Trusting Others with the Truth

This month, we practiced mindfulness of the fourth precept: Not lying, but speaking truthfully. I wish I could say that I am an honest person and that this precept comes easily to me. But in fact, this month I was reminded of how much I still struggle with honesty in certain situations.

Working with this precept helped me to probe deeper into why I’m not more consistently truthful, and to meet myself, and others, with greater understanding and compassion. It motivated me to redouble my efforts to engage in honest, upright speech, thought, and action.

This work brought me back time and again to three important aspects of honesty---and dishonesty---in my own life: lying to make others happy, lying to self, and using honesty as a weapon.

#Insecurity, Not Evil

What is honesty? In a basic sense, I think of honesty as meaning “to speak truthfully”-- not saying things that I know to be untrue. Since we live in an age plagued with so much disinformation, we might, as ethical practitioners, also go one step further. We could say that being honest also means taking responsibility for ensuring that what we think and what we say is true.

Growing up, I was told not to tell lies. Lying was associated with deceit and evil intent. But I was also brought up by a parent with mental health issues---probably a mood disorder. One day, they would be loving and supportive, and the next, incomprehensibly angry and impatient. In the morning, I could do something and they wouldn’t care at all; in the afternoon, I could do the same thing, and be told I was a bad, selfish, spoiled person who didn’t care about others at all. Their mood determined the reaction---not my behaviour itself.

This was confusing for me as a child, and at an early age, I learned, without realizing it, to read my parent’s mood. When I sensed danger, I tried to engage in people-pleasing behaviour: remaining silent, or saying what I thought they wanted to hear, to avoid being scolded. I quickly developed the reflex of dishonesty in the hopes of avoiding conflict.

Now I’m almost 39 years old and those habits continue to play out. I do my best not to intentionally lie and deceive others, yet I can still observe the ways in which I can alter, obscure or avoid the truth in order to attempt to maintain harmony. And I can also see how continually engaging in these desperately people-pleasing behaviours ultimately undermines trust in my relationships.

So the first lesson for me this month was to reframe dishonesty and the failure to adhere perfectly to the fourth precept---from something evil and intentionally deceptive, to something I do out of insecurity, fear, and the desire to be loved: as a survival technique I learned through trauma. Thinking about lying this way allows me to respond more supportively to my own errors, as well as show more compassion to others who struggle in the same way.

#Trusting Others with the Truth

My practice to try to be more honest is to trust others with the truth. I think this can serve as a kind of koan when we are feeling anxious about how people are going to respond when we are honest with them. People may not always be impressed with or appreciative of me if I am 100% honest with them, but that is okay; the mere act of being honest, even if we’re not sharing pleasing news, fosters trust in the relationship.

I have a colleague at work, another teacher, who’s quite blunt when she speaks to her class. I find myself thinking: “I would never speak to students that way!” Yet at the end of the day, I can see how much her students rely and depend on her. They recognize that she is completely honest with them, and they appreciate and are reassured by it. She trusts them with the truth, and they trust her more.

Since as a child I learned in a very painful way not to trust others with the truth, I have to overcome a lot of resistance when it comes to being more straightforward. I always want to polish things, to make them sound a little more pleasing than they are. To make the truth more flattering. But when I am able to break with that pattern, I’m almost always surprised at how positive the outcome is. When I tell people the truth, the world does not end, and in most cases they are appreciative and I feel relief. In this sense, I think honesty is a muscle that gets stronger and more controlled the more we use it.

Honesty---trusting yourself and others with the truth---is a practice.

#Appropriate Speech: Honesty and Compassion

On the other side of the spectrum from people like me, who partially avoid honesty by trying to make everything sound more pleasing, are people who wield honesty like a bludgeon. They are the “just telling it like it is” people who, I believe, use honesty as a kind of alibi for brutality. If presenting the truth in an indirect, diluted form so that it doesn’t upset someone is one way of avoiding honesty, weaponizing it as a way to harm someone you don’t like is another. And the latter is, I think, equally dishonest.

Right speech calls us to consider not only “Is it true?’, but also, “Is it appropriate?” and “Is it helpful?” The truth may not always be pleasant, but it can nonetheless be helpful if it removes delusions and reorients us towards the way things actually are. When we know the truth of a situation, we can respond appropriately.

However, when we don’t ask whether what we’re sharing, and when and how we’re sharing it, is actually appropriate and helpful, then we ourselves are being dishonest about our intentions. Do not lie to please others. But also, don’t tell the truth in order to injure them. Ask: Is it true? Is it appropriate? Is it helpful? If it isn’t, reconsider your intentions, how you’re framing the information, and your timing.

Honesty can be radical, but it isn’t at an extreme: it is the middle path between bluntness and watering-down (or avoiding altogether). And its correlate, I think, is acceptance: being the kind of person who can hear the truth, can handle the truth, and can respond skillfully.

We invite others to be honest by making our relationships the kinds of spaces that can receive and hold truth---even when it isn’t pretty.

Opening my mouth to speak or to respond, I offer what is accurate, appropriate and helpful. Not to startle, nor to soothe, but to balance: To give us both solid ground to stand on.