Self-disclosure is a process
of communication than consist of someone exposing information about himself or
herself to another person. This is always honest information that could be any
kind of personal state such as emotions, preoccupations, feelings or personal
achievements among others. Although self-disclosure
plays an important role in interpersonal communication and relationships, it
isn’t the only type of communication available. To understand why complete
honesty isn’t always an ideal choice or the easy way to go is a very smart and
useful tip for future communications.
So
there is always going to be some alternative to self-disclosure. Although
honesty is fascinating at first sight, it can have some unpalatable
consequences. There are times that honesty is not going to be as comfortable or
as acceptable as other situations. The four alternatives that are the most
common to self-disclosure are silence, lying, equivocation and hinting.
Silence
is a way to self-disclosure; in one way with this silence you can keep your
thinking and perception to yourself. Keeping silence is a smart decision
sometimes. To conserve silence when you have opinions or thoughts such as “You
look fat”, “That dress looks awful” or something like “I would rather be
somewhere else than here at work” is better to use alternatives of
self-disclosure such as silence. Furthermore, frequently people tend to judge
more for what other people say rather than what people don’t say.
It
is normal for people not know what to do when they face some uncomfortable
problem, usually they try to balance between what is less worse to either lie
or telling an undesirable truth. The third way to avoid self-disclosure is
equivocation. Equivocation would be diverging the truth by saying something
such as “I don’t really like the color of that dress, but you look incredible on
it”. For the majority of the people lying is breaking their personal ethics, or
at least they know that it is wrong, that’s one of the main reasons why every
time we think more of equivocation as avoiding self-disclosure becomes clearer.
In
my personal experience the most prized and useful way to fend off
self-disclosure is with hinting. Hinting is not only helping you to avert
telling the truth in a direct way, but it is a way in which people target an
expected response from others. For example, instead of using a direct statement
such as “I don’t want to talk to you anymore ” people can use a face-saving
hint such as “I have so much homework to do, if you want we could talk tomorrow
”. The face-saving hint can tell you why communicators are a little bit more
indirect when the truth or the direct message could be inappropriate or not
very respectful. Hinting is a great way to avoid self-disclosure, anyways is in
everybody to decide how to react in a certain situation.
Sometimes
it is not always wise to be completely honest. People sometimes lie for the
benefit of a healthy and good interpersonal communication, for example two
years ago my boss had a party planned for all the employees, I’m pretty sure
that more than 50% of the people that agreed to go to that party where not as
interested as they seemed they were. In fact I was part of that percentage.
Clearly at the moment when my boss asked me if I wanted to go to the party I
mentioned how bad I wanted to go and how much fun it was going to be. I didn’t
want to be at that party, I was just saying that because I knew that at the
time it was the smartest thing to do. In that situation I was using the lying
and also keeping silence as an alternative to self-disclosure. My mother taught
never to say a lie, my father told me that I had to be smart; I am just trying
to make them both happy.
