April 1

HONESTY MONTH: DAY 1: “You lie once… you lie for the rest of your life… and in quest of proving your innocence… you pledge your honesty with utter lies…. !!!” ― Abhijeet Sawant

Step Four is all about honesty. We have to tell ourselves the truth…or we are doomed to die for the sake of our lies.

There is nothing in this world worth the horrible path of self-destruction that is active and chronic addiction. Yet, so many will follow that road, believing they cannot be honest or their lives will be destroyed by the fallout.

It NEVER happens! Never happens. I remember sitting in a meeting early on and hearing someone read about honesty…and being “constitutionally incapable of being honest with…” self. I cried. Because I had been called a liar for so long I knew that line meant ME. Damn!

And I remember a woman who shared that she had felt that way until she recognized that she had been trained to lie. By her family, to cover up the things that went on in their home that she was not allowed to talk about or question, even with (or maybe especially!) them; but certainly, not with others. Many of us come from this dynamic. The coverup, the looking good for the neighbors, the relatives, whomever we are lying to.

And this begins very early for many of us. We are taught NOT to tell the truth about what we think, how we feel (if we even know what we feel), what is really going on in our relationships, in our homes, in our lives.

So, this step requires a level of honesty that most of us have to work to achieve. I could not list anyone with whom I had a resentment at first. I was SO full of rage, but I could not talk about it or admit it for a while around here. I was too much of a people pleaser.

I had been angry for so long, I no longer recognized that emotion as mine. I truly had a challenge with this step.

I also did NOT want to tell others about who I was and what I had done. I had intense programming with NOT talking about personal issues for so many years that I was ashamed to talk about these things. I really internalized the victim stance; and believed I had caused the things that happened to me. Culturally, most women in my peer set were told that their seductiveness was the reason for sexual misconduct by men. We were the predators, based on our clothing, our attitudes, our flirtatious behaviors. There was a great deal of blame that we were given for the things that happened.

Then the real perpetrators also told us that we were at fault or that what happened was “no big deal.”

Many of the things that I later was able to talk about in this first attempt at self-honesty were not on that first list. I had some rather minor and petty irritations to list then.
I was so happy to have done at least a minor version of this step, because I really wanted to learn about how to do this thing! And it was the level of honesty that I had available at that time in my life and recovery.

So, for me, honesty has been a process along with the rest of these principles. My honesty with YOU is not the key here. My honesty with ME is. And I have learned to accept some rather unsavory truths about Kelly. Some of them really pissed me off! And I got to work another inventory on THOSE. Isn’t that fun? Irony, of course, is so close to the humor I must learn to employ here or I am going to die from the little, stupid lies that I place so much value on!

So, welcome to Honesty Month. It is kind of a bitch, but I have learned to make it MY bitch…and I really, truly love this step. Sometimes more than all the others combined!