Honesty In Getting Clean And Sober
November 1, 2009
“There’s a lot of talk about the importance of being honest in all our affairs and relationships. I really don’t know where to start it’s been so long since I’ve been honest it’s almost easier to lie.”
There are two major challenges concerning dishonesty that must be met and overcome in order to enter into a healthy recovery.
1. The dishonesty and lying has to stop. Unfortunately, for many people, this has become a habit. This behavior needs to be ‘unlearned’and the habit broken.
2. We must also overcome the fear of the consequences of once again being truthful
Being dishonest can easily become the standard of action, or way of life for most alcoholics or addicts. We deceive ourselves and we lied to others. We lie about how much we used, and how often we used. We hid our feelings and emotions, or became distant from our relationships, perhaps not in all areas, but certainly in terms of our substance use.
We lied about where we went and what we had been doing. It’s a way of staking our claim to our right to continue drinking or using drugs. The lies, self deception, and self delusions were created for the for the purpose of allowing us to continue to use. Somehow we needed it all to make sense.
Sometimes it was not even our intention to deceive. But it is simply that our thought processes had become so clouded and confused and distorted, that our sense of reality was way off base and we no longer made sense.
Many people have discovered that there is a tendency to continue to be untruthful it just doesn’t go away when your substance abuse stops.