Radical Honesty: the art of direct seduction and verbal defense

There is something to be learned from a rainstorm. When meeting with a sudden shower, you try not to get wet and run quickly along the road. But doing such things as passing under the eaves of houses, you still get wet. When you are resolved from the beginning, you will not be perplexed, though you will still get the same soaking. This understanding extends to everything

~ Hagakure: the book of the Samurai

Radical Honesty: for Seduction and beyond...

"Ha-Ha-Ha. Oh my god, how can you say THAT!?", said the cute brunette with an amazed smile. Her short friend crossed her arms and gave me a smirk, looking first at me and then at her friend.

"Ha. You laugh like that because you are sexually aroused", I nodded with supreme satisfaction and then looked at her friend with examination. "... and you crossed your arms because I made you feel uncomfortable", I said childishly and this made her to unfold her arms and laugh out loud.

Quick recap for those bastards that always arrive late at movies and they have to make everyone in the row stand until they get to their back seat: While I was waiting outside a bar, I went up to a gorgeous girl and told her with a smile: a) "Hi" and b) "I want to get you home and have sex with you and I think you should know about it".

However, what was REALLY strange was that she did not slap me, she did not call her two-meter-tall-brother to kick the crap out of me and no, she did not run away.

Instead, she smiled back at me.

... And it felt greaaaat.:)

In the twenty five minutes that followed, we negotiated: she told me she was indifferent, I told her back that she should know her place in the market and she should not over exaggerate and after some tough counter arguments ... I got her number.

I know, you would expect me to do something impressive like stealing her from a group of twenty tough looking rugby players, kissing her under a romantic moon and taking her home to have amazing sex with her and her short friend in the bathtub. Along with a sheep.

I would like to show off like that too. But, hey! ... at least I am honest.

However, what did happen was that I had one of the most sincere seducing sessions of my life: during those twenty minutes I did not think and I did not strategize: I just acted. I just said whatever popped in my mind.

And it worked :)

Years would pass until I found out that what I did that night had a name. RADICAL HONES

Radical Honesty - You want me to say WHAT ?!

Radical Honesty is a concept introduced by Dr. Blanton, a 68 year old psychotherapist from Virginia. The fact that he calls himself "a white trash with a PhD", made me wanting to learn more about his life - and I didn't get disappointed. Blanton has been living a life that can be called anything but uninteresting: he got a PhD when he was twenty five years old from the University of Texas, he lived as a hippy, he supported the civil rights movement, he worked as a psychotherapist, he got married, he had children, he divorced, he got married again (he is married with a twenty five year's old Swedish air stewardess) and he ran as a candidate for the 2004 congress elections with quite a success. During his entire life he had had sex with more than 500 (five hundred) women (!), several times with more than one. This result is partly due to his radical honesty approach.

Blanton claims that most of the bad things in our lives originate from not being honest to ourselves and to others.

And he has some pretty good arguments, too.

He then tried this type of approach to marriage counselling, where steaming-red wives told their husbands to go to hell for the right reasons, while releasing all their suppressed anger until there was nothing more left to 'release' and the couple could leave the room happy and reborn. He counselled couples and advised them to go and tell each other, not only how many times they have cheated each other but also how many times they had orgasm with that other person, how did they like it best and which member of their other lover did they suck first.

Why Radical Honesty ?

This is a site that has advocated sneaky manipulative methods applied to all kind of dumb and funny life situations. Some of the more steady readers of this site must be scratching their heads right now: "Is this bastard going to turn softy on us, now ??".

"Sometimes the direct way is the most effective one".

Radical Honesty and relationships

This approach is as comfortable as eating an unpeeled banana. However, it is far more effective than any other manipulative technique. With it you can make friends, seduce people and liberate oppressed energy. In any case you will make the relationship advance.

It consists of telling the other person exactly what you are feeling about him/her. If they have done something good, go up to them and tell them with a smile "I appreciate you for ..." and add a reason after. If they have done something that hurt you (small or bad), you should tell them "I resent you for .." with all the emotions that may come along.

Understand: there are no bad emotions. Evaluations are bad. Emotions are just a liberation of energy.

This approach will shatter egos, it will reveal true friends and it will bring new lovers to your bed - or bathroom. In any case after the dust will settle, it will make your life more vivid. In every sense of the way.

Verbal Abuse and Radical Honesty

When one has made a decision to kill a person, even if it will be very difficult to succeed by advancing straight ahead, it will not do to think about going at it in a long roundabout way. The Way of the Samurai is one of immediacy, and it is best to dash in headlong.

~ Tsunetomo Yamamoto, Hagakure: the book of the Samurai

In a previous post, there was a talk about how to deal with verbal abusers. The radical honesty approach proposes a good solution to this: just tell them your feelings about them. "I resent you for insulting me like that","I do not like you when you do this", are two good verbal punches. This not only sets the record straight but also sets a trap for them. If the person continues to abuse you while you have declared that you do not like it, then he/she is violating a social norm. This means that now you have a green light for treating him/her as you wish, including cutting the relationship all-together, framing him/her openly as an abuser.

[This is a better alternative than revenge. The revenge for one old friend sleeping with another friend's girlfriend involved a locked bathroom door, a chocolate cake and a looooooot of laxative. The word agony does not fully describe that scene.]

In the battle of emotions vs words, unless one of the two has a relevant professional education, emotions will always win.

What is a winner with this approach is that it has a conditioning spin: every time he/she says something that disturbs you, he/she gets a slap. After one or three times this person will anchor a negative feeling to the act of trying to hurt you. He or she then faces a dilemma: either continue and face an escalating negative reaction or stop it and change.

People ALWAYS follow their feelings, mo matter what. Even when it has to do with masochists.

For you this is ideal. You do not have to think and thus you do not accumulate negative energy by trying to strategize your responses or by making negative future scenarios. You just say what you feel and this LIBERATES negative energy (emotions) instead of keeping it trapped inside you. For the verbal abuser this is trouble for all the opposite of the above reasons. What else could that mother of a dead soldier say to George Bush when he wished her "merry Christmas and a happy new year" ?

What if you are getting angry/sad a bit too often with people?

You cannot go on hiding this. You can unlearn this pattern as easily as you learned to bike. Find someone that can help you to do that.

Is it applicable in every domain ?

I do not know. However, what I do know is that people around me that have been using it, they have won professionally and emotionally ENORMOUSLY because they kept clean good relationships with their bosses, lovers and friends. Furthermore, people around them respect them more for being bold and direct. They cannot be manipulated by most techniques presented in this site, because this approach shatters bullshit: this IS the cure for it.

Now, as any philosophy or style of life, it should enter one's life progressively. Little by little, in order to test its limits and its potentials. First, at people that do not really matter and little by little even to those that matter.

Should this be always used ?

Game theory dictates that not all games will be played optimally if you use the same strategy all along the way - pure strategy equilibrium. However, all games can be played optimally if the combination is altered in a correct manner - mixed strategy equilibrium.

In all fighting, the direct method may be used for joining battle, but indirect methods will be needed in order to secure victory. In battle, there are not more than two methods of attack - the direct and the indirect; yet these two in combination give rise to an endless series of maneuvers. The direct and the indirect lead on to each other in turn. It is like moving in a circle - you never come to an end. Who can exhaust the possibilities of their combination?

~ Sun Tzu, The Art of War

Radical Honesty for introspection and happy living

We are all born free. However, the primal reason why we don't live free has nothing to do with politics or religion. The reason why me and you have suffered most of our lives is that we have forgot how to PERCEIVE and we have replaced it with JUDGING - ourselves, values or even others.

Once upon a time, there was a little tiny girl sitting in a garden. She was sitting there all by her self and she was busy watching a big tree. She was watching the way the leaves were dancing and how they were casting shadows to one another, she was listening to the sounds that they were making and she was feeling calm as a kitten. Her mind was empty and all she was doing was to observe. She was in her little paradise full of smells, sounds and pictures.

At some point she picked up a leaf that was right under the tree and she held it up against the sun. It was brownish, almost orange. She then noticed that the leaf looked a bit like the tree: it had a small trunk that was red from which many different smaller branches would spread. She didn't think anything specific, she was just watching as much details as her little brown eyes could register.

"This is a dead leaf, Maria. Leave it down", said a voice behind her. Her father was holding a newspaper.

"It is dirty leaf, my sweety. It fell from the tree. It is no good, leave it down and wipe your hands, sweety", said the big man.

"Come here I'll tell you all about it" said the man with a smile and the little girl run to him.

"This is a tree that is loosing its leaves every winter", said the father with a somewhat serious tone and he then explained to Maria everything there was to know about trees and dirty leaves.

From that day on, Maria never really looked again at another tree with her own eyes. For, every time she was laying her eyes on a new tree, her internal dialog would pop up telling her that "THIS IS A TREE". Furthermore, she never looked at the leaves on the ground again as her daddy had told her that they were 'not clean'.

This is the effect of moralism.

This is what has happened on every human being, including you and me. We are no longer free and what holds us from being free is our own internal dialog, our own set of judgements that does not let our 'being' set free from our 'mind'.

As a result we live our lives in a constant battle between mind and being.

We want to eat but we starve because we must not get fat. We are not hungry but we eat because, it is twelve o'clock. We are attracted to her but we do not tell her, because our mind is afraid that it will get rejected. It evaluates instead of perceiving. Our body wants but our mind hesitates. We bury sexual energy inside us because it is not moral, polite or proper. We do the same with anger. Someone steps on us but we do not tell him because it is impolite. So we keep that anger trapped inside us. Next time we see that person again something in our behavior is colder and more hostile. The other person picks this up and a downward spiral in our relationship starts. Go in the vocabulary and search 'R' for Racism.

We end up living the rest of our lives in a lie because we pay attention to our mind instead of our being: we listen to our own internal dialog instead of our gut feeling. We think, instead of acting.

Instead of living in a world of perceptions and in the now, we live in an imaginary world of future scenarios or we remain locked in past events. And we judge ourselves and others every step of that way. We should have grown up but for some reason we got stuck in that part of our upbringing.

The tragedy of the human being IS its own mind. This is now endangering our species which if it doesn't mature soon, it risks of disappearing as its technical design ability has surpassed its psycho-emotional evolution. We are a monkey with a gun.

It is time to let our internal dialog go.

We talk to ourselves incessantly about our world. In fact we maintain our world with our internal talk. And whenever we finish talking to ourselves about ourselves and our world, the world is always as it should be. We renew it, we rekindle it with life, we uphold it with our internal talk. Not only that, but we also choose our paths as we talk to ourselves. Thus we repeat the same choices over and over until the day we die, because we keep on repeating the same internal talk over and over until the day we die. A warrior is aware of this and strives to stop his internal talk.

~ Carlos Castaneda

Have fun with it.

And remember to read the full book. This is a book that you cannot afford to miss. As the #1 rule of engineering says: RTFM. For an extreme seduction manual read here .

(Read The Freaking Manual)