Dopamine Nation

CHAPTER 8
Radical Honesty
very major religion and code of ethics has included honesty as essential
to its moral teachings. All my patients who have achieved long-term
recovery have relied on truth-telling as critical for sustained mental and
physical health. I too have become convinced that radical honesty is not just
helpful for limiting compulsive overconsumption but also at the core of a life
well lived.
The question is, how does telling the truth improve our lives?
Let’s first establish that telling the truth is painful. We’re wired from the
earliest ages to lie, and we all do it, whether or not we care to admit it.
Children begin lying as early as age two. The smarter the kid, the more
likely they are to lie, and the better they are at it. Lying tends to decrease
between ages three and fourteen, possibly because children become more
aware of how lying harms other people. On the other hand, adults are
capable of more sophisticated antisocial lies than children, as the ability to
plan and remember becomes more advanced.
The average adult tells between 0.59 and 1.56 lies daily. Liar, liar, pants
on fire. We’ve all got a little smoke coming off our shorts.
Humans are not the only animals with the capacity for deception. The
animal kingdom is rife with examples of deception as a weapon and a shield.
The Lomechusa pubicollis beetle, for example, is able to penetrate ant
colonies by pretending to be one of them, something it accomplishes by
emitting a chemical substance that makes it smell like an ant. Once inside, the
beetle feeds on ant eggs and larvae.

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But no other animal rivals the human capacity for lying.
Evolutionary biologists speculate that the development of human language
explains our tendency and superior ability to lie. The story goes like this. The
evolution of Homo sapiens culminated in the formation of large social
groups. Large social groups were possible because of the development of
sophisticated forms of communication, allowing for advanced mutual
cooperation. Words used to cooperate can also be used to deceive and
misdirect. The more advanced the language, the more sophisticated the lies.
Lies arguably have some adaptive advantage when it comes to competing
for scarce resources.But lying in a world of plenty risks isolation, craving,
and pathological overconsumption. Let me explain.
—
“You look well,” I said to Maria as we sat across from each other in April
2019. Her dark brown hair was done in a professional and flattering style.
She was wearing a modest, collared shirt and slacks. She was smiling, alert,
and looked put together, as she had for the past five years I’d been treating
her.
Maria had been in sustained remission of her alcohol use disorder in all the
time I had known her. She came to me already in recovery, achieved by
attending Alcoholics Anonymous and working with her AA sponsor. She saw
me occasionally to check in and refill her medications. I’m pretty sure I
learned more from her than she ever did from me. One thing she taught me
was that telling the truth was fundamental to her recovery.
Growing up she’d learned the opposite. Her mom drank, including blackout
drinking and driving while Maria was in the car. Her dad left the family for
several years for a place no one was allowed to name and which even now
she’d rather not disclose out of respect for his privacy. It was left to her to
take care of her younger siblings while pretending to the outside world that
everything was fine at home. When Maria’s own alcohol addiction began in
her mid-twenties, she was already well practiced at shuffling through
different versions of reality.

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To illustrate the importance of honesty in her new sober life, she told me
this story.
“I came home from work to find an Amazon package waiting for Mario.”
Mario is Maria’s younger brother. She and her husband, Diego, have been
living with Mario as a way to support each other and save on rent in Silicon
Valley’s high-end real estate market.
“I decided to open it even though it wasn’t addressed to me. A part of me
knew I shouldn’t. When I’d opened his packages before, he got really mad.
But I knew I could use the same excuse I’d used last time: that I mistook his
name for mine, since they’re so similar. I told myself I deserved one small
pleasure after a long hard day of work. I don’t remember now what was
inside.
“After I opened the package, I resealed it and left it with the rest of the
mail. To tell you the truth, I forgot about it. Mario came home a few hours
later and immediately accused me of opening it. I lied and said I hadn’t. He
asked me again and I lied again. He kept saying, ‘It looks like someone
opened it.’ I kept saying, ‘It wasn’t me.’ Then he was really pissed and took
his mail and his package and went into his room and slammed the door.
“I slept poorly that night. The next morning, I knew what I had to do. I
walked into the kitchen where Mario and Diego were eating breakfast and
said, ‘Mario, I did open your package. I knew it was yours, but I opened it
anyway. Then I tried to cover it up. Then I lied about it. I am so sorry. Please
forgive me.’ ”
“Tell me why honesty is such an important part of your recovery,” I said.
“I would never have admitted the truth back when I was drinking. Back
then, I lied about everything and never took responsibility for the things I did.
There were so many lies, and half of them didn’t even make sense.”
Maria’s husband, Diego, once told me about how Maria used to hide in the
bathroom to drink, turning on the shower so Diego wouldn’t hear the sound of
beer bottles opening, not realizing he could hear the clang of the bottle
opener when she removed it from its hiding place behind the bathroom door.
He described how she used to drink a six-pack in one sitting, then replace the
beer with water and glue the tops back on. “Did she really think that I

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wouldn’t be able to smell the glue, or taste the difference between water and
booze?”
Maria said, “I lied to cover up my drinking, but I lied about other stuff too.
Stuff that didn’t even matter: where I was going, when I’d be back, why I
was late, what I ate for breakfast.”
Maria had developed the Lying Habit. What started out as a way to cover
up her mother’s drinking and her father’s absence, and eventually her own
addiction, turned into lying for its own sake.
The Lying Habit is remarkably easy to fall into. We all engage in regular
lying, most of the time without realizing it. Our lies are so small and
imperceptible that we convince ourselves we’re telling the truth. Or that it
doesn’t matter, even if we know we’re lying.
“When I told Mario the truth that day, even though I knew he’d be pissed, I
knew something had really changed in me, in my life. I knew I was committed
to living life in a different way, a better way. I was done with all those little
lies filling up in the back of my mind and making me feel guilty and afraid . . .
guilty for lying and afraid that someone would find out. I realized that as long
as I’m telling the truth, I don’t have to worry about any of that. I’m free. After
I told my brother the truth about the package, it was a stepping-stone to our
relationship getting closer. I went back upstairs after that and I felt really
good.”
—
Radical honesty—telling the truth about things large and small, especially
when doing so exposes our foibles and entails consequences—is essential
not just to recovery from addiction but for all of us trying to live a more
balanced life in our reward-saturated ecosystem. It works on many levels.
First, radical honesty promotes awareness of our actions. Second, it fosters
intimate human connections. Third, it leads to a truthful autobiography, which
holds us accountable not just to our present but also to our future selves.
Further, telling the truth is contagious, and might even prevent the
development of future addiction.

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