What if the thing holding you back in life isn’t fear or failure, but your own performance? Brad Blanton is a psychotherapist, author, and the founder of Radical Honesty—a movement that strips away the masks we wear to protect ourselves and challenges us to tell the truth, even when it’s inconvenient, messy, or terrifying.
In this conversation, Brad unpacks what happens when we stop curating our image and start admitting what’s actually true about ourselves, our relationships, and the world. From his time in the Civil Rights Movement to running group therapy sessions in jail, Brad learned that intimacy isn’t built on perfection. It’s built on presence. And honesty, far from being a moral issue, is a form of emotional liberation.
This episode isn’t about being provocative. It’s about being free.
Lessons from the Episode
- We don’t lie to protect others. We lie to protect our image.
- Withholding is the most common and destructive form of dishonesty.
- Intimacy begins the moment we stop trying to be impressive.
- Real change happens when we stop avoiding discomfort and start experiencing it fully.
- Your mind is a brilliant liar. Your body tells the truth.
What Happens When You Stop Managing Your Image
Brad Blanton has been arrested sixteen times, married five times, written eight books, and built a global movement around telling the truth.
That sentence alone already tells you this conversation wasn’t going to be polite.
Brad is a psychotherapist by training, but what he’s actually spent his life doing is challenging the quiet agreement most of us make with the world: to perform, to edit ourselves, and to call that connection. His work, Radical Honesty, is less a technique than a confrontation with how much energy we spend trying to look acceptable instead of being real.
When we spoke, Brad didn’t talk about honesty as a moral virtue. He talked about it as a survival skill. Something learned early, not in therapy rooms, but in jail cells during the Civil Rights Movement, where he first noticed how much damage comes from people relating to categories instead of people.
For Brad, dishonesty isn’t just lying. It’s withholding. Not saying what you feel. Not admitting what you want. Not naming what’s actually happening in the room.
And he believes that this kind of quiet dishonesty is at the root of most human suffering from marriages that decay silently to systems that reward performance over presence.
What struck me most is how often he returned to the idea of performance. We don’t just lie to others, he says. We lie to protect an image we hope they’ll accept. We monitor ourselves constantly—thinking ahead, calculating outcomes, editing reactions—until we’re no longer in contact with anyone, including ourselves.
Radical honesty, as Brad defines it, isn’t about blurting everything out. It’s about bringing what’s already happening in the background into the foreground. Naming the tension. Acknowledging the fear. Admitting that you’re acting differently because of who’s in the room. Not to provoke, but to connect.
Listening to him, it became clear that this isn’t about being fearless. It’s about being willing. Willing to feel discomfort instead of storing it. Willing to stay present while emotions rise and fall instead of suppressing them in the name of harmony.
He talks a lot about obligation versus preference. About how much resentment builds when we do what we think we should do while ignoring what we actually want. And how often our minds convince us that honesty will destroy relationships; when, in reality, it’s often what saves them.
Brad is blunt about this: your mind is paranoid. Its job is to prevent pain, embarrassment, rejection. And in doing so, it often prevents intimacy. Thinking becomes a defense mechanism. Noticing and being with what’s actually happening is where life starts again.
Throughout the conversation, there was humor, irreverence, and a surprising softness. Brad isn’t interested in purity. He talks openly about his failed marriages, unconventional family structures, and the ways he got things wrong. Not as confession, but as evidence that honesty doesn’t require perfection.
What he keeps pointing toward is something simpler: experience the experience. Let anger rise and pass. Let sadness turn into grief, and grief into laughter. Don’t rush to fix or explain or justify. Stay long enough for the body to catch up with the mind.
When you hurt someone, stay. Don’t defend. Don’t minimize. Be there while the hurt moves through them. Forgiveness, he says, isn’t a virtue; it’s a process. One that requires honesty on both sides.
By the end of the conversation, it was hard to ignore how radical this actually is. Not because it’s extreme, but because it runs directly against how we’re trained. School, work, religion, relationships; we’re taught to manage impressions, not reveal experience.
Brad isn’t offering comfort. He’s offering responsibility. The kind that comes from recognizing that we are participants, not victims, in most of what we feel. That when we stop blaming others for what we create, we regain the power to create something else.
His work doesn’t promise happiness. It promises aliveness. Which, as it turns out, might be more sustainable.
Because meaningful connection doesn’t come from getting it right. It comes from showing up without a script, and trusting that what’s real is more nourishing than what looks good.
Takeaways from Brad
- “Honesty isn’t blurting—it’s revealing what’s been hidden.”
- “There’s a big difference between thinking and noticing. One defends. The other connects.”
- “When you hurt someone, don’t run. Stay. Let them feel it. Let you feel it.”
- “Your preference matters more than your obligation. That’s where resentment ends and real connection begins.”