So You've Been Publicly Shamed (PSY8) by Jon Ronson

Author:Jon Ronson
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Pan Macmillan
Published: 2015-03-09T00:00:00+00:00

8

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 women, 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 magazine, July 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 favourite 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 towards being like dogs was to reveal to the group something about ourselves that we really didn’t want people to know.

By coincidence my friend - the writer and broadcaster Starlee Kine - took Brad’s course a few years ago for a book she’s 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

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