April 4

HONESTY MONTH: DAY 4: “Accept everything about yourself–I mean everything, You are you and that is the beginning and the end–no apologies, no regrets.” -Clark Moustakas

I love the idea that honesty is all about my version of myself. It doesn’t matter, really, what I think about anything. That is a moving, changing, organic part of life.

Truth is not the same as an opinion. There is a tremendous difference between the two. We do not come here because our opinions were sending us to jail and destroying our relationships with everyone. Nor were they, necessarily, keeping us from jobs we wanted, or a way of life that was more inherently in line with spiritual principles.

Quite frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn what you think. Truth! It is the vision of who I am and how I present myself to the world around me that causes these issues, and my addiction is the thing that is most problematic in the scheme of things.

Staying out of active addiction means I have to revise my view of what I am up to and how I impact the world around me. What I believe must be addressed. Step 4 will guide me to see how completely and utterly my self-obsession and selfishness and FEAR drive me to do the things I do. I am compelled and driven by those ideas that I need to address.

My relationship with the world around me is a factor in my addiction, and my addiction is a factor in my relationship with the world around me.

I cannot tell you, or anyone else, the truth, until I know what it really is. I have been so full of self-deception and ego defenses for so long that I am not even sure what the truth is any longer. So, I begin to write out those things I have done that are bothering me. My “confessional” if you will. And I see that the things I believed about right and wrong are different than what I have come to believe since that first inventory.

And, as the BB says, we ALL have assets and liabilities. Understanding what those are, precisely, is the path to recovery. Why? Because we MUST remain open to understanding our liabilities, especially when our tendency is to blame others for the wrongs we have done and the anger we are feeling.

I only had two identifiable emotions when I got here; rage and shame. They drove me to do incredibly awful things to myself and others. I was pissed at the world and God and everyone and everything. And I kept feeling ashamed of who I was and all the things that I had done and been and what had happened to me (a whole lifetime of this!)

So, of course, that first inventory was good, the second one was better, and all of the ones since then have increasingly uncovered even greater assets and greater liabilities. All of the “causes and conditions” I was able to uncover at first were about YOU and the world around me. It took some time and a great deal of guidance before I was able to see MY part and see how I could stop believing that all my life was YOUR problem, not mine.

The reframing of the stories is the key to recovery. What I believe or “think” about all of it has shifted. I am able to have the courage to see the real truth. Not just beat myself up with my shit, but to proactively shift the focus of attention and grow in positive directions.

Inventories are not a shit list of people who have pissed me off or done me wrong. They are an honest assessment of where I am in the world and what needs to be cleaned up and addressed in my thinking and living. This living thing is a challenge for all of us, and we need to get on with it, instead of recreating the past, over and over again.

As the saying goes: “If you want something you have never had, you have to do something you have never done.” Yeah, that’s it!