A great deal has been written about trust and love, and that if you can build a trusting, loving relationship, then people can be honest with each other.
I believe this idea is exactly backwards.
It is very nice if I feel trusting and loving toward someone,
but if I don't feel this way, what can I do about it?
Trust and love are my feeling responses toward another person,
and these responses cannot be manufactured.
Either I feel love or I don't.
I cannot decide to love or trust, but I can decide to be personally honest or not.
And when I choose to be really honest and say what I experience and what I feel,
I am showing that I can be trusted.
Likewise, honesty does not always bring a response of love,
but it is absolutely essential to it.
When I am honestly myself, and you respond warmly and with caring, then love exists.
If I calculate and put on phony behavior in order to please you,
you may love my behavior,
but you cannot love me,
because I have hidden my real existence behind this artificial behavior.
Even when you love in response to my phony behavior, I cannot really receive your love.
It is poisoned by my knowledge that the love is for the image I have created, not for me.
I also have to be continually on guard to be sure that I maintain my image so that your love does not disappear.
Since I have shut myself off from your love in this way,
I will feel more lonely and unloved, and try even more desperately to manipulate myself and you in order to get this love.
In contrast, when I am honestly myself and you respond to me as I am in that moment,
I can receive this fully and know the satisfaction of being really related with you.
This honest relating is not always joyful or pleasant —
it is sometimes sad, sometimes angry, etc.—but it is always solid and real and vitally alive
This vitality of relationship is, in fact, the love we try so desperately to win.
It is only available to people who practice telling the truth.
-Brad Blanton-
(Radical Honesty)
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