The words that feel most honest are usually the ones to cut
A former cop turned communication trainer built his method on a rule that sounds backwards: don't say what you mean.
George Thompson taught English literature before he became a police officer, and the mismatch shaped everything he wrote afterward. On patrol he noticed that the sentence rising fastest to his lips in a tense encounter — the sarcastic comeback, the flat insult, the retaliation — was almost always the sentence that made the situation worse. He called this natural language: the words a raw feeling writes for you. They feel true because they are true, in the moment. That's exactly the problem.
His alternative, laid out in Verbal Judo, he called tactical language: words chosen for what they'll do to the listener, not for how satisfying they are to say. His test was almost paradoxical. If a response would feel good to deliver, that's a signal it's natural language and probably the wrong move. Tactical language often feels flat to say out loud — which is exactly why it works.
Thompson wasn't arguing for suppression. He built the Verbal Judo Institute and trained well over a hundred thousand officers on the idea that you can feel the full force of anger and still choose your sentence deliberately, the way an actor chooses a line. The feeling gets to exist. It doesn't get to write the script.
Most advice about honest communication assumes the honest version is the good version. Thompson's field was full of nightly proof that the truest-feeling sentence and the useful one are frequently different sentences entirely.