RO in Turbulent Times
In the early days of the COVID 19 pandemic, many of my clients (with the exception of essential workers) were laid off. As a self-employed therapist, I remained working from home. My days were a series of sessions filled with confusion, grief, what -ifs and all the emotions ranging from anger to sadness. And as much as I filtered the news for my own sanity, due to the nature of my job, I could not escape the endless conversation about the pandemic. What made my job particularly difficult is that there were no courses offered in my education titled “How to support your clients through a global pandemic,” so I really had to cobble my knowledge of disaster psychological services with the humility of being another human in a pandemic too. Another human who was scared, grieving the loss of a loved one, trying to figure out best safety practices for myself and my loved ones amidst competing and sometime contradictory sources. It was a strange, suspended place and I leaned heavily on the calls for kindness from our provincial health authority. Fast forward 6 years and again I find myself with the relative privilege of being able to again filter the news but inundated with a collective new fear; a collective new grief. When clients ask me “what’s the point in practicing any of this?” given the state of affairs, I would argue that it is more important than ever to be examining ourselves, our actions, our capacity to set aside differences for the greater good. So, it might be a good idea to revisit what radical openness is and is not. And perhaps also a time to remind ourselves that sometimes being closed to torture is the most radically open act we can do to signal to others you matter.
Radical Openness Is:
• Being open to new information or disconfirming feedback in order to learn.
• Learning to celebrate self- discovery— it is freedom from being stuck.
• Rewarding— it often involves trying out novel ways of behaving that may help us cope more effectively.
• Courageous— it alerts us to areas of our life that may need to change.
• Capable of enhancing relationships— it models humility and readiness to learn from what the world has to offer.
• A process of purposeful self- enquiry and a willingness to acknowledge one’s fallibility— with an intention to change (if needed). It can be both painful and liberating.
• A way to challenge our perceptions of reality based on assumptions that we all have perceptual and regulatory biases and as a consequence we don’t see things as they are— we see things as we are.
• Being open to learning new things, which involves a willingness to consider that there are many ways to get to the same place.
• About taking responsibility for our personal reactions and emotions—without falling apart or automatically blaming others or the world.
• Meant to help us adapt to an ever- changing environment, rather than being stuck rigidly responding to situations in ways that don’t actually serve us.
Radical Openness is Not:
• Approval, naively believing, or mindlessly giving in
• Assuming one already knows the answer
• Something that can solely be understood intellectually— it requires direct and repeated practice
• Rejecting the past
• Expecting good things to happen
• Always changing
• Being rigid about being open
(Source: Lynch & Little, 2025, p.143)
For myself, radical openness means standing by my Canadian prime minster when he tells the world that our perceptual bias of how things have “always” been done can be challenged while also contending with the painful truth that my country has companies willing to monetize on the torture of fellow humans. Within my control is not to support these companies or their subsidiaries; in this sense I can be closed and still in line with my values. To be radically open means that I practice being vulnerable, saying to my partner “I had a nightmare last night that those trucks were coming up our street” or saying to my clients “Your response is normal – the solution might not be self-enquiry but strategies for solidarity.” Recall, we are hardwired to belong and evolved to help those outside our immediate blood line. Importantly, radical openness is not acquiescing to power or getting stuck in fatalistic mind. Our fellow humans need us.
The RO DBT community is, beautifully, a global one, and I acknowledge that likely none of us can say we live within borders that have not witnessed, perpetrated or tried to defend injustice or inhumane practices, many occurring as we speak. As we remind our clients, we have all harmed and been harmed. It is painful to grieve the expectation that we have not. My ray of hope, however, is that if you lean to OC, you have some special superpowers in this time of turmoil. Those superpowers are the capacity to plan ahead, exercise caution, to lean into moral certitude when warranted, and to fix sh*t. My understanding of radical openness is to embrace flexible responding to the context at hand, and you betcha, that time is now.