Rediscovering Honesty

[slo2lrn]

Now one week clean. Able to start thinking with guidance from sponsor, friends in recovery, and addiction specialist of ten years. Reading posts to stimulate me further and learn. Writing to organize my thoughts.

Beginning to realize that honesty is harder than I imagined. I'm not one who lies to all people all the time but I've ALWAYS lacked the courage to talk about feelings. About wanting to run. About wanting to hide. About fears, crazy fears. Mark Twain said: "I have been through some terrible things in my life, some of which actually happened." I relate to that.

slo2lrn

[kyeyezofblue]

one week for myself(clean). honesty has never been my best quality, and now it comes little easier, but the pain i feel stays the same.so many wrongs to right, so many people to say i am sorry to, and some just " knew i was on something" all along. which i guess i had it coming to me, but funny thing is the times when they knew i was on drugs and messed up, i was clean that day.kinda makes me wonder how many people know the real me?? i have confessed a lot of things to my husband and children, which i know is a good start. but now i have to confess a lot more things to myself. i need to get back with GOD really bad.and i am slowly getting the courage to do so. everyone says they are proud of me, but i am not proud of myself right now. and i know i cant fix anything else until i fix myself, so i am taking one day at a time and one scared breath at a time.

[Wolfchild]

i had looked up the word Honesty very early in my recovery. Found out that the honesty i was trying to incorporate into my recovery was ineffectual. i learned from experience that honesty is more than just "telling the truth".

Genuine honesty is a spiritual principle that takes the place of fear and self obsession. It involves becoming emotionally and spiritually naked with myself, my sponsor, and with God. It's not a result, it's a process.

[Gmoney]

For me, honesty wasn't that big of a hurdle I had to learn how to overcome. I was taught to be honest at a very early age and saw pretty quickly that being honest had huge advantages. My problem was discerning between when to be honest and when to keep my mouth shut. What I mean is...I would often use honesty as a weapon. I knew nothing about compassion or empathy. My "brutal honesty" was equal to verbal abuse.

It was only after step work did I learn that honesty was merely a perception - a singular and personal point of view. Through the process of exposing and revealing what I believed to be "the truth," I found that honesty can very often have nothing to do with what is factual. As the literature tells us, "Everything we know about the truth is subject to revision." It's subject to revision because what we know about the truth can be very little - even though we may believe we're being totally truthful. For me, this is why open-mindedness and willingness go hand-in-hand with honesty. By exposing what it is that I think, believe, feel or concieve, I'm given an opportunity to learn, grow and accept reality.

We all don't come into recovery "brimming" with honesty, but through practice, we become better at telling on ourselves - whether I'm honest about a fear, an obsession, a resentment or pain - revealing my perceptions allows others to help me align my views with reality and my HP's will for me.