Honesty

When I was pretty young, probably around 4 or 5, we lived in a neighborhood full of young families on the first rung of the middle class ladder. Most of my friends were typical kids, decent most of the time, jerks when stressed out, but able to move back from jerk to decent if a mom showed up. Jerk smoldered a little but decent prevailed, so it was pretty clear that decent was genuine and jerk was reactive.

There were, of course, a couple of exceptions. I think they lived on the next block over, where our babysitter lived. Maybe I just like to think it. She was an older teenager. She taught us that “Strawberry Fields” by the Beatles would tell you, “I buried Paul,” if you played it backwards. It freaked me out hearing that! She also told us Coke would eat up your stomach and tried to demonstrate with a piece of bacon. Nothing happened. She introduced us to stories of séances and ghosts, and I swear she could have written for “The Twilight Zone.”

A couple of kids that had to come from the same block would play on our street once in a while. They were older, almost teens. They taught us to go up to someone and say, “Your epidermis is showing!” It was a great practical joke because the person would look confused, then worried, and then a little freaked out. When you explained it you got a great laugh.

But these older kids were jerks. Not reactive jerks—genuinely jerks. They pulled the trick on a little girl they knew and brought with them across the block border. I think she was a sister or a cousin. They got that cocky look on their faces and said “Watch this.” Then they called her over and told her, “Your epidermis is showing,” and laughed that jerky whole body laugh that said they thought they were the coolest things around.

She started to cry. Deeply fearful cries. I was mortified! I tried to explain to her it was only her skin, but she looked wounded and withdrawn and wouldn’t stop crying. Someone appeared and took her home.

Another time the jerks pulled the “Watch this” routine and told the little girl they were going to call the police on her for something little, like calling somebody a rude name. She argued briefly, but they insisted they would do it, the police would come, and they would take her off to jail. She crumbled that time, too, and the “someone” who showed up to take the girl home demanded the jerks go with her, too.

Looking back I see how cruelty hurts. Cruelty doesn’t care about truth or facts. It uses whichever will cause damage. They hurt her with an outrageous lie, but they also hurt her with the truth.

Truth is a very powerful thing. In counseling and in coaching, it is a tool and a goal. Being forthright, clear, and direct are practices that help clients move forward. The problem is, even people who want to learn about themselves and move forward can be devastated by the truth, so it has to be balanced by empathy and respect and acknowledgements of the client’s strength and abilities.

And the hardest lesson of all about honesty: you can be empathetic, you can acknowledge strengths and abilities, you can speak gently and slowly and give information in little pieces, and it can still devastate someone. People who don’t want to know themselves, who are broken or fearful and need to build a lie and climb inside it to feel safe, can despise honesty. It is poison to them because it will bring down the world they fabricated to feel safe, competent, worthwhile, likeable, etc.

That hostility towards truth can be insurmountable in a professional counseling or coaching relationship. In personal relationships it’s impossible to have anything but a limited and shallow interaction with such a person, and hardly worth the effort.

Honesty is a bold commitment to truth. It does not waiver when challenged because it flows from the heart. Honesty does not hurt for the sake of hurting, but it does not hide to protect others. People can be hurt and disrupted when they see themselves and their behavior in the light of honesty, so it is a powerful tool that must be respected. Honesty means speaking the truth, but doing so in love and with compassion to help another person receive truth. Only through honesty can a person be truly known by others, and only through honesty can people experience genuine relationships with each other.