I think there may be a subtle difference between tempering honesty with kindness and informing honesty with kindness. The former, like you say, turns out to be kindness trumping honesty in the end. But the latter alters the initial appearance of the honesty, like when we rehumanise the other person/people we take the edge off our criticism of them, and when we rehumanise ourselves we remind ourselves of our role in co-creating the relationship issue hence re-shaping the honesty. It’s hard to explain but I guess I’m trying to say being kin-and-honest is alot more demanding than just being what we might at first glance think is honest. Sorry this probably isn’t clear at all!!

Thanks for that. I think you are right that there is a real risk that compassion trumps honesty. I hoped perhaps that this more intertwined way of seeing them might help prevent that but it’s definitely worth keeping mindful of.

You raise an excellent question Alison – exactly the same one that I’ve been pondering myself since writing this in fact. It relates to another post that I want to do about how we balance believing/trusting people and treating them as sensible and explicable, whilst not being drawn into problematic ways of seeing things that come out of their struggling.
My experience is that generally if one person is able to be kind-and-honest with the other that frequently enables the other person/people to meet them there (although it can take time to get there if the other person/people are in a very vulnerable place, and – of course – it can work the other way that the stress of the situation takes us away from being in that kind-and-honest state).
I’m thinking that perhaps an ideal would be that – if we pick up on the fact that either we, or the other person, is not in a good place to engage kindly-and-honestly – that would be a good time to take some time away, alone or with supportive others, getting ourselves back into that state in order to engage well. However, in reality, it very rarely seems to work that way. Rather we tend to bash up against each other until one or more people do find their way to a more kind-and-honest place, perhaps because we finally see the vulnerability of the other, or the absurdity of the situation, and that punches a hole through the whole thing.
And perhaps that is okay and part of accepting that we are human and imperfect.
I think sometimes it probably is important to say to the other person that you don’t want to engage when they are in the place they’re in (because they seem to be finding it hard to hear you, for example). But it is also important to watch out – as you say – that we’re not taking the moral high ground imagining that we’re so much better at these things than they are. It is times like that that I find that I am most likely to fall on my face!