Alternatives to self disclosure

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.