The great lie.
Adjusting my Sails
Thread Starter
Join Date: Jan 2008
Posts: 1,021
The great lie.
The Lies We Tell:
MINIMIZATION
The first lie we tell ourselves is called minimization. This is where we take reality and make it smaller. We think the problem is not that bad. If an alcoholic takes an eight ounce glass and fills it up with ice, and takes a shot glass full of whiskey, and pours it over the ice, and holds the glass up to the light, they will be disappointed. A shot glass full to the brim with whiskey makes a disgustingly small dent in an eight ounce glass.
If you are an alcoholic, you are not going to use a shot glass. If you have a shot glass at home, it is gathering dust. You are going to pour your whiskey until you see some color in that glass. Now, if we were to take this drink, and measure how many shots are in it, we are going to find four, maybe five, shots in the glass. Here's how we minimize: We think, and believe, that this is a drink, one drink, but it's not one drink, it's really four drinks.
We can do the same thing with beer cans. If you are a beer drinker, you have a considerable collection of empty beer cans at the end of the week. When you take the garbage out, you have got, maybe two big plastic trash can bags full of cans. As you are going out to take out the garbage, you may think, "Boy, I hope the garbage person doesn't think I'm drinking all this beer." At that time, you may put one of the bags on your garbage pile, and the other one on your neighbor's pile.
We can minimize about our mounting problems. Everyone gets a couple of DWI's don't they? Almost everybody gets a divorce. It's not so bad to spend a couple of nights in jail. We're a good person, we're not bad, we were just unlucky, the cops were after us. We take what is real and make it look smaller. We lie to ourselves, and we believe the lie.
RATIONALIZATION
The next lie we tell is called rationalization. This is where we have a good excuse. Probably the most commonly used excuse for drinking is, I had a hard day. It follows, therefore, that if I had such a hard day, I deserve to get blasted. Anyone, who had the hard day that I had, would need to relax. Let's have a few beers, a couple of joints. In rationalizing we may blame our problems on someone else. "If you would just lighten up," we might say, "I could straighten things out." We may think remorsefully of all we could have been, if we had been born wealthy, or been given the right brakes. We look at all those successful people and we hate them. We never had such a chance, we tell ourselves. There's no God. If there was a God, where was God when I needed God.
DENIAL
The last type of lie that we tell ourselves, and this one is the most characteristic of chemical dependency is denial. Denial is a stubborn angry refusal to see the truth. Here we refuse to see what is right before our eyes. We block out what is real until we really don't see it at all. The best way to show you how this works is to give you an example. You are walking down the street and it is a very hot day. It's ninety-five degrees in the shade. Sweat is pouring down your face. As you walk up the road, watching the heat waves rise up off of the asphalt, people are standing along side of the road with pails full of ice water. As you pass each of them, they throw their bucket full of reality in your face. "Your wife's divorcing you! That's your third DWI! The boss won't put up with you anymore! You're in trouble with your parents again!" You see the pails of water, you see them throw them in your face, you hear the words that are shouted at you, but you do not experience the full reality of what's happening, you don't get the full emotional impact of the problems. With your whole life falling apart, you are walking up the street as if nothing was happening at all. The people around you are amazed. Why doesn't he see? Why doesn't she understand? Why can't they see what's happening to them?
HOW TO BEGIN TO LIVE IN THE TRUTH
A key component of alcoholism treatment is uncovering the truth. Recovery from addiction demands rigorous honesty. You can't see what's happening to you because you are lying to yourself. You can't see the truth because you believe the lies. You are completely fooled. In treatment the full reality of what has been happening to you will be before you. It will be painful, but the truth will set you free. Recovery is an endless search for the truth and we must be willing to listen to what others say. We must try to be open to what people tell us about ourselves and our actions. We reflect to each other what we see. We try to find the truth together. What we cannot do alone, we can do together.
THE GREAT LIE
It is important for us to know how the psychology of chemical dependency gets going. In childhood we come to believe in the great lie. This lie is at the core of alcoholism or drug addiction. We do not hear this lie from our parents or from our friends. We don't hear it from our teachers or from television. It is more powerful than that. We hear this lie inside of our own thinking, inside of that most personal part of ourselves. The lie is this: If you tell anyone the whole truth about you, they won't like you.
Once we hear this lie and believe this lie, we know that we will never be loved for who we are. Therefore to get any of the good stuff out of life at all, we have to pretend to be someone that we are not. We try to be someone else. We watch those people who are popular and we copy them. We are very careful about what kind of clothes we wear. We copy people's mannerisms and their fine little gestures. We find ourselves cocking our heads in a certain way when we laugh or smile. We are hoping to fool the people. We hope that they cannot see the real me. We want them to see the pretend me.
HOW THE GREAT LIE WORKS
As this coping behavior occurs, it works. Some people do like us for the new me we are trying to be. We become pleased to know that we are not going to be alone. The people we are fooling will love us. We begin to wear specific costumes and to play certain roles. We may wear the nice girl costume or the cowhand costume. We may wear the hippie costume or the yuppie costume. We know it is a costume, we know it's not us, but the people are fooled, and the lie goes on.
WE NEVER FEEL ACCEPTED
We must look carefully at what is happening. We have fooled people into liking us--but they don't really like us--they don't know us; we are keeping who we are secret. As we keep doing this, making this effort to be loved, our emptiness grows, our pain increases. We try hard. We copy everyone that looks cool. We put on the best false front we can, but in time, we realize it isn't going to work. We feel more and more lonely and isolated. We have known all along, that we weren't going to be loved, not for the real us. No one was going to love us.
THE PROMISE OF THE DISEASE
When we are lonely enough in this process, when we are isolated enough, when we are hurting enough, the illness comes along and offers us a smorgasbord of answers to our pain. Sex, money, power, influence, drugs, gambling, and alcohol, are all there, and more, and we feed on this cafeteria of sin. For a while, things get better. All these things relieve the pain for a little while. We find ourselves irresistibly drawn to this table of wrongs. We spend more time doing it. We eat, drink, stuff, cram, push and shove. We find more and more of our life centers around the use of these things. We get up on the table and stuff ourselves. We begin to lose our morals and values. We eat, and consume, and vomit, and stuff ourselves even more. In time, there is never enough. There is not enough sex. There is not enough money. There is not enough power. There is not enough booze. AA says, one drink is too much and a thousand is never enough.
TRUTH
Finally, we begin to get sick from this cafeteria of wrongs. We realize an awful fact: The answer is not in these things. It is a terrible point of grief when we finally realize that the answer is not in our drug of choice. This is not a happy time, but by now, we are addicted, we can't stop. We want to stop drinking. We promise ourselves that we'll stop, but we can't stop, we're addicted.
How to stop the lies and begin recovery.
One of the things we must be willing to do is tell the truth all the time. Nothing else will stop the great lie. WE are enslaved to our addiction, but the truth will set us free of our chains.
In alcoholism recovery, probably for the first time in our lives, we have the opportunity to get honest. If we don't, if you hold anything back, you will return to chemicals. We don't have to tell everyone the truth, but there is a psychological law at work. The law is this: The more you can share the closer you can get, and the closer you can get the more you can share. As intimacy grows, you tell more of the truth.
It is vitally important that we find out the truth about ourselves.
MINIMIZATION
The first lie we tell ourselves is called minimization. This is where we take reality and make it smaller. We think the problem is not that bad. If an alcoholic takes an eight ounce glass and fills it up with ice, and takes a shot glass full of whiskey, and pours it over the ice, and holds the glass up to the light, they will be disappointed. A shot glass full to the brim with whiskey makes a disgustingly small dent in an eight ounce glass.
If you are an alcoholic, you are not going to use a shot glass. If you have a shot glass at home, it is gathering dust. You are going to pour your whiskey until you see some color in that glass. Now, if we were to take this drink, and measure how many shots are in it, we are going to find four, maybe five, shots in the glass. Here's how we minimize: We think, and believe, that this is a drink, one drink, but it's not one drink, it's really four drinks.
We can do the same thing with beer cans. If you are a beer drinker, you have a considerable collection of empty beer cans at the end of the week. When you take the garbage out, you have got, maybe two big plastic trash can bags full of cans. As you are going out to take out the garbage, you may think, "Boy, I hope the garbage person doesn't think I'm drinking all this beer." At that time, you may put one of the bags on your garbage pile, and the other one on your neighbor's pile.
We can minimize about our mounting problems. Everyone gets a couple of DWI's don't they? Almost everybody gets a divorce. It's not so bad to spend a couple of nights in jail. We're a good person, we're not bad, we were just unlucky, the cops were after us. We take what is real and make it look smaller. We lie to ourselves, and we believe the lie.
RATIONALIZATION
The next lie we tell is called rationalization. This is where we have a good excuse. Probably the most commonly used excuse for drinking is, I had a hard day. It follows, therefore, that if I had such a hard day, I deserve to get blasted. Anyone, who had the hard day that I had, would need to relax. Let's have a few beers, a couple of joints. In rationalizing we may blame our problems on someone else. "If you would just lighten up," we might say, "I could straighten things out." We may think remorsefully of all we could have been, if we had been born wealthy, or been given the right brakes. We look at all those successful people and we hate them. We never had such a chance, we tell ourselves. There's no God. If there was a God, where was God when I needed God.
DENIAL
The last type of lie that we tell ourselves, and this one is the most characteristic of chemical dependency is denial. Denial is a stubborn angry refusal to see the truth. Here we refuse to see what is right before our eyes. We block out what is real until we really don't see it at all. The best way to show you how this works is to give you an example. You are walking down the street and it is a very hot day. It's ninety-five degrees in the shade. Sweat is pouring down your face. As you walk up the road, watching the heat waves rise up off of the asphalt, people are standing along side of the road with pails full of ice water. As you pass each of them, they throw their bucket full of reality in your face. "Your wife's divorcing you! That's your third DWI! The boss won't put up with you anymore! You're in trouble with your parents again!" You see the pails of water, you see them throw them in your face, you hear the words that are shouted at you, but you do not experience the full reality of what's happening, you don't get the full emotional impact of the problems. With your whole life falling apart, you are walking up the street as if nothing was happening at all. The people around you are amazed. Why doesn't he see? Why doesn't she understand? Why can't they see what's happening to them?
HOW TO BEGIN TO LIVE IN THE TRUTH
A key component of alcoholism treatment is uncovering the truth. Recovery from addiction demands rigorous honesty. You can't see what's happening to you because you are lying to yourself. You can't see the truth because you believe the lies. You are completely fooled. In treatment the full reality of what has been happening to you will be before you. It will be painful, but the truth will set you free. Recovery is an endless search for the truth and we must be willing to listen to what others say. We must try to be open to what people tell us about ourselves and our actions. We reflect to each other what we see. We try to find the truth together. What we cannot do alone, we can do together.
THE GREAT LIE
It is important for us to know how the psychology of chemical dependency gets going. In childhood we come to believe in the great lie. This lie is at the core of alcoholism or drug addiction. We do not hear this lie from our parents or from our friends. We don't hear it from our teachers or from television. It is more powerful than that. We hear this lie inside of our own thinking, inside of that most personal part of ourselves. The lie is this: If you tell anyone the whole truth about you, they won't like you.
Once we hear this lie and believe this lie, we know that we will never be loved for who we are. Therefore to get any of the good stuff out of life at all, we have to pretend to be someone that we are not. We try to be someone else. We watch those people who are popular and we copy them. We are very careful about what kind of clothes we wear. We copy people's mannerisms and their fine little gestures. We find ourselves cocking our heads in a certain way when we laugh or smile. We are hoping to fool the people. We hope that they cannot see the real me. We want them to see the pretend me.
HOW THE GREAT LIE WORKS
As this coping behavior occurs, it works. Some people do like us for the new me we are trying to be. We become pleased to know that we are not going to be alone. The people we are fooling will love us. We begin to wear specific costumes and to play certain roles. We may wear the nice girl costume or the cowhand costume. We may wear the hippie costume or the yuppie costume. We know it is a costume, we know it's not us, but the people are fooled, and the lie goes on.
WE NEVER FEEL ACCEPTED
We must look carefully at what is happening. We have fooled people into liking us--but they don't really like us--they don't know us; we are keeping who we are secret. As we keep doing this, making this effort to be loved, our emptiness grows, our pain increases. We try hard. We copy everyone that looks cool. We put on the best false front we can, but in time, we realize it isn't going to work. We feel more and more lonely and isolated. We have known all along, that we weren't going to be loved, not for the real us. No one was going to love us.
THE PROMISE OF THE DISEASE
When we are lonely enough in this process, when we are isolated enough, when we are hurting enough, the illness comes along and offers us a smorgasbord of answers to our pain. Sex, money, power, influence, drugs, gambling, and alcohol, are all there, and more, and we feed on this cafeteria of sin. For a while, things get better. All these things relieve the pain for a little while. We find ourselves irresistibly drawn to this table of wrongs. We spend more time doing it. We eat, drink, stuff, cram, push and shove. We find more and more of our life centers around the use of these things. We get up on the table and stuff ourselves. We begin to lose our morals and values. We eat, and consume, and vomit, and stuff ourselves even more. In time, there is never enough. There is not enough sex. There is not enough money. There is not enough power. There is not enough booze. AA says, one drink is too much and a thousand is never enough.
TRUTH
Finally, we begin to get sick from this cafeteria of wrongs. We realize an awful fact: The answer is not in these things. It is a terrible point of grief when we finally realize that the answer is not in our drug of choice. This is not a happy time, but by now, we are addicted, we can't stop. We want to stop drinking. We promise ourselves that we'll stop, but we can't stop, we're addicted.
How to stop the lies and begin recovery.
One of the things we must be willing to do is tell the truth all the time. Nothing else will stop the great lie. WE are enslaved to our addiction, but the truth will set us free of our chains.
In alcoholism recovery, probably for the first time in our lives, we have the opportunity to get honest. If we don't, if you hold anything back, you will return to chemicals. We don't have to tell everyone the truth, but there is a psychological law at work. The law is this: The more you can share the closer you can get, and the closer you can get the more you can share. As intimacy grows, you tell more of the truth.
It is vitally important that we find out the truth about ourselves.
Laozi Old Man
Join Date: May 2008
Location: Detroit, MI
Posts: 6,665
Originally Posted by Dean62 
The first lie we tell ourselves is called MINIMIZATION.
I think therefore I am - but the "I am" that thinks is not the "I am" that I am.
IO Storm
Join Date: Mar 2007
Location: Southern California
Posts: 18,436
How to stop the lies and begin recovery.
One of the things we must be willing to do is tell the truth all the time.
One of the things we must be willing to do is tell the truth all the time.
Wow, Dean...
How true is this. One of the things I found out about myself after
coming into recovery is that I continued to exagerrate, embellish, and
omit..which amounts to lying.
As I went further along..I saw more clearly, and called myself on it.
in fact..I did it today..embellished, and immediately said.."No, that's
not how it was..it was like this..."
So easy to do. But growth, to me, is not that I don't do it..but the
quickness of my response and willingness to own up to it.
And the instances grow further apart.
God, keep me open..and honest...and willing!
Neat thread..
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