We can be honest combatively or collaboratively. The former is what most people think of when they imagine themselves “being honest,” while the latter is more of a rarity, only routinely practiced in healthy relationships. Combative honesty is phrasing thoughts in a manipulative or hostile fashion while retaining a kernel of truth. It is honesty clad in spikes. It's fundamentally designed and intended to hurt, disrupt or browbeat its recipient into submission to one’s own interpretation of something.

 Collaborative honesty is phrasing thoughts in a way that conveys their subjective and provisional nature, it involves making oneself vulnerable to another person by honestly expressing oneself in a way which is conducive to civil discussion and the attainment of shared aims. It's intended to allow the other person in the conversation to inhabit your perspective more fully, with a minimum of defensiveness, a lack of blaming or shaming, so that you might both benefit from the interaction, so that nobody is “losing” and both are enriched.