The practice of honesty has a revered, important place in the journey of recovery from addiction.
To heal any illness, we must learn how to notice and name what is currently true for us without judgment and gloss. This is especially so for addiction, mental health, and trauma recovery.
Isn’t that interesting? In this post, we here at Villa Kali Ma take a closer look at the ways coming clean supports staying clean.
How We Learned to Lie: the Habit of Hiding?
We weren’t always such complicated people. Human beings come into the world in a state of honesty. A baby’s first mode is total transparency, openly radiating every passing feeling, sensation, and desire.
During the growing-up process, we learn that some truths get frowns and scowls, and others get smiles and hugs. Entraining to our caregivers for survival purposes, we learn to hide, hold back, and fudge the facts some of the time.
Dishonesty as a Trauma Symptom
The idea of honesty often has a heavy moral overlay. Just thinking about the times we have lied, we may go into a reaction of guilt or shame.
However, dishonesty may also be looked at more matter-of-factly, as a sign of what was once necessary for us to get to where we are now.
The bigger the “bad reaction” to our authentic being, back when we were small and dependent on people for our lives, the more we may have developed lying as a survival strategy.
For example, if our attachment figures responded to our truth with shaming, anger, punishment, or abandonment, it’s very likely that we developed many different mechanisms for hiding the reality of what we feel, think, and experience.
Fast-forwarding to the years in which we were active in addiction, dishonesty very likely became a commonplace, daily habit. Lying to others helps us hide the truth of our addicted state, as well as our true feelings, thoughts, motivations, and actions. Lying to ourselves helps us to continue to use addiction as a coping tool without getting flooded with deep shame and desperation about our powerless condition.
Is it a coincidence that both lying and addiction are connected to trauma? What do you think?
Honesty in Recovery: Understanding That Dishonesty is a Common Relapse Trigger
When we get into recovery circles, we learn that to reverse the addiction’s pattern of misery and enslavement, the most powerful tool is the plain truth. All we have to do, on any given day, is tell the truth.
The truth about what? In the beginning, all we need to do is tell the truth about our addiction. In AA parlance, we learn to “tell on the addict within”.
We say, “The addict told me my use wasn’t as bad as the guy who spoke at the meeting, so maybe I don’t need to be in AA.” Or, “My addiction wants me to go to my cousin’s wedding, I think it’s hoping I’ll have a slip there”. We use this name-it-to-tame-it language, with its slight note of distancing, to differentiate from the addiction, which enhances our ability to see it and to understand that it isn’t who we are.
When we notice that we have moved back into patterns of dishonesty, we are moving in the wrong direction – towards relapse.
Dishonesty Will Make You Feel Trapped
Honesty is the protective talisman, the white magic of recovery. Honesty affects the nervous system and the body, creating the sensation of coherence, which means that everything within us can feel connected and unified as one whole.
Our physiological sensations, our emotions, and our thoughts can come into balance through practices of honesty – noticing and transparently naming what we notice. The feeling that goes along with honesty is liberation: the truth sets us free.
Every time we tell the truth, we slowly unravel more and more of the web of lies, the false persona, the person we have pretended to be. In sharing what we notice about our internal process as transparently as we can – naming thoughts, feelings, sensations, behaviors – we activate the prefrontal cortex.
The pre-frontal cortex is the seat of the so-called noticing mind, the wise part of us that is accessed in mindfulness-based therapies. In truth-telling, we move into compassionate, calm curiosity, out of reaction and judgment.
Over time, we may get very good at sensing all of it without becoming overtaken by any intense feelings, negative thoughts, or scary body sensations.
We may be able to say things like, “I notice there are some thoughts in my head, a part of me that’s saying she hates what I have done to my family. She’s being hard on me, creating feelings of guilt. I notice my chest is collapsing around my heart as she’s saying these things. I think this collapsing is coming from another part, who’s pretty young – it feels like the part that used to get yelled at, and she would feel so trapped and scared and bad.”
We do this to help protect ourselves. If we were to go back into patterns of dishonesty, for whatever our reasons, we would start to rebuild the thick web of lies and feel trapped in it all over again.
Dishonesty Destroys Relationships
Dishonesty shatters the most basic level of trust, which is necessary for a bond to exist between two people. Lies, even those meant to spare people’s feelings or control their reactions, compromise the chance of intimacy. Intimacy is only possible when two people are being their real selves. Any relationship based on a faked self won’t touch on real love, connection, nurturance, or growth.
At the same time, we might not know how to stop lying to ourselves or others.
We may struggle to stop withholding important information about our thoughts and feelings, fearing what will happen to our inner sensations and feelings if we do.
If we associate truthfulness with past overwhelming experiences of judgment, shame, and rejection, it puts us between a rock and a hard place. We have to tell the truth about what we’re thinking, feeling, and doing to recover, and doing so will make us feel better, but we may also believe deep down that if we tell the truth, we’ll experience the feelings we’ve been trying to avoid. We may expect to be flooded with shame, guilt, fear, rage, or other difficult sensations.
The answer to this conundrum lies in the choice of person to whom we tell our truths. In the beginning, recipients of our honesty must be people who are reasonably able to hear it.
It is very likely true that in the past, the people we depended on responded to our truth in ways that hurt us, scared us, made us angry or want to run away, maybe all at once.
With a therapist or a recovery friend, however, we are in a position to have a different experience of telling the truth. Though it takes some getting used to, the practice of telling the truth grows our feelings of resonance and relatedness.
Honesty brings us closer, into a zone where our needs for compassion and witnessing can be met by another human. We find we are strengthened by truth and learn to rely on it as a clarifying, healing factor.
Over time, we will learn how exactly we can be fully authentic without hurting or triggering others so much. We will eventually learn to do this even in our closest relationships, where it is most likely all that we encounter our deepest, oldest pain, coded in memories of vulnerability gone wrong.
How to Maintain Honesty in Recovery?
The secret to authenticity in the face of risk lies in sharing neutral observations gathered through mindful noticing, without interpretation or assigning blame. It also helps to tell the truth only when we’re feeling calm and safe and to use that same, slightly distancing kind of name-it-to-tame-it language.
We can say, “I noticed that when you said ‘you’re late’ to me, I began to feel agitated and a bit angry. I think there’s some triggering going on, some sensations and memories that belong to my past more than they do to this moment. Let me take a moment to regulate myself and look into what this reaction in me is about, and then I’ll return to finish this conversation, OK?”
It takes practice to learn, but this kind of truth telling is easier for another person to hear without being triggered. Emotional, blaming, or judgmental language that sometimes comes out of our mouths when temporarily hijacked by a trauma-based part of us, on the other hand, all but guarantees that we trigger the other person!
Sometimes, even calm, regulated truth telling triggers other people – that’s part of life. In such moments, it will be our ability to compassionately witness our truth, internalized from our years of practice telling the truth in recovery circles and/or with therapists, that will help us hold strong and yet stay open in the face of a loved one’s triggered state of being.
What to do if we realize we have lied or we are tempted to lie? Tell the truth as soon as you can. Even if the truth is embarrassing, makes us look bad (often only to our perfectionistic inner critics), or causes another person to have a reaction which is hard for us, the truth is necessary for recovery. If we start lying again, we’ll end up using again.
Tell the truth, then choose not to beat yourself up about whatever the truth is, nor about the fact that you slipped back into lying. You can comfort yourself by remembering that lying is a feature of addiction and is connected to survival strategies from your past. You can remember the wider culture and how it teaches all of us to hide.
You aren’t the only one. It is hard for all of us to stop falsifying. We may still feel that we need our white lies now, for a million reasons – because it is more socially comfortable, to avoid conflicts, or because we fear judgment from people whose rejection of us would be felt as very painful.
If you react, tell the truth about that reaction, too. “I notice some shame creeping in as I’m telling you this.”
Whatever you do, tell the truth about what you’re experiencing, sensing, thinking, feeling, and what your behaviors are to a safe recovery person, and you’ll be back in the right flow for recovery.
Villa Kali Ma can help women with honesty in recovery
At Villa Kali Ma, we aim to help each woman who comes through our doors to recover enough of her spunk, spirit, and capacity for calm, joy, and courage that she can tell the truth about who she is.
Our holistic clinical programs show women how to un-snag from fallen branches, move around boulders, and unblock the way. We know that once a woman is back on her true journey, magnificent things will happen in her life. Yes, life will challenge her, but she will be flowing and growing again. In this, we trust completely. And that’s the truth!
