You’re A Liar…

…Just like Donald Trump and me

My name is Dr. Brad Blanton. I am the lead author of this book and I’ve written a bunch of other books. I am a psychologist, writer, and seminar leader. My five or six books on Radical Honesty, including this book, are based on my decades of experience in the private practice of psychotherapy in Washington, D.C., many years in the civil rights and anti-Vietnam war movements, being a hippie, having lots of psychedelic experiences, a lot of training and psychological work with authors and teachers (many Gestalt therapists), getting married and divorced a number of times, fathering and helping raise children, running workshops and seminars, and co-leading groups with other teachers and therapists, running for public office, reading a lot of books, watching a lot of movies, having thousands of conversations with my peers over the last sixty years or so, and having intimate, honest relationships with a few hundred other people. I have traveled around the world and all over the world. I have lived a long time and learned a lot.

I am not the dumbest person you might come across although I’m not the smartest person you could find either. I am mostly goodhearted and I am also an arrogant jerk and an asshole who thinks most other people are too fucking stupid for me to waste my goddamned time writing to them. I also feel sorry for you and everybody else I know in a patronizing fashion and think you should be grateful for my pity and kind condescension. I want to help you suffer less because of your ignorance about your mind’s interference with the flow of your life, and your inability to interfere with your own mind’s interference. I want to help us make a better world that works for more people more often, and one that keeps on getting better instead of stupider. Then, hopefully we might avoid having us all kill ourselves of earlier than we would have had to if we could have got over shit faster.

My life work has been about addressing failures of connection that come from attachment to our minds’ always-outdated assessments and interpretations.

My writings, therapeutic work, and teaching have been directed at encouraging people to heal disconnection by learning to reconnect with others at a deeper and wider level. They do that by being honest in a descriptive, nonwithholding way that invites contact, affiliation, connection, and open conflict until feelings change, from down deeper, at the level of sensation.

Then our thinking changes in response to noticing sensations at the level of feeling. This replaces categorization and alienation through secrecy and withholding and phoniness, which lead to more endless, stupid, goddamned lies and needless destruction.

I named the process I teach and write about Radical Honesty, and it has been my passion and obsession for the past six decades. I believe that commonplace, “acceptable” lying is the greatest threat to our existence and I believe that if we start telling the truth and relating with one another authentically rather than lying and withholding and pretending, our visceral truth telling could save us from extinction.