Telling the truth and living the truth… these were principles my mother was raised with, and did her best to instill in her family. But bless her heart, with five children between the ages of 3 and 14, and living with an active alcoholic husband and father, she found that very difficult to do under the circumstances.
The three primary lessons you learn growing up in a family with addiction are: don’t tell the truth, don’t rock the boat or keep the peace at all costs, and don’t talk about feeling. This is who you are – just as you are what you eat – you learn these behaviors in your developmental years. These messages get locked in the mainframe and the processes run automatically – your behavioral radar is established: you need to be liked, to please others, and you never really get to know who you are… all this and you aren’t even 10 years of age!
This was my entrance into life. For those of us in this situation, we get into our teens and we are completely unaware of what is ahead of us and the why’s of it all. Today, I don’t complain about it because in so many ways it was a gift and led me to do the work that resulted in me being the person I am today. It is not about right and wrong, nor fault or blame, it is just simply what it is.
And here we get to this issue of telling the truth and living the truth. There are untold millions of us living our daily lives with similar life experiences and upbringing – it doesn’t matter whether you are rich or poor or what your ethnic background it. Our early years of learning to be an honest person got messed up with mixed messages.
Hopefully, life will take us to that place of surrender where we begin to realize the full freedom of the words “and the truth will set you free.” Father Martin, a recovered alcoholic and a Catholic Priest, said telling a lie won’t kill you – it might get you into trouble – however, living a lie will kill you spiritually, emotionally, and possibly physically. Living a lied happens when we consistently present ourselves to those who love and care about to be living a certain way, when in fact we are not.
During my drinking and using days from my mid-teens until my mid 20’s I did not live the truth because I didn’t fully understand nor necessarily agree with what that meant. Because my emotional needs were not fully met growing up, I was very needy during this time and was always trying to please others – almost to the extreme – and so people didn’t see who I was because I didn’t know who I was. Also, I was not particularly honest – I was not faithful to my wife at the time and I always lied about how much I had been drinking.
I have always maintained that telling a lie is one thing, but when you live a lie, it will take you down. You don’t need to look any further than today’s news to see the full effect of what telling a lie and living a lie will do to you and to your loved ones. Tiger Woods got caught in both as a result of his choices. He is really no different than scores of others in the realm of telling and living lies – it just happens that he is better known. Living a lie eventually took me down. The thing about living a lie is that it not only takes you down, it often takes the people around you down too.
When I was living a lie, I didn’t always know that was the case. I never stopped to think about what I was doing and how it might impact the people in my life. I didn’t know what living life with what 12-step programs call “rigorous honest” looked like. I find it interesting the writers of the Big Book of AA knew, back in 1936-39, just how important the concept of honesty is to finding recovery in that they used the descriptor of “rigorous” when talking to addicts about honesty.
In recovery we talk about “H.O.W.” – it stands for honesty, openness, and willingness. Being honest requires being open, which requires a willingness to take action. We can’t achieve or maintain recovery without being honest, open, and willing – the three are interwoven. These are all spiritual principles we talk about in our cards, and they are all critical to working on our character defects.
To learn how to become honest in recovery, we can begin by doing the work of a 12-step program. Working on steps four and five really address the issue of honesty and following through on these steps is what the work of recovery is all about. Of course people have a choice to do this work or not do it. If you don’t, you don’t get the payoff – the opportunity to become happy, joyous, and free. I really believe honesty is absolutely pivotal to finding and maintaining recovery.
I also recognize being rigorously honest isn’t something that happens overnight. Learning to be more honest is an incremental process – you can only be as honest as you believe yourself capable of being. As you work with it and become more truthful with others, you become more honest with yourself and realize there is more you can do to really be honest “all the time, about everything, to everyone”.
So just to finish up, I’d say Tiger Woods will need to do a lot of personal and spiritual work to ensure all his future personal interactions with the people in his life are clean and clear. All of us in recovery who have had the experience of not living our truth in our addiction, know it won’t be easy, but at the end of the day, living openly and honestly – no more secrets, no more lies – has its rewards.
Blog by Jim Stimson 