So You've Been Publicly Shamed

Eight. The Shame-Eradication Workshop

Twelve Americans — strangers to one another — sat in a circle in a room in the JW Marriott hotel in Chicago. There were buttoned-down, preppy-looking businessmen and businesswomen, a young Burning Man — type drifter couple, a man with a Willie Nelson ponytail and deep lines in his face. In the middle sat Brad Blanton. He was a large man. His shirt, open to his chest, was yellow-white, like his hair. With his sunburned face, he looked like a red ball abandoned in dirty snow.

Now he stirred. “To begin,” he said, “I want you to tell us something that you don’t want us to know.”

• • •

A lot of people move around in life chronically ashamed of how they look, or how they feel, or what they said, or what they did. It’s like a permanent adolescent concern. Adolescence is when you’re permanently concerned about what other people think of you.”

It was a few months earlier, and Brad Blanton and I were talking on Skype. He was telling me about how, as a psychotherapist, he had come to understand how so many of us “live our lives constantly in fear of being exposed or being judged as immoral or not good enough.”

But Brad had invented a way for us to eradicate those feelings, he told me. His method was called “Radical Honesty.”

[Brad Blanton] says we should toss out the filters between our brains and our mouths. If you think it, say it. Confess to your boss your secret plans to start your own company. If you’re having fantasies about your wife’s sister, Blanton says to tell your wife and tell her sister. It’s the only path to authentic relationships. It’s the only way to smash through modernity’s soul-deadening alienation.

— A. J. JACOBS, “I THINK YOU’RE FAT,” Esquire, JULY 24, 2007

Brad’s thinking was that shame grows when we internalize shame. Just look at the frantically evasive Jonah. Whereas look at Max Mosley. Brad’s favorite animal was a dog. A dog doesn’t lie. A dog doesn’t feel shame. A dog lives in the moment. Max Mosley was like a dog. We should be like dogs. And our first step toward being like dogs was to reveal to the group something about ourselves that we really didn’t want people to know.

—

By coincidence, a friend of mine, the writer and broadcaster Starlee Kine, took Brad’s course a few years ago for a book she was writing. I met Starlee before I flew to Chicago. I told her not to tell me what to expect — I wanted to be surprised — but she did tell me the first part. She said it always begins with the participants’ being asked to reveal a secret.

“With my group,” Starlee told me, “the first man said that his secret was that he hadn’t paid taxes in ten years. Everyone nodded and looked disappointed that his secret wasn’t so sensational. Then the next man said that his secret was that he had once murdered a man. He was in a truck with a man, and he punched him in his head and threw him out, and the guy was dead, and another car ran him over. And he didn’t go to jail and he never told anyone.”

“What did Brad Blanton say?” I asked her.

“He said, ‘Next. Great.’ So then it got to the next woman. She said, ‘Oh! My secrets are so boring! I suppose I can talk about how I have sex with my cat.’ Then the murderer raised his hand and said, ‘Excuse me. I’d like to add something to my secret. I’d like to add that I also have sex with my cat.’”

Starlee had found Brad’s course crazy. I probably would have too had I not been seasoned in the destruction of Jonah and Justine and the salvation of Max.

—

“Well,” began a woman called Melissa, sitting opposite me in the circle. Melissa was a successful lawyer. But her passion was sadomasochistic sex. “Humiliation is my biggest turn-on,” she said. She has even built herself her own private dungeon. But Melissa’s sex dungeon wasn’t her secret. Her secret is that she earned more than $550,000 last year and felt ashamed to have earned so much.

Later, when I recounted this to Starlee, she explained to me that Melissa is actually a regular at Brad’s workshops. She’s Brad’s protégée.

“Melissa tells everyone about her dungeon,” Starlee said. “How you respond to it is her way of judging how enlightened you are.”

Vincent sat next to Melissa. His secret was that he was beginning to regret signing up for Brad’s course. “It was a snap decision and $500 is lot of money for me,” he said. “I was going to spend it on visiting my girlfriend in Thailand.”

“Has he paid in full?” Brad asked Melissa.

“Only the $150 deposit,” Melissa replied.

“Get his money,” Brad said to Melissa.

Brad was making the radically honest statement that he was more concerned about getting the $350 Vincent owed him than assuring Vincent that he’d made a good decision signing up for the course.

“Can I pay you what I owe you in the break?” Vincent asked.

Brad shot Vincent a suspicious glance.

Emily spoke next. Her secret was that she sells marijuana for a living.

“Like by the ounce?” someone asked her.

“By the pound,” she replied. “I charge about $3,400 a pound.”

“Are you worried about being caught?” I asked her.

“No,” she said.

“We’re very discreet,” Emily’s boyfriend, Mario, told the room.

Mario’s secret was that he sometimes tells Emily he thinks she’s fat.

“You’re not fat,” I said to Emily.

Mario’s other secret is “I use my lucid dreams as opportunities to rape women. I find the first girl that’s around and I do whatever I want. I have my way with her.”

“Can I be the star of your next dream?” said Melissa.

I had a headache. “Does anyone have any headache tablets?” I asked the room. Melissa reached into her pocket and pulled out a little baggie filled with loose pills of different shapes and colors. She picked out two and handed them to me. I swallowed them.

“Thank you,” I said. “I have no idea what kind of pills you just gave me. It actually crossed my mind that you might have just given me a date rape drug.”

Wow, what a good feeling! I thought. I thought it so I said it, with no possibility of negative consequences!

Melissa glanced inscrutably at me.

Jim was an engineer for an oil company.

“I don’t want you guys to know…” Jim’s voice cracked. “… that I am a drug addict.”

He made this declaration with such quiet power that it took the room aback.

“They don’t drug-test you at your oil company?” someone asked Jim.

“Yes, they do,” Jim replied.

“You don’t flunk it?” asked Brad.

“No,” said Jim. “I haven’t flunked it yet.”

“How do you get around it?” asked Brad’s friend Thelma, whose secret was that she watches gay male porn.

“I… don’t know,” Jim said.

“What drugs are you addicted to?” Brad asked Jim.

“I like… marijuana,” Jim said.

There was a short silence. “How much do you smoke?” I asked him.

“In three weeks I’ll smoke an ounce of marijuana,” said Jim.

“Is that it?” screeched Emily.

“I was once very attracted to a man I thought was a woman and ended up spending time with him and paying for that time,” Jim said.

Everyone looked a little less underwhelmed at Jim’s new secret.

Mary’s secret was how badly she was taking being rejected by her partner, Amanda. “I’m fifty and I’m alone,” Mary said. She looked at the floor. “I’ve lost myself.”

Mary wasn’t just sitting around moping at home. It was worse than that. She was repeatedly telephoning Amanda. There was a time when Amanda would say to Mary, “One day I’ll marry you.” Now all Amanda was telling her was, “Stop calling me.”

Brad told Mary to take the Hot Seat. He pointed to an empty chair.

“What would you say to Amanda if she was sitting opposite you right now?” Brad asked her.

“I’d tell her that I resent her for saying don’t contact me.”

“Say it to her,” said Brad.

“I resent you for saying, ‘Don’t call me,’” Mary said quietly into space.

“See what it feels like to use an angry voice,” Brad said.

“FUCK YOU,” Mary yelled at the empty chair. “I resent you for saying, ‘One day I’m going to marry you,’ and then you didn’t. So FUCK YOU. I resent you because you’re such a fucking bitch sometimes. I resent you for treating me like… I resent you for saying all those beautiful things and you took them all back…” Mary was sobbing.

“Good,” Brad said. “When are you going to say this to her face?”

Mary swallowed. “I’m wondering at what location…”

“Call her up,” Brad told her. “Say, ‘It’s not a request. We’re either going to do this alone or in front of your whole goddamned office and you’ve got one day to make up your fucking mind.’”

“Okay,” said Mary, quietly.

“So, when?” Brad said.

“By next weekend?” Mary said.

“Good,” Brad said.

Jack, a veterinarian sex addict, looked uneasy. “How do you put this approach in the context of people not calling the police?” he asked Brad.

“You’re asking people to leave this session,” I agreed, “and do something to people who aren’t part of this. People must get hurt. The police must get called sometimes.”

“People call the police sometimes.” Brad shrugged. “It takes twenty minutes for the police to get there. So you’ve got twenty minutes to complete all your anger.”

“I can’t imagine this always works out well,” I said.

“That’s because you’ve been brainwashed your entire life about all the terrible things that are going to happen,” Brad said. “Yeah, people get mad. People get upset. But people get over stuff. People worry about what happens in the first five seconds. But I’m concerned about the next five minutes. I’m committed to people staying with each other until they get over this.”

This last part, Brad said, was critical. You remain with the person you’ve just been yelling at until the resentments fizzle. That’s how wounds heal.

Vincent — the man who was regretting signing up for the course — suddenly announced, “I’m sorry. I’m leaving. This isn’t for me. I’m sorry.”

“I resent you for saying you’re leaving,” said Melissa.

“Okay,” said Vincent.

“I don’t think I’ll ever get over this resentment,” said Melissa.

Wow, I thought. Give the man a break. She’s only just met him. “I resent you telling him that you’ll never get over the resentment of him leaving,” I told Melissa.

“I appreciate you for sitting there listening to me,” Melissa said to Vincent.

“Thank you,” Vincent said.

“Shit or get off the pot, man,” said Jack the veterinarian sex addict. “I resent you for saying you’re leaving and I resent that you’re still here.”

Vincent left.

The day’s session ended. I said I hoped nobody minded but I was tired so I wasn’t going to have dinner with the group. I was just going to watch TV and send some e-mails instead.

“I feel slighted,” said Brad.

“Ach, no you don’t,” I said. Although I knew that he did.

• • •

There was a reason I needed to go to my room that I hadn’t explained to anyone. I had a work crisis. A story I’d been working on had turned chaotic, and my editor and I were at loggerheads, sending each other tense e-mails.

It had sounded like an intriguing story at the beginning. There has been a tradition over the years of journalists wearing disguises to experience injustice firsthand. The pioneer was John Howard Griffin, who in 1959 stained his skin dark and spent six weeks hitchhiking as a black man through the segregated Deep South — a journey chronicled in his 1961 book Black Like Me. From time to time, editors have asked me to undertake similar journeys. After 9/11, a TV producer suggested I stain my own skin and move into a Muslim area of London. But it seemed to me like she basically wanted me to spy on Muslims, so I said no. This time, however, I’d been asked to disguise myself to experience a different injustice.

“We want you to be a woman,” the editor had said. “We’ll work with a prosthetics artist to make you unrecognizable. We’ll get a movement coach to teach you how to walk like a woman.”

“Women and men walk differently?” I asked.

“Yes,” she said.

“I never knew that,” I said. “This could be really interesting. As a man, I’m rarely stared at lasciviously. But as a woman, I might get stared at lasciviously a lot. How would that make me feel? And do women behave differently when there are no men around — like at women-only gyms and women-only saunas? I’m intrigued. I’ll do it.”

—

So I met with a prosthetics artist at a college in West London. She encased my face in alginate and took a cast. A prosthetic mask was made. She spent a couple of weeks manipulating it into womanly features. I slipped it over my face. I looked like a woman with a gigantic head. The editor called me in for a meeting.

“It’s fine,” she said. “Don’t worry. We won’t use the prosthetic head. We can still make you look exactly like a woman.”

“Are you sure?” I said.

“You’ll be amazed what a few hours with the movement coach will do,” she said.

“You don’t think we’re in danger of relying too much on the movement coach?” I said. “It had been the prosthetics that had rather sold me on the idea.”

“I promise you that we won’t let you out of this building unless you absolutely pass as a woman,” she said.

—

So, in an empty conference room in a quiet corner of the magazine’s offices, I dressed as a woman. Makeup was applied. I put on a wig and a dress and a padded bra. I spent hours under the tutelage of the movement coach. Test photographs were taken. Finally, I left the conference room and walked toward the editor’s desk in the manner that the movement coach had instructed.

She swallowed slightly when she saw me.

“They’ve done an incredible job,” she said. She turned to the deputy editor. “Haven’t they done an amazing job?”

The deputy editor swallowed slightly. “Yes,” she said.

“You look exactly like a woman,” said the editor. “Now go outside and experience life as a woman.”

“I don’t think I look like a woman,” I said.

“What are you talking about?” said the editor. “You look exactly like a woman.”

“I don’t think I look anything like a woman,” I said.

She peered at my tormented facial expression.

I hesitated for a moment. Then I walked toward the exit. Sweat smudged my foundation. I glanced back over my shoulder at the editors. They were giving me encouraging looks and indicating the door. I felt sick, short of breath. My stomach muscles clenched.

And then I stopped. I couldn’t do it. I turned, went back downstairs, and I put on my male clothes.

—

A week had passed and our relationship remained frosty. She felt I had prevaricated unprofessionally and was acting too sensitive. “Don’t over-think it, Jon,” she’d e-mailed me. “It’s just a fun feature. Shouldn’t be the cause of some sort of a midlife crisis.” I felt that the story’s original premise had fallen to pieces and the reason they were happy to send me out into the world looking nothing like a woman was that in our line of work the more humiliated a person is, the more viral the story tends to go. Shame can factor large in the life of a journalist — the personal avoidance of it and the professional bestowing of it onto others.

Nobody must ever see those test pictures, I’d been thinking all week. Never.

—

Now, as I lay in my hotel room, I understood the truth of it. My terror of humiliation had closed a door. Great adventures that might have unfolded involving me dressed as a woman would never now unfold. I’d been constrained by the terror. It had blown me off course. Which, actually, meant that I was just like the vast majority of people. I knew this from studying the work of David Buss, a professor of evolutionary psychology at the University of Texas at Austin.

One day in the early 2000s Buss was at a cocktail party when the wife of a friend began flirting with another man in front of everyone: “She was a striking woman,” Buss later wrote. “She looked at her husband derisively and made a derogatory remark about the way he looked, then turned right back to her flirtatious conversation.”

Buss’s friend stomped outside, where Buss found him fuming, saying he felt humiliated and wanted to kill his wife: “I had no doubt that he would do it. In fact, he was so wild with rage, such a transformed man, he seemed capable of killing any living thing within an arm’s reach. I became frightened for my own life.”

Buss’s friend didn’t kill his wife. He calmed down. But the incident shook Buss up. Which was why he decided to carry out an experiment. He asked five thousand people a question: Had they ever fantasized about killing someone?

“Nothing,” as Buss later wrote in his book The Murderer Next Door, “prepared me for the outpouring of murderous thoughts.”

It turned out from his survey that 91 percent of men and 84 percent of women had experienced “at least one vivid fantasy of killing someone.” There was the man who imagined “hiring an explosives specialist” to blow his boss up in his car, the woman who wanted to “break every bone” in her partner’s body, “starting with his fingers and toes, then slowly making my way to larger ones.” There was a bludgeoning with a baseball bat, a strangling followed by a beheading, a stabbing during sex. Some people were set on fire. One man was exposed to killer bees.

“Murderers are waiting,” Buss’s book bleakly concludes. “They are watching. They are all around us.”

Buss’s findings deeply distressed him. But I saw them as good news. Surely fantasizing about killing someone and then not doing it is a way we teach ourselves to be moral. So Buss’s conclusions seemed silly to me. But there was something different about his study that I found extraordinary. It was something that — as Buss’s research assistant Joshua Duntley e-mailed me—“we did not code for specifically.” It was the part where Buss asked them what had stimulated their murderous thoughts.

There was the boy who daydreamed about kidnapping his schoolmate, “breaking both his legs so he couldn’t run, beating him until his insides were a bloody pulp, then I’d tie him to a table and drip acid onto his forehead.” What had the schoolmate done to him? “He ‘accidentally’ dropped his books on my head and all his friends had a good laugh.” There was the office worker who imagined “tampering with my boss’s car brakes so he’d have a braking failure on the motorway.” Why? “He had given me the impression that I was a real loser. He would mock me in front of other people. I felt humiliated.”

And on it went. Almost none of the murderous fantasies were dreamed up in response to actual danger — stalker ex-boyfriends, etc. They were all about the horror of humiliation. Brad Blanton was right. Shame internalized can lead to agony. It can lead to Jonah Lehrer. Whereas shame let out can lead to freedom, or at least to a funny story, which is a sort of freedom too.

And so there in my room I decided that on day two of Brad’s course I would go for it. I would let the shame out. I would be Max Mosley. I would be radically honest.

• • •

On day two of Brad’s course, Brad asked me in front of the group if I’d like to take the Hot Seat, given that I’d been so quiet on day one.

I cleared my throat. Everyone was smiling expectantly at me as if I were the start of a good television program.

I hesitated.

“Actually, I won’t,” I said.

The expectant smiles turned quizzical.

“The truth is,” I explained, “I don’t think my problems are as bad as everyone else’s problems in the room. Plus, I don’t like conflict.”

I clarified that I wasn’t against conflict in a weird way: I quite enjoy watching other people being in conflict. If I notice two people yelling at each other on the street, I would often stop at a distance and have a look. But it just wasn’t my thing to participate in conflict.

“So I don’t want people to think I’m anti — Hot Seat,” I concluded. “They’ve been my favorite parts of the course so far. I find the lectures in between them quite boring but the Hot Seats are great.”

“So you want there to be a Hot Seat but you don’t want to be the one to get in it?” said Brad’s friend Thelma.

“Yes,” I said.

“I say do a Hot Seat right now, go ahead and get in it,” Thelma said.

“No, no,” I said again. “I’m honestly more comfortable watching other people do it.”

“CHICKEN SHIT!” Thelma yelled. “I call CHICKEN SHIT! If you get a chance to jump on Jon, do.”

“Ha-ha,” I said. “But seriously, I’ve got nothing that’s so pressing for me to be in the Hot Seat. I don’t want an awkward silence and I don’t want to dredge something up. I’d be faking it. I just think other people here have got more issues than I do.”

“BULLSHIT!” yelled Thelma.

“YOU’RE AN ARROGANT CONDESCENDING BASTARD!” said Brad.

“I don’t think I said anything condescending,” I said, surprised.

“‘You people need it and I don’t,’” said Brad, impersonating me.

“I actually really resent you for saying that,” said Jack, the veterinarian with the sex addiction. “It was FUCKING condescending. I also resent that you’re sitting there fiddling with that fucking phone constantly, which I find extremely distracting. I RESENT YOU FOR HOLDING THE PHONE!”

“Can I say something about the phone…?” I said.

“We don’t give a fuck what your reason is,” said Brad. “We’re going to resent you whether you explain it or not.”

“That’s not how conversations work,” I said.

“Jon, do you have a resentment you want to share about anyone in this room?” said Melissa, hopefully.

I paused. “No,” I said.

“I JUST WANT YOU TO KNOW THAT YOU’RE A BULLSHIT ARTIST AND EVERYTHING YOU’RE SAYING IS BULLSHIT,” yelled Brad.

“RIGHT,” I screeched. “I resent YOU”—I glared at Jack—“for saying I’m condescending. I’m NOT condescending. I was basing my opinion that your problems are worse than mine ENTIRELY on the things you’ve all SAID IN THIS ROOM. And I resent YOU”—I looked at Thelma—“for acting like Brad’s stooge, like his gang member. There is nothing I dislike more in the world than people who care more about ideology than they do about people. You swamped me with a tidal wave of Brad’s ideology.”

“THAT’S A STORY YOU’VE MADE UP ABOUT ME!” shouted Thelma. “Yeah? He wants to tell me, ‘FUCKING BACK OFF,’ but he’s afraid of the conflict! So his mind kicks in!”

“I resent you for repeatedly yelling ‘Chicken shit’ and ‘Bullshit’ at me because…” I said.

“Not ‘because,’” said Thelma. “That’s interpretive.”

I stared openmouthed at Thelma. She was COACHING me? In fact — it dawned on me — none of the yelling was a break from their therapeutic milieu. It was Radical Honesty. It works wonders for some of Brad’s clients. But it wasn’t working wonders for me. I was beginning to feel intensely rageful.

“Do you resent me for telling you what to say?” said Thelma.

“Yes, I fucking do,” I yelled. “I massively fucking resent you for telling me what to say.”

“Poor little thing,” said Brad. “We’re so sorry we hurt your tender little feelings. Okay!” Brad clapped his hands together. “Lunch! I hate to abandon you, Jon, but I’m going to leave you cooking.”

The group stood up and began drifting away.

They were breaking for lunch?

“But I’m still very resentful,” I said.

“Good!” said Brad. “I hope you remain incomplete all lunch.”

“I don’t see any value in that at all,” I muttered, as I put on my jacket.

—

Out in the hotel corridor Mario the marijuana dealer smiled and told me, “I don’t think Brad’s finished with you yet!” I understood why Mario said that. Brad seemed to have just broken his own golden rule. He hadn’t ensured that everyone stayed together while my anger played itself out. No love had been given the chance to grow. I had been cast out into Chicago at an apex of resentfulness.

I spent the lunch hour stomping around the streets. After lunch, I had only a few hours before I needed to catch my plane back to New York, so I laid out for Brad my complaint.

“You broke for lunch right in the middle of it,” I said. “You left me seething.”

Melissa leaned over and removed my baseball cap from my head. I flinched.

“I could have been suicidally unhappy about it,” I said.

“We were running ten minutes late for lunch, so I made the decision to leave you cooking,” Brad said.

After that, things moved on. Jack the veterinarian sex addict who hated my fiddling with my phone took the Hot Seat. He recounted a time his father physically attacked his mother in front of him. It was a heartbreaking story. He closed his eyes tightly as he told it, so I took the opportunity to quickly check Twitter. I hate not knowing what’s happening on Twitter. Soon after that, I caught my plane home.

—

We all kept in touch for a while. Mary e-mailed me to let me know how things had gone with Amanda: “I tried the Rad. Hon. approach and she was super resistant and defensive and pretty much closed to what I wanted to express. I could feel the waves of anger coming off her while talking to her. Since then I have had to still see her at the gym and at times I’ve ‘ignored’ her. Other times we’ve had civil, pleasant chats (not that many).”

Another member of the group e-mailed us all to report that he attempted Radical Honesty on his wife, but she responded by trying to physically push him away so he told her that he would “‘get the ax and defend myself by killing you.’ Rightfully she was scared, as she knows that often I confuse truth with fantasy. We all do. So the police came by. I am under consideration for a job that involves a security clearance, so any ARREST will result in no offer there… I love you all, especially Thelma, who I find extremely attractive, and I want to have sex with her (you). Perhaps I could even treat her (you) as my wife.”

Brad wrote back, copying everyone in: “What you say is completely insane. Your best bet is to seek out a psychiatrist who can prescribe you a mild tranquilizer.”

—

My Radical Honesty weekend had not been a success for me. But I continued to believe that Max Mosley’s own version of it—“as soon as the victim steps out of the pact by refusing to feel ashamed, the whole thing crumbles”—had indeed been his magic formula, the reason why he’d soared above his shaming. And I continued to believe it right up until a new public shaming unfolded, this time up in Kennebunk, Maine, that forced me to rethink the whole thing. This new shaming made me realize that Max had survived his for a completely different reason — one I hadn’t put my finger on.