your life straight after making this new discovery though, maybe first work on getting comfortable with being uncomfortable.
- Start small with small changes in the way you respond. Learn to breathe and pause before you say ‘yes’ or ‘no’.
- Practice checking in with your body regularly (maybe set a timer on your phone), noticing where you hold tension, noticing what changed from the last time you checked in.
- Remembering this, create space between what you see and hear and how you react to it by checking in with yourself and noticing your sensations before you act.
- Try noticing and sitting with the uncomfortable physical sensations and thoughts that go with ‘negative’ emotions for a little longer than you normally do…and then give it five minutes longer!
Discovering Radical Honesty doesn’t mean a switch gets flipped, and we change our lives overnight. It’s not a magic bullet. It’s a practice that — like all practices — takes time to use in a way that feels easy and natural. Don’t make it a new rule or belief to ‘should’ yourself into behaving in the ‘right’ way.
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Law Turley is an MBACP-registered Integrative Therapist, Supervisor and Certified Radical Honesty® Trainer living and working in South West UK.
