Jon Ronson - So You've Been Publicly Shamed

And that was how I discovered a man teaching a course in how to refuse to feel ashamed.

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.”