HONESTY MONTH: DAY 17: “I would rather be damned by my honesty, than caged by my lies.”― Omega Maverick
Step 4 is where I begin to see who I really am. I get to recognize my character defects and stop using them to the extent that I had.
But most of all, I get to see who I really am. I have another version of this I would like to buy into, but I get to find the real truth in my relationships, my beliefs, my old ideas, my pathology (we all have one!) and how that works (or doesn’t) in my interface with the world around me.
Insight into our own quirks and personality traits can be uncomfortable to sit with. We all have our own ideas of who that person is in the mirror, but we need to have an honest, true version to become more the person we are intended to be here.
There are so many factors that make up human beings, our heritage, our upbringing, abuse of all kinds and our ways of dealing with that, the dysfunctional ways we cope with life and who we are going to become on the other side of this assessment.
A true inventory tells us all of this. We get to see our warped images of self and others and how truly dysfunctional and crazy some of our coping skills are, along with the warped ideas we may have about how we are affected by them.
When we are truly fearless about this stuff, we get to sit with a whole lot of what the BB calls “unpalatable truths” about ourselves. We start out with a shit list of everyone else and find out that WE are the broken and troubled ones. And that WE are the perpetrators of every damaged relationship in our lives because we are trying to manipulate and control things to get what we believe we need and/or want.
This is the cage we have lived in, the downward spiral of insanity that brings us into this whole thing to begin with. This is the stuff…the real causes and conditions that drive the bus that is addiction. Most of us are more addicted to proving everyone else wrong and at fault than we are the drugs and alcohol that keep us from seeing these truths. They are not “painful” or “sad” or any of that crap. They are just the damned truth! What freedom we get when we get real. I love this shit!
Dolphin Hug 