Emotional Honesty

From an article entitled Emotional Honesty. Concerning our penchant for hiding our true emotions:

"...in many ways, society teaches us to ignore, repress, deny and lie about our feelings. For example, when asked how we feel, most of us will reply "fine" or "good," even if that is not true. Often, people will also say that they are not angry or not defensive, when it is obvious that they are.

Children start out emotionally honest. They express their true feelings freely and spontaneously. But the training to be emotionally dishonest begins at an early age. Parents and teachers frequently encourage or even demand that children speak or act in ways which are inconsistent with the child's true feelings. The child is told to smile when actually she is sad. She is told to apologize when she feels no regret. She is told to say "thank you," when she feels no appreciation. She is told to "stop complaining" when she feels mistreated. She may be told to kiss people good night when she would never do so voluntarily. She may be told it is "rude" and "selfish" to protest being forced to act in ways which go against her feelings.

Also, children are told they can't use certain words to express themselves. I have seen more than one parent tell their child not to use the word "hate," for example. And of course, the use of profanity to express one's feelings is often punished, sometimes harshly. In some cases the parent never allows the children to explain why they feel so strongly....At the same time, I have no doubt that part of a highly developed EI is knowing when to be emotionally honest, when to remain silent and when to act in line with or counter to our true feelings. There is something of a continuum of emotional honesty which includes unintended repression, full disclosure, discretionary disclosure, and intentional manipulation and emotional fraud. Furthermore, there is a constant trade-off between our short term vs. long term interests, our needs vs. others' needs and our self-judgement vs. judgement by others. Because all of this is largely an emotional problem to be solved, and a complex one at that, I believe emotional intelligence is being used when we make our decisions about when and how much to be emotionally honest. In my experience, approaching full emotional honesty simplifies my life, helps me see who will accept me as I am -- which in itself is a freeing discovery -- and offers me the opportunity for a rare sense of integrity, closeness and fulfillment.

Nathaniel Branden writes:

"If communication is to be successful, if love is to be successful, if relationships are to be successful, we must give up the absurd notion that there is something "heroic" or "strong" about lying, about faking what we feel, about misrepresenting, by commission or omission, the reality of our experience or the truth of our being. We must learn that if heroism and strength mean anything, it is the willingness to face reality, to face truth, to respect facts, to accept that that which is, is."


This is now me speaking. As usual, I don't think I have any absolute answers. I am starting to doubt that things are that simple. These blog posts are mostly equivalent to indulging in thoughts, and since I am usually against most types of indulgences, this may be out of character. In any case, I have trouble with this concept of emotional honesty. Naturally I am too open with my feelings. I may end up telling a complete stranger how I am really feeling. I just assume that when someone casually says "how's it going?" that they actually mean it as a question and not just a greeting.
Despite this side to my nature, many things over the years have told me to suppress expressing my feelings freely. As a missionary I was convinced that I should basically let anything that bothered me just be ignored. It was my problem if I got annoyed or upset. I still am very persuaded by a talk from conference where a seventy talked about a wife that decided a good exercise would be to share five things that were bothering them each concerning their partner. She went first talking about small things like how he ate his food, etc. When it was his turn, he just said that he couldn't think of anything about her that bothered him. The talk's moral was to let little things like that slide. While I still think that this should often be the case, I am wondering if it isn't better to take the advice of this article and be more open. I agree that trust is probably best built in an atmosphere where one shares more than one conceals, but at the same time, how do create this atmosphere that encourages openness? Furthermore, this article says that "emotional intelligence" consists of being able to tell when one should be emotionally honest. She doesn't say more though. And neither do I.