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Honesty Promotes Intimate Human Connections
Telling the truth draws people in, especially when we’re willing to expose
our own vulnerabilities. This is counterintuitive because we assume that
unmasking the less desirable aspects of ourselves will drive people away. It
logically makes sense that people would distance themselves when they learn
about our character flaws and transgressions.
In fact, the opposite happens. People come closer. They see in our
brokenness their own vulnerability and humanity. They are reassured that
they are not alone in their doubts, fears, and weaknesses.
—
Jacob and I met off and on over the months and years that followed his
relapse to compulsive masturbation. In that time he continued to abstain from
his addictive behaviors. Practicing radical honesty, especially with his wife,
was the foundation of his ongoing recovery. At one of our visits he shared a
story with me, something that happened shortly after he and his wife moved
back in together.
She was sorting out the bathroom, a day after moving back into their shared
home, when she noted one of the shower-curtain rings was missing. She
asked Jacob if he knew what had happened to it.
“I freeze,” Jacob told me. “I know perfectly what happen with the shower-
curtain ring, but I don’t want to tell her. I have many good reasons. It was
long time ago. She will only be upset if I tell her. It is so good between us
now. This will mess it up.”
But then he reminded himself of how corrosive his lying and sneaking
around had been for their relationship. He had promised her, before she
moved back in, that he would be honest with her no matter what.
“So I say, ‘I use it to build one of my machines, almost a year ago now,
after you left. It is nothing recent. But I promise I will be honest with you, so
I am telling you.’ ”
“What did she do?” I asked.
“I think she will tell me it is over and she is leaving again. But instead she
does not yell at me. She does not leave me. She put her hand on my shoulder
and she say, ‘Thank you for telling me the truth.’ And then she hug me.”
—
Intimacy is its own source of dopamine. Oxytocin, a hormone much involved
with falling in love, mother-child bonding, and lifetime pair bonding of
sexual mates, binds to receptors on the dopamine-secreting neurons in the
brain’s reward pathway and enhances the firing of the reward-circuit tract. In
other words, oxytocin leads to an increase in brain dopamine, a recent
finding by Stanford neuroscientists Lin Hung, Rob Malenka, and their
colleagues.
After his honest disclosure to his wife, followed by her expression of
warmth and empathy, Jacob probably experienced a spike in oxytocin and
dopamine in his reward pathway, encouraging him to do it again.
While
truth-telling
promotes
human
attachment,
compulsive
overconsumption of high-dopamine goods is the antithesis of human
attachment. Consuming leads to isolation and indifference, as the drug comes
to replace the reward obtained from being in relationship with others.
Experiments show that a free rat will instinctively work to free another rat
trapped inside a plastic bottle. But once that free rat has been allowed to
self-administer heroin, it is no longer interested in helping out the caged rat,
presumably too caught up in an opioid haze to care about a fellow member of
its species.
—
Any behavior that leads to an increase in dopamine has the potential to be
exploited. What I’m referring to is a kind of “disclosure porn” that has
become prevalent in modern culture, where revealing intimate aspects of our
lives becomes a way to manipulate others for a certain type of selfish
gratification rather than to foster intimacy through a moment of shared
humanity.
At a medical conference on addiction in 2018, I sat next to a man who said
he was in long-term recovery from addiction. He was there to tell his
recovery story to the audience. Just before he went up on stage, he turned to
me and said, “Get ready to cry.” I was put off by the comment. It bothered me
that he anticipated how I would react to his story.
He indeed told a harrowing story of addiction and recovery, but I was not
moved to tears, which surprised me because I am usually deeply affected by
stories of suffering and redemption. In this case, his story seemed untrue for
all that it may have been factually correct. The words he spoke didn’t match
the emotions behind them. Instead of feeling that he was granting us
privileged access to a painful time in his life, it felt like he was
grandstanding and manipulating. Maybe it was just a matter of his having told
it so many times before. In repetition, it may have grown stale. Whatever the
reason, it didn’t lift me.
There is a well-known phenomenon in AA called “drunkalogues,” referring
to tales of intoxicated exploits that are shared to entertain and show off rather
than teach and learn. Drunkalogues tend to trigger craving rather than
promote recovery. The line between honest self-disclosure and a
manipulative drunkalogue is a fine one, including subtle differences in
content, tone, cadence, and affect, but you know it when you see it.
I hope my disclosures here, my own and those my patients have given me
permission to share, never stray to the wrong side of that line.
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