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Establishing genuine human connections poses a significant challenge in the face of societal expectations and personal inhibitions. The pressure to conform and maintain a carefully constructed image often prevents individuals from expressing their true thoughts and emotions. Consequently, this fear of judgement or rejection fosters relational interactions that lack depth and authenticity. As a result, many find their connections to be superficial, leaving a pervasive sense of disconnection and isolation.

In this episode, you'll discover how radical honesty can transform such patterns and lead to deeper, more intimate connections. By examining the intersection of honesty, forgiveness, and vulnerability, this episode offers practical insights and exercises designed to foster genuine contact and warmth in your interactions. Learn about the power of reporting your immediate experience versus relying on preconceived notions, ultimately guiding you toward a more fulfilled and open way of relating.

Brad Blanton, psychotherapist, author, and founder of Radical Honesty Enterprises, is known for his unwavering honesty and engaging Southern charm. His bestselling book, “Radical Honesty: How To Transform Your Life By Telling The Truth,” has been translated into sixteen languages. Blanton's work explores personal and social transformation, evident in titles like “Practicing Radical Honesty” and “Honest to God.” He retired in 2020 after writing extensively, with his final book, “Lying or Living,” set for publication in 2024 by Sparrowhawk Publishing.

In this episode

6:22 The philosophy of radical honesty.

8:49 The distinction between genuine perception and ideation.

14:40 Embracing uncertainty and its role in deepening personal connections.

16:55 The power of radical honesty in personal growth and forgiveness.

25:02 The importance of honesty and vulnerability in personal and relational growth.

37:32 Expressing true feelings and thoughts without censoring or editing.

45:36 The balance therapists and clients must achieve between allowing and making things happen.

Your Check List of Actions to Take

• Foster an environment where individuals feel safe to express their true feelings and thoughts without judgement.
• Practice forgiveness by allowing emotions to emerge and dissipate, ultimately transforming the quality of your relationships.
• Engage in radical honesty by consistently reporting what you notice rather than what you think or imagine.
• Approach uncomfortable situations, like discussing personal vulnerabilities, with openness to build acceptance and freedom from judgement.
• Engage in supportive therapy methods, such as EMDR, to effectively face and process past traumas.
• Use mediators to help structure and manage conversations, ensuring each person speaks and listens without interruption.
• Approach therapeutic interactions with the understanding that neither party has all the answers, fostering a collaborative atmosphere.

Mentioned

Radical Honesty: How to Transform Your Life by Telling the Truth (*Amazon Affiliate link) (book)

Practicing Radical Honesty (*Amazon Affiliate link) (book)

The Truthtellers (*Amazon Affiliate link) (book)

Honest to God: A Change of Heart That Can Change the World (*Amazon Affiliate link) (book)

The Power of Radical Honesty – Dr. Anna Lembke (*YouTube link) (video)

Dopamine Nation: Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence (*Amazon affiliate link) (book)

ERP 305: The Surprising & Powerful Benefits of Learning to Tolerate Discomfort — An Interview with Dr. Anna Lembke

Connect with Dr. Brad Blanton

Websites: radicalhonesty.com | lyingorliving.com

Facebook: facebook.com/drbradblanton | facebook.com/RadicalHonesty

X: twitter.com/drbradblanton | twitter.com/RadicalHonesty

YouTube: youtube.com/@radical.honesty

Instagram: instagram.com/drbradblanton | instagram.com/radical.honesty

LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/dr-brad-blanton | linkedin.com/company/radical-honesty-institute

Connect with Dr. Jessica Higgins

Facebook: facebook.com/EmpoweredRelationship 

Instagram: instagram.com/drjessicahiggins 

Podcast: drjessicahiggins.com/podcasts/

Pinterest: pinterest.com/EmpowerRelation 

LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/drjessicahiggins 

Twitter: @DrJessHiggins 

Website: drjessicahiggins.com  

Email: [email protected]

About Today's Show

Dr. Brad Blanton, thank you for joining us.

You're welcome. Happy to be here. Thanks for asking me. 

Yeah. You have done so much work in writing books and having programs, and this huge body of work as it relates to Radical Honesty. For people who are getting acquainted with you here or maybe aren't as familiar with your work, can you share a little bit about what Radical Honesty is and how this became so important for you? 

Okay. Well, I started out, I got my doctorate when I was fairly young. I was 26 years old when I got my PhD. I was traveling around to get educated as a postdoctoral, and I met Fritz Perls. So I did a couple of years, at the end of his life, working some with him at Esalen Institute. So a lot of my background is Fritz Perls. Before that, there was quite a bit of interest in existentialist theology. The Courage To Be was my favorite book when I was in my 20s. The Courage To Be is about noticing being as the source of life, rather than ideation. The confusion between being and ideation has been what's fascinating to me all my life. 

That's what we call Radical Honesty. If it hurts someone else's feelings, you stay with them till they get through it. Or if it offends them, you stay with them. Or if it makes them fall in love, you stay with them till they get over that. The idea is that Radical Honesty allows for a deeper, more intimate connection between people. That deeper connection is our only hope, because our ability to take care of each other is damaged by our tendency to formulate things into principles and ideas, and leave out the more important connection and experience that comes from it.

Thank you for offering that distillation. As I'm here listening to you now, and you're describing the importance of being and noticing, versus the ideation, the way that I experience and relate to ideation is: perception, interpretation, projections. That often interferes, if I'm hearing you, with real contact with what someone's describing or what they're attempting to get out in their experience. Is that right?

Well, perception is included as noticing. So if you have a percept and you report it, that's legit. But if you report an idea as though it were something you noticed, other than as an idea, then there's a problem. One of the reasons I wrote Radical Honesty is because I concluded, after three or four years in private practice in Washington DC, that we all lie like hell all the time. We're taught systematically to do it, to leave out information, to select what's reported, and then basically do an ongoing con job about what a great person we are that we want other people to think we are. Radical Honesty is when you start ratting yourself out, saying: Well, that thing I've said about how I smoked two joints, I didn't smoke more than a joint and a half. Basically, tell the truth about what's so in a descriptive way, whether it offends your preset concept about what you should do and how you should behave.

So if one is listening, in the listening role, if one is lying, and they're listening, what's visible could be a lie. And the one that's on the receiving end or the listener is perceiving what is visible, and that's still the perception. But sometimes, do you think if one is perceiving, it might be influenced by one's experience in their life, or they create meaning? I guess it gets all interconnected like layers here.

There is an exercise in Gestalt Therapy, which has been elaborated on some in Radical Honesty, which is in excess called: I notice and I imagine. So you separate out what you see with your eyes, hear with your ears, and what you imagine with your mind. 

Basically, it's a great joy to confirm with someone else. “Yeah, me too. I see what you mean, and I see what you do with the meaning of it as well. I see what you see, I hear what you hear, and I imagine what you're imagining about is very much like mine. So I appreciate you for saying what you said.” When I say I appreciate you, there's an I-Thou relationship there, and the Thou relationship is based on reporting what you notice, more than on reporting what you think about.

Okay, and with the Thou, for people who aren't as familiar, this is some of the greater contact that you refer to in intimacy?

Yes. 

It's hard to access that when perhaps we are caught up in our interpretations and our thinking.

I call it a distinction between dumbness and stupidity. Stupidity is whenever your mind is involved. You have to have a mind to be stupid. But if you're just dumb and you're sitting there, like duh, that's the pathway to enlightenment, that's the road home. You sit there and go, uh. You get that your mind's meaning-making machine is not entirely under your control, it just goes on runs on its own. You think it has a lot to do with who you are. But basically, mostly it has a lot to do with screwing you up when you're trying to make interpretations in the world. 

Someone asked me recently in an interview, what's my most important therapeutic intervention? I said, I don't know. They said, you don't know what it is? I said: No, that's it, I don't know. Someone says so what do you think I should do with this? I say, damn if I know! I'm your therapist and I know you pretty well, and I don't know what you ought to do with this. We can talk about it, but not as though I'm the expert on their life and they're the one who need my wisdom in order to live, basically. I'll just say, duh! They say, what should I do? I say, duh, I don't know.

I don't know if I'm tracking in with you, so I want to check this out. It seems as though the person that's in the listening role, that might even say I don't know or be willing to hold the unknown, perhaps offers a container for the person that is speaking or expressing, to access more inside themselves, rather than look to external things to attach to.

Yeah, at least tolerate the uncertainty. Uncertainty is not a bad thing. Uncertainty is great, and that I shouldn't be uncertain is an assumption of the dogmatic judgmental mind. The main difficulties we have in this world come from our judgmental mind. A lot of us have a lot of right-wing nuts, like: I've got a Donald Trump conscience, so why would I want to trust it?

Yeah, so is there a deepening that might happen if one stays in the unknown or stays in the I don't know?

What happens is that love emerges because it's not trying to be manufactured. You're happy to be connected with someone who's listening. You can tell they're listening, because what they're doing and saying back is what you're doing and saying, and you're saying, isn't this wonderful? Even if it's in anger, it gets enacted when you're cussing each other out, and raise hell and holler. Then half an hour later, you put your arms around each other and say, let's go get a beer. That's the kind of forgiveness that allows for personal growth to occur. Intimacy comes with grown-ups loving each other, or children being able to do it naturally without having been screwed up enough yet.

Okay, so there's layers here perhaps. If I'm understanding, Brad, how I was just framing it was that when one is sharing and one is listening, that there can be the being, on the listener or the receiver's position, to just notice, and being the I don't know, and the attunement or just being present. Then for the one that's expressing or sharing, perhaps there's an invitation to recognize the impulse to want to craft it in a way that's acceptable or likable, or the ways that we might lie, and to access deeper sensation or truth. Can you speak a little bit more about that speaker role or the sharer role?

Well, it's usually simpler. The things are simpler. If you had to have a long explanation for things, the odds are your mind has been too involved already. I developed a 10-day workshop that was designed to give people the benefits of a year of psychotherapy in 10 days, intensive 12-hour days. So I did this 10-day workshop over and over again. One of the things that we said in the workshop was, if you disempower your judgmental mind, and you use this mantra of “anything worth doing is worth doing poorly,” it's quite an insult to most minds, particularly those with advanced degrees. Don't tell me that. Well, anything worth doing is worth doing poorly is a kind of an insult to the mind. Yeah, you got a good mind, so what? 

If you play like you know, when there's something you know that you don't know, and you know you don't know it, and you're acting like you do, that's pretty stupid. Because that only carries you and who you're talking to off into the wilderness.

Okay. So in this immersive experience, there's an invitation to be in the I don't know. So can you give us a little insight as to what you might prompt? What would be an exercise for people who aren't in the habit of orienting or relating in this way, what might you set up for people?

We ask people to talk to each other in pairs. There's a number of different exercises. But we ask them to talk in the dialogue, back and forth with the person, based on the assumption that we assert called “fuck them if they can't even take a joke.” So if you're not worried about whether they catch you on a lie or not, here you say that: Yes, I was lying. I admit it, I was being a manipulator. I'd like to figure out a way to blame you for it, but it's too much trouble. So let's just go ahead and admit that I'm the crook. That's kind of a dumb thing to do if you're being interviewed by the sheriff. 

I learned a lot of this in the civil rights movement. I got in the civil rights movement in Texas when I was 18, and I got arrested a dozen times about. It was over the years as under the gun as a White guy could be. If I had been Black, I'd have been killed for sure. I got slapped around and beat up. But what I learned in the civil rights movement was: win, lose, or draw, you tell the truth. If they're offended, it may cost you something. But then you'll just say basically, if this offends you, God knows I'm sorry. You're admitting that you're lying, you ought to be offended. You're offensive to me. But you do it short of violence. That's what the non-violent movement was about, was to be able to get really angry but not kill somebody, which is what humankind hasn't learned yet. 

So a lot of this is from activism and things that had to do with it. I refused to serve in the Vietnam War. In my world as an activist, I found that I fell in love with my fellow activists so much easier than I fell in love with people that were not fellow activists, because they were putting their life on the line the same time I was.

Yes. At least in your intensives, are there agreements, or is there a safety held for speaking the uncomfortable or the sweaty conversations?

More like a series of agreements that are specific to people being responsible for what they say and do. We grant each other the right to question each other during too, and have arguments and insult each other. One of the clearings, this is not as complicated as it first sounds, but here it is. Forgiveness is the primary objective of psychotherapy and Radical Honesty. Forgiveness means that you actually do get over being mad at somebody or hurt by them, and you do it by being honest and connected to them, and sticking with it until you get over it. They made you furious and angry, and a half an hour later, you may be in love with the person. Because what gets transformed is your quality of connection to each other. You can be appreciative of something that you used to resent, in a fairly short period of time; half an hour or an hour. But you can't jump each other and beat the hell out of each other. You have to have a mediator and some ability to stick with your honesty, that's the key to transformation. Forgiveness is a kind of transformation, where you're not the same person that you used to be.

The narrative and the ways in which we're so held to a position or convicted about something, that if we can have this inner transformation or transmutation into forgiveness, then that is qualitatively different.

Right, and you can get by with things with each other, it's a lot funnier. It's like, when I told you that you were an idiot, I was right. I'm not taking that back. But I'm not as mad at you as I was before. So you can make jokes denigrating each other's character. But instead of it being an accusation that brings war, it's a joke, and everybody laughs. I love you, even though you're still as stupid as you always were.

Brad, can you help us? Because there's context that you're saying, having experienced and been a part of the protesting in the civil rights movement? Recognizing being White, you were able to be honest, and you were put into jail or prison, or arrested multiple times. That the outcome of that viably likely would have been very different had the color of your skin been darker. But part of what you're describing is, even with the consequences, that the ability to stand up and speak is of priority. Is that what I'm hearing you say? 

Yeah, not speaking what's on your mind and what your feelings are is lying.

The omission, that's important. Because people think often they're not lying when they're holding or withholding.

The most popular form of lying is just not mentioning it. 

Yeah, okay. Then you also referenced the example of a couple that is perhaps in great conflict, spouting off at each other, and that could be endless, vicious. It could result to nothing helpful, in the sense of what we know in the way of intimacy, honesty, vulnerability, and connection. How is what you're describing, the focus about being and sensation, the difference between what gets created in these two different scenarios?

Well, being and sensation are aligned with each other. Thinking and giving the right answer, and saying what people expect you to say rather than what you have to say, is lying. So it's simple, you're lying whenever you're covering up your feelings and the intensity of them. There are stages. You can be mad at somebody and you can say what you resent them for, and the more specific you are about what you resent. I resent you for the way you turned your head just now. That little thing doesn't seem very significant. But you noticed it and it made you mad, so you report it. Then they do it a little bit later, and you say: There you go again, that damn head nod! Then they'll say, fuck you! When they do, you've got a connection, and both of you laugh. There's a connection in the anger, and a connection in the laughter and the joy. 

What happens is, your mind has been defeated by your honest connecting or contact with them. Instead of being outsmarted by your own mind, which most of us are most of the time, you can use it to direct your attention and say: Well, I feel a little guilty about this, but I think you're full of shit about what you just said. Then they'll say whatever they say back, and you'll say whatever you say back according to what comes up when they speak. And what's happening is this little trail of connection. It doesn't take but a minute or two to accumulate some affiliation and some appreciation of being able to do that with another human being.

Well, Brad, I have to be honest with you that I am listening. and I'm kind of just tracking in my mind, and my mind is present, so I realize that probably takes me out of connection with you here. 

You have to learn how, but you can do both and.

I just recognize I'm wanting to understand it in the context of so many things discussed on the show, for listeners to have a sense of what this looks like. But also, in some ways, the way I'm feeling this is that the contact and the connection points are really what it's about.

Yes, and not trying to control them or manipulate you or the other person. Not do a great performance. You're not performing anymore. You're just saying: Well, this is what I really think. What do you think about what I think? They tell you, and even though it's a little critical, you appreciate. You actually feel the warmth of appreciation, because you know someone is being straight with you.

Yes. It sounds like it potentially adds so much more freedom and allowance for the vast range of human experience that is made welcome, and there can be contact in these various places of experiencing, and to make that contact is incredibly powerful.

What happens in the 8-day workshop is that what was, at one time, a problem about two people being mad at each other at the same time, or hurt and angry at the same time toward each other. And a very short time later, no longer being angry, being happy to be together, and appreciative of each other for the engagement and the conversation. So it messes up your mind's preconceived notion about what's supposed to happen next. That's what most of us have fun with. 

So we do little performances for each other. The last day of the workshop, people do all kinds of tremendously creative things, like standup comedy routines about things that they were crying about and hollering about at the beginning of the workshop. They're laughing at themselves for their deep seriousness about bullshit earlier on in their workshop participation.

Yes, often in the human experience. I'll just speak from my experience, just so I can personalize this. If I'm in a position that I have things organized in my life in certain ways, and I have a certain identity around certain things, or I have a certain prescription around certain things, the way that I relate or how I express, that it's very, to your point, manipulated or constructed.

It has been messed up pretty much, over-thought.

Yeah, it's been over-thought, over-constructed. So it takes me out of that genuine, vulnerable human place that allows me to be in fuller contact. Now, this is different than setting up an environment where people criticize each other, or attack each other, or blame each other. That's different?

Well, they do it within a context. They have someone supervising, there is a mediator. There's usually a couple of Radical Honesty trainers that assist, usually about 14 people in our week-long workshop. It's eight days long, about 10 or 12 hours a day. What happens is, one of the things we do, about four or five days into the workshop, is we ask everyone to take off all their clothes. To stand naked in front of the group and talk about their body, what they like and what they don't. We do that so they will embarrass themselves. We say, we're asking you to embarrass yourself, and we're here to help embarrass you. So they embarrass themselves, and we coach them to experience the warmth in the flesh, and the redness in the face, and all that stuff. What do you notice in your face? What do you notice in your body? We do it until it gets almost boring. People say: Well, yeah, I'm embarrassed. I've been embarrassed. I'm tired of being embarrassed. Now what? 

And what happens is, before the workshop, people have to agree to do that. You're telling me that you're going to do that, or you don't do the workshop. You've got to put up $2,000 or $3,000, and then if you don't do it, we'll just kick you out. Basically, you've made the agreement that if you don't want to do it, don't do the workshop. So we will do do the workshop. 

Then the last three days of the workshop, we're constantly here saying, put your damn clothes back on! Because they won't. They get so used to it, whenever they start being bothered, they take some clothes off. Because that was when they were just embarrassed. The humor, people are laughing and laughing and laughing in those last few days. Because they faced up to an experience, and they got the idea which is central to Radical Honesty, which is this. 

So it's tricky learning that, and one of the ways you can learn is being completely embarrassed by being naked in front of people. Well, there's a lot of turmoil, and everybody thinks that's a terrible thing, if somebody is a mental healthcare professional, to be doing there. But one of the things I learned in jail was you had some very great conversations with other people that got arrested the same time you did. They took the risk, and you did too, and you already love each other for that. So when people get naked together, they dread it and dread it, and some of them say they're going on, and some people drop out still then. Then when they do it, you can't get them to keep their clothes on, because they associate their liberation with being naked.

I mean, I appreciate it. A lot of people listening might think: Wow, that is radical! Also, it's such a metaphor around how I would say most of us are experiencing or moving through life, is covering certain things. There's an analogy. When I was doing some work with youth, I used the metaphor, I'm sure you've heard of this, of the iceberg, where what is above the waterline is what's visible to what we allow others to see, and then what's beneath the waterline is the mass of the iceberg. It's like 90% underneath the water, and it's where our dreams, our fears, our insecurities, and all these things are. So the invitation is to drop the waterline, make it more visible. I mean, standing naked with strangers that typically maybe live a little bit more modestly, that that is a real reveal. I can appreciate just challenging that and really helping provide the experience of helping someone live outside of those confounds of how they've restricted their living or what's deemed acceptable. 

To go back a moment, when you were talking about a mediator that is facilitating, what might a mediator do to help that interaction where one is wanting to criticize or blame or attack the other? 

Well, basically, it's knowing how to interrupt. You say to the person: we're going to ask you to speak to each other one at a time. I'm going to work with one person talking to the other, and the other person just sits there. It's kind of a model that's like the tip of the iceberg, you're sitting there. Then we'll ask you to say what you resent, and you do that, and then say what you appreciate. And you find several discoveries. One is that you both resent and appreciate the same person often, in somewhat different things. But once you've fully expressed and contacted them and told them the resentment and they've heard it, and they've had even some interaction back maybe, what happens is that resentment you have decreases; the intensity of the sensation is not as intense. 

So you have what we call partially forgiven, according to what you notice emerging, increasing, decreasing, receding, and eventually going away. So the transformation that is forgiveness is the goal of these interactions. It's so that you can get over your resentment of another person. But it's more deep than that. You have to get over your automatic general obedience to your own internalized top dog managing editor. 

So we have people do that a dozen or so times, and sometimes it sticks. 

Wow! So it sounds like this is a both and, in that as one is having the experience of not having this holier than thou, judgmental, virtuous thing happening, which is editing and censoring and placing things in hierarchy. Then the listener isn't necessarily needing to respond or defend.

Yeah, they don't have to. They're just being opposed to the person to work on their internal judge being a little overwhelming, and you're kind of helping them by letting them judge you. Even if you react and say you resent their judgment, you're still helping them, because you're modeling how to do it. It happens enough times, people fall in love with each other. The thing about Radical Honesty Workshops is, by the end of the eight days, everyone falls in love with each other. Just about all the time, just about everyone falls in love with each other. We try and encourage you to go ahead and love and feel it, and let it increase and decrease and recede and go away. If it emerges, that's fine. But we're not trying to obliterate or to make it happen, we're allowing it to be.

To your point, if I'm hearing you, when we can allow things to emerge and then dissipate, and the experience and the contact that exists in that being in that experience, that we feel forgiveness, we feel contact.

We feel warmth for the other person where we used to feel tension. I like the way that you nod your head, is what you will say about the same thing, when in the beginning, I resent the way you nod your head was what you said. You show what a ridiculous thing your internal judge actually is. It's kind of like a messy little busybody.

Right, look at it, it's all over the place. As far as this moment, it's categorized as this, and in that moment, it's categorized as something quite opposite. 

Now, Brad, you had mentioned trauma and people's ability to experience and maybe have a greater capacity to experience the different aspects of it. Then perhaps even, at the end of an intensive, have a different way of relating to it and making a standup comedy about it. My understanding of forgiveness, I remember I was in my Master's program at this point. I then got a PhD after that, but this was a Master's program. I had done a paper, I think it was a literature review on forgiveness, and there were over 110 definitions of forgiveness. I think it's a concept, depending if someone has a religious orientation or affiliation with the word. One of the things, the essence that I found helpful, was that one can hold: I don't condone, or I wouldn't have wanted that to happen, or I didn't necessarily like that it happened, and also accepting that it happened. It sounds like a lot of people feel that if I forgive, then I'm endorsing or I'm condoning. It sounds like what you're describing is, there can be a multiple range of feelings or experience or sensations about a traumatic experience that can come and go, and that there's still an experience.

You still don't have to accept it. You still don't have to advocate it or become a pusher of it. But the idea is, when we go and do in-depth work with each other, a lot of therapists say, you have to be careful not to re-traumatize the person. Well, you go into the trauma with the person, holding hands with them. You don't seek to make it worse, you let it be however it was the last time they cut it off. Because what is there about trauma is the resistance to experiencing it, which maintains it. You go ahead and hold hands with someone and be with someone. Have people surrounding them and saying, this is a safe place where you can do this. It's the end of the trauma, and the trauma becomes then less traumatic, while you're here with your friends facing it. You're acknowledging what occurred, rather than your hysteria about it, or whatever your judgments were to try to protect yourself with your mind. So you do have to go through a re-experiencing or experiencing something very much like what happened during the traumatizing event. But you do it with affiliates, with friends who are there with you. It's a delicate matter, and it still needs to be experienced in order to be gotten over.

Yeah, it's my understanding of EMDR even, is that they still don't know exactly why it works. But the stimulation of the left-right hemisphere of the brain, that as we do that, it gives a calming effect that allows us to confront things that maybe were too overwhelming to confront. Or have that resource or window of capacity or tolerance to basically metabolize it, and maybe process it in ways that we weren't able to otherwise. So having this holding and this support and this affiliation, to experience and to allow. Oftentimes, the association with trauma is overwhelm; an overwhelming experience that we couldn't actually fully process. So to have that resource, that's so helpful. 

And you have a book. I know we're winding down our time. Much of that book is using these philosophies and these principles, or this invitation. I mean, I know you were saying the thinking is philosophy and principles, and you're applying it to the greater context or more of the collective. Would you like to say a little bit about that here? It's a big topic. I mean, you wrote a whole book, and you've been working on it for so long. So I appreciate it's not an easy question.

It's not. It's taken me forever to write this damn book. The title of the book changed about 20 times, and the title for about three months was: That Goddamn Book. My publisher said it would be kind of hard to market, but I thought it'd be easy. But allowing things to happen versus making things happen is a dilemma where a therapist and a client dissolve together. If you're too pushy and you're making yourself do something that you resist doing, and you just increase the resistance, you're not going to help anyone. If your therapist and you are doing that, you're not going to help any. Mostly, I want to get what actually went on, I'm usually thinking, well damn! So I say, well, damn. That's what I say. It's not that I'm the expert that knows what to do. I don't really know much about what you're talking about, about the left half of the brain or the right half the brain. I've got that four quarters brain book, and it's driving me crazy. I can't remember the name of it. But anyway, it's about left and right side, both have a left side aspect and a right side aspect to them. It's enough, it's about as much as I can hold at once. 

So my general sloppy philosophy is, wait in, and be alert and aware, and see what it comes up with. If something's triggered, then I'll go and read that stuff. If something's triggered that is feeling, stay with it and trace it. Depend on your confirmation with each other of what you notice, with regard to sensation, as well as thought. Do the best you can. Certainly not that you are great experts in living, you don't know shit. But you're willing to try to help each other. So there's a certain humility.

Yes. Well, I very much appreciate you taking time to be with us and share what you've been devoting so much of your life to support people in creating contact with one another, and intimacy and human experience and the being. Then also, how this relates to our humanity and our existence as a population. I will make sure to put the links to how people can get in touch with you. It sounds like you offer these intensives, you have groups, you have your books. What would you want to encourage people to check out?

Well, about four years ago, I sold my seminar business to a group of nine people that were trained by me, and another group of about 30 that surround them, to do the workshops part. Just before I turned 80, I did that. There've been workshops every month in 11 countries in Europe. They're at last two workshops in the last year. and there's several of them in other countries and in other cities in the United States. I mostly just run the publishing, got my Sparrowhawk Publishing. So I'm still writing, but I'm not conducting workshops. People are still evolving the Radical Honesty Workshops, some of which I agree with and some of which I don't, which is good for me. It's like, it's not yours. So basically, I'm happy that things are evolving, and I would like from all the above on the way I think they should notice colorization or two.

Exactly. Well, I'll put the link to several of your books on today's podcast episode show notes. Also, are you okay if I put the link to the organization that runs the workshops?

Yeah, The Radical Honesty Institute, and my publishing. I've got my Sparrowhawk Publishing, so I want to keep doing that till I peter out. I've got maybe five or 10 more years in me. I'm trying to make it as long as humanity does, but I don't think I'm going to.

Well, again, I am grateful for your time. Is there anything else you want to mention that you want to direct people towards? 

No, I appreciate you for this whole interview. I had a good time talking to you. I appreciate you for your attention, and the way you talked and what you had to say.

Well, thank you, and it's a privilege.

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