How We Got into Mind Trap Land, and How We Might Escape

We were all taught at a young age to manage the emotions of others. We were given rules to shut us up, but we were never given permission, the key, to unlock our mouths and let the truth come out. We were taught to fear speaking our own minds with guidance like this: “You can’t say that. Don’t point! Be quiet. Be good. Be nice. Give Auntie a kiss, don’t hurt her feelings. Don’t make Daddy mad. That’s a bad word. Don’t you talk back to me!”

The effects of these demands, along with the threat of punishment or of the withdrawal of affection and approval, stay with us long after childhood.

Younger kids are often honest. To get them to stop saying what they see and think they have to be trained out of it. And they usually are lying by simple withholding by the time they finish junior high school.

Our schooling, formal and informal, teaches us how to lie about what we notice, so we won’t mention the “wrong” things and upset someone or get in trouble. We come to believe that the happiness of others depends on whether or not we act in some way that pleases those people.

The belief that we are responsible for protecting other people’s moods is an exaggeration. For some of us, meeting this expectation becomes a terrible and crippling life sentence. A lot of parenting can be summed up as, “Either please people who you are obligated to please or constantly catch hell for not doing it well enough.”

To be free, we need to grow up to be honest instead of compliant, and risk supporting each other in a practice of honesty, even if it sometimes hurts us or makes us mad. Honesty won’t kill the nourishment of our connection to others the way lying does. We advocate honesty whenever it turns up even if it is offensive. And we encourage you not to quit there. Go further. Be honest about appreciation, joyfulness, and love as well.

Let’s face it, not many of us were rewarded for telling the truth. Instead, we learned to lie pretty well. We lie so well and so quickly, in fact, that we often don’t notice how pervasive our lying is. Then, when we do catch ourselves, we rationalize our lying away, saying it’s because we don’t want to “make him mad” or “hurt her feelings.”

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In this book, we’re going to show you how to lose your presumptuous, self-sabotaging mind and work to get dumber and come to your senses.

We have all been brainwashed to think otherwise, but we need to get dumber rather than smarter. We need to become good, dumbfounded noticers, instead of reactive interpreters of reality. That way we can experience reality instead of trying to make our imaginings become real. We have to speak honestly and stay in touch even when it is uncomfortable, and then keep doing so until the discomfort changes by being experienced more completely and not resisted.

Being radically honest is a powerful idea whose time has come, and it has taken a long time to get here.

When we transform grief to joy, anger to love, or damnation to forgiveness, it is done by telling the descriptive truth about what we notice about ourselves and others, as well as what we notice ourselves imagining about it.

Sharing these things honestly allows a magic to happen that the mind can’t keep up with, much less control. Radical honesty brings about an entirely different quality of life in connection to each other. A better quality of contact.