Why “Acting Right” Might Be Hurting Your Relationship
Have you ever found yourself walking on eggshells or stuffing your feelings just to keep the peace? We are often taught to prioritize cultural manners over our own truth, but “acting right” can actually create distance between you and your partner. Embracing a practice of radical honesty means identifying those moments where you are withholding and choosing to speak your truth instead. It sounds scary because it requires us to unlearn deep-seated coping mechanisms, but the reward is a level of transparency that most never experience. The hardest part isn’t admitting what the other person did; it’s being brave enough to share your own embarrassing foibles and vulnerabilities. When you stop lying to protect feelings and start sharing from the heart, you create a stable base for true growth and co-healing.
Full Transcript
[00:00:00]Susan: radical honesty piece was very, very good. And I’m not sure that everyone can do it.
[00:00:05]Susan: Radical honesty is, you know, that’s Brad Blanton’s work and we were friends with Tabor Chadburn and so we were aware of it and we just decided when we were seeing our therapists, to just be completely honest. And what we realized about being completely honest was we’re, it was a couple of things. One was that we’re pretty rational people and not everybody’s lucky enough to be married to, you know, to to be in a rational right relationship.
[00:00:34]Susan: That that’s a big thing. There are a lot of people who don’t have the. Growth mindset and willingness to learn. There are a lot of people who would never, ever in a million years get naked in a sex workshop and put themselves through the things that we did to grow together. Which is one of the reasons we started personal life media was because we knew that very few people would have the courage [00:01:00] to go to a place like that and have those experiences.
[00:01:03]Susan: And so we wanted to create things that couples could do at home themselves. And because Tim was such a part of my healing journey from the trauma that I had, and I realized that in many cases, couples are doing co healing with each other from all their childhood trauma. The radical honesty was interesting because radical makes it sound like it’s like this.
[00:01:27]Susan: It’s, it’s kind of like the term relationship anarchy. It’s very similar. Radical honesty and relationship anarchy are very similar. Radical honesty just means you’re going to identify every time that you are withholding, walking on eggshells, stuffing your feelings, you know, letting things go when instead, you have an opportunity to speak your truth to your partner and have them hear that it sounds scary because it’s [00:02:00] radical, but the thing about it that’s the hard part is actually unlearning, lying, unlearning the endemic cultural morays that teach us all those coping mechanisms to act right so that you don’t hurt somebody’s feelings.
[00:02:18]Susan: I was lucky because at that time we also did the work of David Data. We, we knew David, we went to his workshops. We learned about the feminine flow and the masculine, you know, the woman is the river and the man is the river banks. And that worked well for us. He never yells, but I rage, I fucking rage.
[00:02:39]Susan: Mm-hmm. I’ll scream and stomp my feet and have a shit fit. And that’s so cathartic to me because I was never allowed to do those things. And he allows me to do it and it’s very satisfying and I can move through things quickly that way. Yeah. And he [00:03:00] can hold the space for me to do that. And what was so interesting about radical honesty was that.
[00:03:07]Susan: When you’re telling the truth, it’s actually the embarrassing things that you are experiencing that are the hard part of telling the truth. It’s not really about anything Tim did. It’s really about our own foibles and learning to tell the truth about those. And he was so good at holding anything that came up for me.
[00:03:31]Susan: And he always is, I can say whatever I need to say and I know that he’s not sure. Sometimes it’ll hurt his feelings or sometimes he’ll be like, oh shit, I had no idea. You know, like or whatever. But it doesn’t take him off his steady stance. He can metabolize it and then we move through things very quickly.
[00:03:52]Susan: And relationship anarchy is a similar concept where it’s a new concept and it’s a relationship construct that is basically, [00:04:00] if you are in relationship with more than a monogamous pair, bonded couple. If you are in relationship with other people as well, it can be whatever that dynamic needs to be so that each of the people in that relationship is treated the way they wanna be treated.
[00:04:19]Susan: You understand what it is they want, what their relationship values are, how to meet their needs uniquely. And that was what we also learned how to do, was to create relationship constructs that take into account who he is, who I am, who any partners are that are also with us, and they come and go. Over time, we are a stable base and people come in and out of our lives as they grow and change and their needs change, but we are always together in that.
[00:04:50]Susan: It’s, and that’s been a challenging area of our growth in our relationship as well.
