Sometimes the unconditional love and acceptance we get from our family members comes at too high a price, namely our self-esteem.
But if we must isolate ourselves from openness in order to be insulated from the down side of being open to all then we risk losing the opportunity to truly know our­selves. There are students here at CUNY who have taken the risk of being open about themselves and their personal pasts. We see talk shows that feature guests who have gone on nationwide TV to reveal what others con­sider to be shameful. The plus side of being open is that it acts as a kind of therapy by functioning as cathartic mostly for the per­son doing the revealing, but it also helps others to follow suit and gives others a model or hero/heroine to emulate.

There are many who think that the open­ness only adds to the shame being revealed but if this criticism is analyzed it can be traced to a kind of resentment of the persons individuality, for what is criticized is the very thing that gave rise to the shamefulness in the first place. For instance, revealing a less than honorable past may harm the family's reputa­tion, telling truths about oneself thus has consequences for others and the "moral" , thing to do is to take others into consider­ation. Well, that's exactly what has made us a nation,if not a world,of  and for others. We have "considered" ourselves out of exist­ence.

Another down side about being open is that people may treat you as if you had the plague, and avoid you, but these are fearful people who in avoiding the fear that your openness represents are in fact themselves representing the very fear they avoid. These are the people who instead of living the experience that life has to offer, instead experience the living that others offer to them via the distancing mechanism of TV, radio, newspapers etc. These are the people who "rubberneck" to see an accident, these are the people who rationalize that living an open-book life is an attempt to capitalize on sensationalism in an attempt to get attention, fame, money, etc.

What is happening in the latest push towards family  and family-type values  is duplicated in trends of family-like groups such as genders, races, even economic classes.  The conservatives champion a cohesiveness  that "glues" the family to death and all in the name of pro-life! The liberals demand that they be supplied with an exponentially ex­panding rainbow, where the expansion, and inclusion take our supply of opportunities, and our decisions to demand choices FOR us and all in the name of pro-choice. But both political extremes are allergic to openness, and in their pursuit to erect barriers to open­ness, there is an unholy alliance.

What both camps may agree to is chang­ing the motto on our paper money from "in god we trust" to "in family we trust". But trust is a function of experience, for trust without experience is childlike, and inno­cence without experience is an invitation to plunder and pillory. Trust must come from first and foremost the experience of the self. Then the renunciation of that self to others. But this kind of communication is not the be-all and end-all objective because the experi­ence being communicated is being re-expe­rienced so the original experience is being enhanced. But communication becomes.. overly important when we look to others to have our experiences for us,or when we  have a family or group EXPERIENCE communicated to us such that until there is validation from a family or group spokesperson that there was in fact experience, our particular family-self or group-self refrains from authentically having the experience, (so the family experi­ence, etc., HAS the person). . We can substitute "in self I trust" and when we do, we will be able to take risks instead of risk taking us, when for instance we are reckless or negligent  When we have the experi­ence of self trust, we will then know with certainty (knowledge and substantial certainty) that we have something to say from our own experience and though what we may say may be a communication of competence, deviance or excellence it at the very least will be an authentic experience communi­cated and not innocence met with mockery or an uninspired comment that puts us to sleep.

©2008 Barbara Todish