When Does Honesty Become an Intrusion?

By Dr. Marie Feuer

It's morning horse poop time, my Zen exercise, and I've been thinking about two workshops I attended involving horses and leadership. Actually, thinking is a rather mild description of what's been going on. I've been wrestling with some questions that have tormented me for years, and the workshops brought them right up to the surface. When do we have the courage to say something difficult to another person, and when are we simply intruding into something that isn't ours to touch? How do we distinguish respecting someone's boundaries from avoiding an uncomfortable conversation? And how much of what we call kindness is really our own inability to tolerate another person's reaction?

I went to these workshops with a rather unusual agenda. I wasn't interested in showing up as a wonderful, together healer, teacher, or spiritually evolved person. I could have done that. I've been doing this work for decades, and I know how to behave appropriately in a group. I know how to be a good student, make people comfortable, and perhaps even impress someone enough to create a professional connection. Instead, I made a conscious decision to bring the parts of myself that weren't doing so well. I came in bleeding, so to speak, because I wanted to work on my own unresolved wounds rather than present another polished version of myself.

And I may have made an ass of myself. I spoke up when perhaps I should have kept quiet. I challenged things. I pressed someone to tell me what was wrong when she had already said nothing was wrong. I was picking up what felt to me like an enormous amount of anger, and my nervous system was having a terrible time tolerating the discrepancy between what she was saying and what I was experiencing. I wanted her to acknowledge what I was sensing so that I could settle down and move on. But whose problem was that? Hers or mine? Was I trying to create an honest connection, or was I demanding that another person behave in a way that would make me more comfortable? I've apologized to the workshop leaders for some of my behavior, and I wouldn't be surprised if I were never invited back. On the other hand, I learned an extraordinary amount about myself. I went there to heal, not to network. Does that justify what I did? Of course not. But does the fact that I made people uncomfortable necessarily mean I was wrong? Not necessarily. So I'm still sitting with it.

One of the things that has always made me sad is this very grown-up social rule that we shouldn't push people. If somebody puts up a wall, respect the wall. Walk away. Let them discover whatever they need to discover in their own time. There is certainly wisdom in that, particularly given the extraordinary amount of exploitation and abuse that has occurred in the name of spiritual growth, therapy, and helping people. But I've also had close friends tell me, sometimes years later, that they saw something happening in my life and chose not to say anything. When I asked why, especially when these were people whose opinions I valued, the answer was that I wasn't ready to hear it. Perhaps they were right. Perhaps I wasn't ready. But who decided that? How did they know? And what might have happened if they had taken the risk of planting a seed, even if I became furious and rejected it at the time?

I see another version of this in my private work. People sometimes come to me after ten or twelve years of therapy, and we'll get into something that has been affecting their lives for a very long time. Suddenly they'll ask, "Why didn't my therapist ever say that to me?" Well, maybe the person couldn't have heard it ten years earlier. Maybe all those years of support were necessary before they could consider another perspective. Or maybe the therapist didn't want to deal with the reaction. I don't know, and I don't assume I do. But I think it's worth asking whether some of our supposedly respectful ways of helping people are also ways of avoiding the discomfort of being the person who says something nobody wants to hear.

When you touch a sore muscle during a massage, the person flinches. Nobody is particularly surprised. Emotional flinching is much harder to tolerate. Someone gets angry, cries, withdraws, becomes defensive, or tells you that you've completely misunderstood them. And perhaps you have. Can you tolerate that? Can you stay connected without immediately trying to fix their reaction? Can you acknowledge that you might have gotten it wrong? Or do you need the other person to calm down, agree with you, or thank you for your wonderful insight so that you can feel okay again? I think these are important questions for anyone who works with people, particularly therapists, teachers, spiritual practitioners, and those of us whose work involves perceiving things that aren't always immediately obvious.

My mother was a brilliant therapist and a deeply wounded woman. I loved and learned a great deal from her, but I also lived with the consequences of her wounds. Back in the 1980s, I belonged to an Adult Children of Alcoholics group for mental health professionals, and we talked about how many people enter the helping professions partly because helping others soothes something unresolved in themselves. There's nothing inherently wrong with being drawn to service through our own suffering. The problem comes when we stop examining ourselves because we've become the person who helps everybody else. We may become very skilled at understanding other people's dysfunction while remaining remarkably unwilling to look at our own.

I have some personal experience with that. I began teaching conflict resolution when I was seventeen, and over the years I worked with children, parents, police officers, community organizations, and eventually college students. When I became a professor, I was often the person people came to when something was going wrong. I was damn good at getting people to work together. I could read a room, anticipate problems, manage people's reactions, and sometimes prevent a conflict before anybody even realized one was developing. Much of that was genuine skill, and much of it was also extraordinary codependency. I was so busy making everything work that I often didn't get to exist. I knew what everybody else needed, but I wasn't nearly as well acquainted with my own feelings, needs, or desires.

One of my spiritual teachers said something to me years ago that changed the direction of my work on myself. We were talking about selfless service, and I was feeling rather pleased with myself because I thought I was exceptionally good at it. He looked at me and said, "In order to have selfless service, first you have to have enough of a self that you can give it away." That landed like a rock. I had spent so much of my life being useful, sensitive, intuitive, and accommodating that I hadn't fully recognized how much of myself had disappeared in the process. I could make everybody else comfortable and then go off somewhere alone to deal with whatever it had cost me. That's not necessarily generosity. Sometimes it's a very sophisticated way of avoiding yourself.

This history matters because I know how to behave beautifully in difficult situations. I know how to regulate myself, adjust my behavior, and keep a group functioning. But I've also learned that making everything work isn't always a good thing. Sometimes things shouldn't be working. Suppose someone repeatedly violates your boundaries. You learn to recognize the behavior, change your responses, and protect yourself. Wonderful. Those are useful skills. But suppose this is someone you want a continuing relationship with. At what point do you say, "I'm changing my behavior around you because I feel that my boundaries are being violated"? Now the other person has information they didn't have before. They may disagree. They may get angry. They may tell you something about your behavior that you don't particularly want to hear. But at least there's a possibility that both people can begin examining what's happening instead of one person continuing the behavior while the other becomes increasingly sophisticated at dancing around it.

Of course, there are situations where you absolutely should not have that conversation. There are dangerous people, unsafe relationships, jobs you cannot afford to lose, and circumstances where protecting yourself takes precedence over educating anybody. I'm not suggesting that everybody should go around confronting everybody else. God knows there are enough emotionally immature people having what they call honest conversations because they want what they want, they want it now, and they expect everybody else to accommodate them. That's not what I'm talking about. I'm asking how we distinguish a necessary, potentially valuable confrontation from an intrusion that primarily serves our own emotional needs. And I don't think there is a formula that will answer that question for us.

When I was a professor, one of the things my students repeatedly told me was that they felt free to argue with me, disagree with me, and sometimes have very heated discussions without being punished. We could have an uncomfortable exchange, and the next class we were okay. They were often astonished by that. Some told me they were beginning to stand up to their husbands, employers, or parents. Others were becoming better parents because they were allowing their children to disagree with them. They were discovering that conflict didn't necessarily have to destroy a relationship. I loved hearing that because, to me, teaching wasn't simply about passing along information that might be obsolete in a few years. It was about helping people learn how to think, how to question, and how to tolerate the discomfort of not knowing. I wanted them to discover that they could have an ugly moment and still come back into a relationship. In the horse workshops they talked about going back to grazing after a disturbance. We could have a blowup and then go back to grazing. That didn't mean nothing had happened. It meant the relationship could survive something happening.

Horses are particularly interesting teachers in this regard because they don't spend much time trying to look psychologically sophisticated. A horse may turn away, refuse to participate, walk off, kick, or become agitated. If you're paying attention, you have to examine what you're doing and what you're bringing into the interaction. What was my energy? What did I just ask of that animal? How might the horse have experienced me? And when you genuinely change something, the horse may respond immediately. There's no need for a three-hour discussion about whose mother did what twenty years ago. I also think horses can teach us something about not solving everybody's problems for them.

Once there's a relationship and sufficient trust, I want my horses to learn to think through difficulties, settle themselves, and make decisions. I can support them without taking over. The same is true with children and, I would argue, with adults. If we're constantly using our sensitivity, intuition, or interpersonal skills to prevent every problem before it happens, are we helping people develop their own capacities, or are we making ourselves indispensable?

But humans have language, histories, shame, social expectations, and all kinds of reasons for saying one thing while feeling another. We also have the possibility of telling another person what their behavior was like for us, provided we're willing to hear their side as well. And that requires something much more complicated than learning a communication technique. It requires developing a relationship with ourselves that is strong enough to tolerate being wrong, being disliked, being embarrassed, and sometimes discovering that what we thought was our great sensitivity was actually one of our old wounds having a field day.

I have a story from my energy work that continues to influence how I think about all of this. Years ago, I was doing some work on a friend and felt that I wasn't getting through. I intensified what I was doing until I felt like a lightning bolt. When I finished, she looked at me very pleasantly and said she hadn't felt anything. Well, I walked away with my tail between my legs. I thought I'd done a terrible job, and it certainly shook my confidence. We remained friends, but I never tried that particular work with her again. Twelve years later, she brought it up. She asked whether I remembered that session, and of course I did. She told me it had been the beginning of her healing journey. I was astonished. She said she had felt the energy all around her like a tsunami, but she couldn't let a drop of it in. That experience made her realize how shut down she was. This was a woman who appeared enormously open. She talked about everything, had done therapy and twelve-step work, and seemed to have all her cards on the table. Yet she recognized that there was a wall inside her that she hadn't understood before. For twelve years I had believed one thing about that encounter, while she had been living with an entirely different experience of it.

Now, that doesn't mean every uncomfortable interaction is secretly healing. It certainly doesn't mean that someone who objects to what we're doing will eventually realize we were right. I find that kind of certainty dangerous. The fact that something turned out well twelve years later doesn't give me permission to assume that every time I push someone, I'm doing them a favor. It does remind me that our immediate interpretation of an encounter isn't necessarily the whole story, and that sometimes we simply don't know what happened.

Which brings me back to those horse workshops and the woman who told me nothing was wrong. I believed I was perceiving anger. Maybe I was. Maybe I was interpreting something through my own wounds. Maybe she was angry and simply didn't want to discuss it with me. Maybe she needed time. Maybe my pressing her made an already uncomfortable experience worse. And perhaps my own tolerance needed to be greater so I could allow her to have whatever experience she was having without insisting that she explain it to me. I don't know. I'm still working on it, and I suspect I will be for some time.

There's another part of this that matters enormously to me. I find life profoundly lonely when everybody stays on the surface, makes all the right moves, smiles pleasantly, and never talks about what's really happening. I've spent much of my life trying to create relationships in which people can be honest, complicated, difficult, loving, frightened, angry, and still remain connected. I don't want relationships that depend on everybody behaving perfectly. But I also don't want to use my desire for depth as an excuse to disregard someone else's boundaries. That's the balance I'm trying to understand, and I don't expect to find it by memorizing a set of rules.

I think the place to begin is with the relationship we have with ourselves, and I don't mean the pleasant, inspirational version of self-love that gets passed around on social media. I mean getting to know the ugly, selfish, jealous, frightened, revengeful, depressed, self-serving, and sometimes vicious parts of ourselves. The parts we'd rather pretend aren't there. The parts that make us cringe when we remember something we said or did. If we can't tolerate those aspects of ourselves, how are we going to tolerate another person showing us something equally uncomfortable? And if we need to believe we're always kind, always intuitive, always well-intentioned, or always right, how will we recognize the moments when we aren't?

From there, perhaps we can begin experimenting with difficult conversations in relationships where there's enough trust to make the experiment worthwhile. We can tell someone that we're frightened, that we don't know exactly what we're doing, that we may need to stop and think, and that we want to hear their experience as well as express our own. We can recognize when we're becoming too dysregulated to continue and come back later. We can apologize without necessarily deciding that everything we said was wrong. We can also learn to accept that sometimes the other person doesn't want to have the conversation at all, and that their refusal doesn't automatically make them dishonest or emotionally immature.

And we can allow ourselves to look bad occasionally. That's a particularly difficult one for those of us who have spent years being competent, helpful, and admired for our ability to handle difficult situations. Sometimes we will be the person who loses their composure, says something badly, or makes an uncomfortable situation worse. That doesn't necessarily define who we are. It tells us something about who we were in that moment, what was happening inside us, and perhaps what we still need to learn. We can take responsibility without turning one difficult encounter into a permanent diagnosis of ourselves or somebody else.

I still don't know whether I made the right choices at those workshops. Part of me is pleased that I had the courage to show up with my wounds instead of my polished professional identity. Another part wishes I'd behaved better. Both parts have something to tell me, and I'm trying to listen to them without rushing to declare a winner. I've made mistakes in my life that turned out to be important turning points, and I've also made mistakes that were simply mistakes. Sometimes it takes years to understand the difference. Maybe that's what makes this work so interesting, and so difficult. There is no technique that will guarantee we never hurt anyone, never misread a situation, or never retreat when we should have spoken. We have to keep developing the capacity to know ourselves, to hear other people, to take responsibility, and to remain curious even when the answers are uncomfortable. I would rather keep struggling with those questions than become someone who is absolutely certain she already knows.

This is much of what I work on with people privately: developing a deeper relationship with themselves, learning to distinguish old wounds from present experience, exploring intuitive and energetic perceptions without surrendering their judgment, and finding ways to live more honestly in their actual relationships. I draw on psychology, spiritual practice, intuitive and energy work, and more than fifty years of experience, but I don't approach every person with the same method.

If this is familiar territory and you'd like to explore it together, I offer a free 30-minute introductory Zoom session through DrMarie.org.

Journey on.