Have you known someone who decided to become brutally honest? If so, did you support them or try to change their minds?

I don’t support anyone who is purposefully mean and have no problem dishing out a smackdown. ;)

It depends on their goal. I’m a huge dick but my dickishness is to help. I don’t walk around telling homeless people to get jobs. But if a friend needs a reality check I will give it to them.

Well…...Remember that sometimes you have to be cruel to be kind….So I would support whatever decision they made as long as they have thought it through…and was sober

Speaking as one who has somehow, despite his actual sterling and softhearted good nature – I epitomize ‘jellydom’ – obtained the reputation around here of being a crank, curmudgeon, s-o-b or worse (okay, okay: ‘and’ worse), and certain Fluther threads notwithstanding, it has always seemed to me that people who strive for ‘brutal’ honesty usually have an underlying personality or social defect. Namely: no manners and no tact.

I like being honest, because with my advancing age I find that my memory just won’t support long strings of complicated lies. (This has been learned from sometimes bitter and sometimes humorous experience.) So I tell the truth because most times it’s all I have the human RAM to handle. And by the same token, advancing age has led me to develop don’t ask me how, because the fact that it has happened and how it has happened is a bewildering mystery to me a mellowed attitude (believe it or not) since my youth. I try to avoid the ‘brutal’ adjective because I just don’t like being beat up. As a general rule; there are exceptions to most rules.

A long marriage (or hope for one) will train a man out of ‘complete’ and mostly brutal honesty, too. If he has a single lick of sense, that is.

No. I have a relative who likes to kind of warn people that she’s brutally honest but most of us feel it’s more a way for her to speak whatever she thinks instead of practicing any sort of tact. We all do our best to avoid her.

Too often what I have seen as a result has been just plain mean comments.

Some things are better left unsaid.

I am not talking about gently bringing up something to someone you have a very close relationship with, although I would tread very carefully there too.

I don’t think that your personal commitment to be honest means that you can mind someone else’s business without consequences.

I perceive myself as brutally honest person with a conscious. After growing up kind of too honest, I’ve learned what types of situations trigger effects on some people. So, I try to let my Smart ass take over most of the time rather than just blurting out what I really would have said.

I value honesty in a person, but at the end of the way common sense is important when dealing with people. If someone’s honesty is causing unnecessary hurt, that’s just counter productive, no?
Kindness is undervalued these days

@stardust I agree, kindness is very underrated.

I agree with @stardust. Honesty tempered with kindness and tact is the way to go.

Oftentimes being “brutally honest” is an excuse to be mean and treat people poorly.

I find that tact is a woefully underused skill.

@tranquilsea I think your question brings up an excellent point about the empowerment. It always seems to me to be a choice not to better other people but to validate horribly rude behavior and make the brutal one feel virtuous for doing so.

“People who are brutally honest get more satisfaction out of the brutality than out of the honesty.”
—Richard J. Needham

I have known people who have pretended that they always were brutally honest in order to excuse various comments they made, but I have never known anyone who decided to actually become brutally honest. I once tried being completely honest without being brutal about it, and I think I succeeded in finding a way to strike that balance, but I still don’t know what to make of it.

My experiment was limited to one person: a girl in whom I was interested my senior year of high school. Being completely honest was probably the only reason our relationship ever got off the ground, but it also was a key factor in ruining it. The relationship lasted for a very short period of time by my standards (one month), but we are still friendly when we see each other.

Ultimately, it seems that the best option is to start off fairly honest, be a bit guarded while you are getting to know someone, and then become increasingly honest again as the relationship becomes stronger. And of course, serious lies are unlikely to ever be excused, so we must understand ourselves as being limited to non-answers, vague answers, deflections, and the occasional white lie.

Brutal honesty is much like being bitten by a shark sometimes. However, on the bright side, at least the person’s being honest. I’ve found that honesty is a rare find, so it should be honored and appreciated. Face it, would you rather be lied to? As for it pissing people off and or alienating them? Being someone who has been quite alienated from just about everything that a life can offer a person, it wasn’t brutal honesty that did that- it was lies. I, of course, don’t know any of the people that you have talked about in your post, but it seems as though that the people who are finding themselves offended by brutal honesty are just the type of people who can’t handle the truth.

@SavoirFaire Yes. That summed up what I was trying to say in a much more elegant way. There’s a sadism factor involved in the choice to be brutally honest.