let’s be honest

Honesty is critical to recovery. I know a lot of people in recovery programs don’t like absolutes. We live in a world that is not fond of absolutes.

But the power of addiction is strongest in the shadows – which leads me to the conviction that being dishonest, with myself and others, is likely to lead to a relapse (at best).

There are a few different types of discussions I believe are important for my recovery. Each has a different purpose, a different audience, and different timing; but each requires honesty or it becomes useless.

First, there is telling my story. This is usually what happens in Step 5 of the 12, confessing our faults. In the context of a 12-step program, this will often be a discussion with one’s sponsor. My sponsor and I went to a local monastery and spent a long day with me talking, crying, and walking through my full story.

When I told my story, I had to remember that the point was not to talk about what a victim I was, but to own up to where I had missed the mark. I needed to take responsibility for my own choices.

I think that confession allowed me to be honest with myself, which was at least as important as being honest with anyone else. It also gave me a chance to process some of the stuff that had happened in a more coherent view than anything I had done in private confession through prayer, and gave me a broader view. Patterns began to emerge. For the first time, I saw that there were certain events or feelings that often preceeded my acting out. I later learned these are called “triggers.”

Eventually, it was time for another conversation – a disclosure to my wife. The focus in a disclosure is different. This is not the encyclopedaic recitation of the full list of wrongs that was in my story; this was a specific disclosure of the behaviors which had impacted our relationship, whether she knew the impact or not, and regardless of whether they happened before or after the wedding. It was more general in the sense that she didn’t need (or want) to know the gory details, more pointed in terms of recognition of impact.

My wife has since said that there were two things she saw in my disclosure that were key to our continued marriage: I was broken by my errors, and I was complete in my revelation.

Wait a minute – you just wrote ‘complete in revelation’ just after writing ‘more general.’ What?

By complete, I mean that there was no general area of acting out, no range of activity, that felt incomplete. I gave her general areas or activities (“I visited adult bookstores for anonymous encounters”), and let her ask whatever details she wanted to hear. That’s not to say she liked my answers. I just decided that if there was pain involved, it would be more merciful for both of us to get it out and over with at once instead of continuing to poke and prod at it. If the marriage was going to fail, it was going to fail quickly. By her ( and God’s) grace, that was not the outcome.

I think trying to do a complete disclosure with her without the filter of the prior confession would have been disastrous. Had I gone to the level of detail my confession required, I suspect there would have been a steeper path to our climb. For example, listing specific locations and specific actions might have spurred her imagination, making our relationship that more challenging. I know a guy who bought a new mattress, then a new bed, then remodeled the bedroom, then bought a new house because he dwelt in the details of where his affairs took place.

Again, wherever my wife asked for details, I provided them. There is a world of difference between paving a path for renewal in your relationship and giving her material to question how she compares to someone else, and your words in a disclosure make all the difference.

The final conversation I think is critical is my testimony. OK, technically that’s a monologue, not a conversation. There is healing power in sharing my story. There is a renewed reminder of where I was, and why I would not want to be there again. There is the hope that someone who hears the story might see something of himself, and get some help.  There is hope, in spite of that part of me that sought fulfillment in so many wrong ways.

I share that testimony when I can. Not every setting is appropriate, but I have found very few cases where the story shared creates discomfort or disconnecton with others. Maybe I’m more cautious in sharing than some. I certainly don’t get on the train in the afternoon and say, “MAY I HAVE YOUR ATTENTION, PLEASE?”

I’m not a masochist.

I am a human, flawed, fallen, devious in many ways; but I am also being healed, and I am a child of the King. If I am honest, that’s my identity: a prince, so named by the King whom I didn’t want to serve. That’s a far cry from where I was, not that long ago.

if you only knew…

The movie Sneakers featured a decryption device which could break any code. One needed only the secret passphrase to gain access to the secrets of the world, and the phrase was “Too Many Secrets.“

Secrets can be a good thing, when it comes to birthday parties or roses ordered but not yet delivered; but secrets in a relationship are often deadly.

A phrase my wife used when we first became more serious in our relationship was, “if you really knew me, you wouldn’t love me.” Of course, if she had known more about me back then, who knows how things would have developed…but the point is, we kept each other in the dark. We feared each others’ rejection and alienation.

I know that, as I became more aware of her issues, I felt that those issues were of little importance relative to the relationship we were building. They would certainly affect us, sometimes dramatically, but none were “deal-breakers.”

I wonder if she has felt the same way about my issues.

What I find now is that the more I am honest about my struggles, the more she respects me. Oh, true enough, it might be different if I was still cruising and acting out…but my honesty about the difficulty of remaining ’sober’ has only drawn us closer.

It is also important to say that I would not expect a person of lower caliber than my wife to be able to accept the darkness in my story. Since those things were/are a part of me (though not the definition of who I really am) , I would be stupid to pursue a relationship with her if she couldn’t handle my past.

I know several men who are ’single again’ because their spouses were not able to see through the history into the present tense of the person before them. I also know a lot of men who continued to act out, regularly,  after divulging the truth; that doesn’t usually work out so well either.

Secrets make it easier to keep secrets. New secrets. Dark secrets.

Honesty begets honesty. Harsh, brutal honesty.

I believe pain is always easier with a clear conscience.

coming clean

A man’s very highest moment is, I have no doubt at all,  when he kneels in the dust, and beats his breast, and tells all the sins of his life. – Oscar Wilde

I’ve rejoined a group that was very instrumental in helping me find my sanity a few years back. This time around I am going to be moving into a role of servant-leadership, hopefully helping others find their sanity as well.

As we went around the room last week introducing ourselves, there were several in the group who mentioned that they were married, and several had already had a session with their spouse ’spilling the beans’ on the hidden stuff in their hearts and lives.

Lest my next thoughts be misunderstood, let me say that this is a crucial conversation which (I believe) must happen, rather like re-breaking a bone that fractured and then set incorrectly from lack of proper care. However, there are good and bad ways to have that conversation.

The temptation for many addicts is to get a case of ‘verbal diarrhea‘ and pour out all of their stuff in one cleansing eruption. This feels emotionally satisfying for the teller; ‘there, that’s done’.

But this probably is more about you than it is about your spouse or significant other, and even less about the two of you.

In my 12-Step program, I had my confessional with my sponsor. It is probably best to start with someone other than your spouse, preferably someone who already knows a little about you and understands the nature of addiction.

By the way, I keep using the term ’spouse.’ Being single doesn’t release you from the need to do this. One of the things that keeps people in the power of the sickness is the secrecy. ‘If I keep my darkness in the dark,‘ one might think, ‘I won’t be rejected, more lonely…‘, or whatever. But giving a voice to the part of you that really does want to be free gives that part of you more strength. It doesn’t stop your knee-jerk reaction to your triggers, but it helps you start to build resistance. If you have no one in your life who is your partner in life, then you will need, eventually, to tell someone who is close enough to know the you you want people to see, not the you who acts out.

In the group I first attended, there were maybe a dozen guys that did some form of confession to their wives the wrong way. I don’t have any great body of research to draw from here, but I can tell you that most of those marriages were over within a year. Those who took a measured approach, not blurting everything out as soon as they were either caught or dinged by their conscious, had a marital survival rate above 50%.

That may not sound very encouraging. But bear in mind that the truth has a nasty habit of coming out, one way or another.

So if I were writing The Rules of Self-Disclosure, they would look something like this:

Law #1: Thou shalt go to someone you trust in clergy or a solid counselor to start the process. If their response is to beat you with a wet noodle, or a verbal dressing-down, consider going to someone else. They should neither condone nor condemn. If you are having this conversation, you are likely doing enough self-condemnation.

Law #2: Thou shalt tell your spouse or significant other that you would like for the two of you to have a talk with said clergy person/counselor. The timing should not be a month ahead, nor should it be at the last minute, but with enough time for your partner to steel themselves a little bit for something that will be tough to hear. The purpose in letting your partner know there will be another party present is that nobody brings a pastor along to announce they’ve found someone else, etc.

The delay between the notification and the meeting will seem an eternity, but please don’t start down the road to disclosure when it is just the two of you.

Law #3: Thou shalt let the clergy person/counselor guide the discussion. They are trained in tough conversations; you aren’t. Make no mistake; this conversation will not be easy, and there is no way to make your partner feel like this isn’t a personal attack on them. In addictions that involve either porn or interaction with other people, your partner will feel betrayed. And they won’t be incorrect. That will hurt.

Law #4: Thou shalt make no demands of your partner. Let me use my experience here, rather than impersonal pronouns. My wife seemed to take the whole thing fairly well when we had our talk. Truth is, she was in shock. She had known about my issues before we got married, but I had convinced her that her suspicions were her own paranoia, and I was ripping the mask off of my lies – several years of lies at that point.

I’m not sure how, beyond the grace of God, but we made it through those next few very tense months. After our initial conversation, I had to let her process things quite a bit. If I had been defensive during this period, I suspect I would be writing from an efficiency apartment or my mom’s basement at this point; but I took her moods and doubts and questions as they came. She had every right to question me, and denying that would have made her think that I was still hiding something. Oh, that reminds me…

Law #5: Thou shalt put everything on the table at once. Your partner may not need or want the gory details of when and with whom, but she might. A good approach is to start in general categories (“I’ve visited adult bookstores since we were married, even in the past few months“), and then get more particular if she asks.
Starting with things that would get my blog marked as ‘inappropriate’ may make you feel better, but it won’t help her process what you’re throwing out there.

Law #6: Remember that you are not in charge of the outcomes. This goes somewhat with #4 above, but it goes further than that. If you are fortunate, you may be sleeping on the couch for a while. But you may find yourself knocking on your best bud’s door asking for his couch for a while.

Depending on what you did, you may find yourself in jail.

But trying to manage the outcomes will nearly guarantee failure. Do what you can to make sure the initial disclosure doesn’t end in violence. But don’t expect your partner to say, “Aw, that’s okay punkin’” and invite you to continue your marital bliss anytime soon.

As I said in an earlier post, this may sound discouraging – please don’t let that stop you from doing the right thing. Your sin will find you out, they say; I’d rather have some input on the finding out.

So here I sit, three years after the toughest conversation of my life. I’m still married to the same woman (by God’s grace), and my children adore me. What my wife and I have learned is a level of honesty I never thought I would find. It isn’t always pretty, but it is always real. I used to think reality was overrated; now I understand that fantasy is overrated – reality is very cool.

confess

I am humbled that I can approach the throne of the Creator of the Universe to admit my shortcomings, to own up to where I fall short. I am using other words here besides “sin” because that is such a loaded word – it has been beaten into people so hard that we recoil at the sound…but all it really means is that we have come up short of the target.

But it is one thing to speak to an invisible God and share my weaknesses; it is quite another thing to open that area up to the view of another person. Step Five says:

Admitted to God, to ourselves and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs

Like Step Four, this is not an exercise one can do in a few minutes. This is where you have to really dig in deep, and start looking at the root causes and earliest indications of the behaviors that got you where you are today.

For me, Step Four took an afternoon of focused time, plus a week of “oh, yeah” additions. Step Five tooktwo months. I know other people who have taken a year to work out a list of their wrongs. I’m not sure if their lists were really more comprehensive than mine; for some it is a very difficult thing to put to paper a list of their wrongs done.

Some include, or even focus on, the wrongs done to them.

I think there is great value in thinking about those things, if it helps to reveal the dark areas of your soul where you have locked away some of the wrongs you have done; but one runs the risk of playing the blame game.

Said another way, if the Steps are about me admitting my weakness and becoming stronger, what is the point of focusing on what others have done to me? That makes me a victim. Victims are generally innocent. Therefore, I’m not responsible…

That really misses the point, don’t you think?

In my bondage to pornography, every time I started to “get clean,” the highlight films would start playing in my brain. They weren’t just the images I had taken in; they were also the feelings of shame that I was so weak. Then the narration would kick in: “You’ve given in so many times before – why fight it?“

I confessed all of this stuff to God hundreds, maybe thousands of times.

But the grip this stuff had on me did not begin to loosen until I told a living, breathing human being all about it.

I confessed abusing a neighbor who was a couple of years younger than me. I confessed targeting girls who I thought I could talk into doing what I wanted. I confessed going places that exist for no other purpose but to provide sexual gratification. I confessed blurring all kinds of lines, dropping every standard I’d held, to get my next “hit.” I listed them all in detail. I got as specific as I could remember as to times, places, people, anything I could remember, because this was the means to freedom.

To make darkness retreat, you must turn on some light.

I turned a spotlight on my darkest behavior.

It would be remarkable if I were completely free from that moment on, but I was not. There were dark days still to come. I would need to repeat this step, a little later.

But when I finished that day – after hours of talking, crying, and praying – I felt the weight lifted. I had told another human being the absolute worst of me, and he was still able to look me in the eye and treat me respectfully.

An important point or two here – you can’t just pick someone off the street for this. I know plenty of people who have switched into “verbal dairrhea” once they start confessing, and they suffered a lot of rejection because they chose the wrong people with whom to share. For the other person’s sake, they must be someone mature enough to hear the gory details without being themselves triggered by what you describe. If you and one of your friends decide to get clean together, don’t be each others’ sponsors. You need someone who has some level of detachment.

I also think this is the one time where being graphic is helpful, within any limits you and your sponsor agree to beforehand. If I may switch addictions for a moment here, it is probably not as freeing to me to say, “I used to eat a lot of junk food” as it is for me to say, “Mint chocolate chip shakes made with chocolate milk. Every day.” The more I can do to identify the particular beast, the less power it has over me.

It took me a while to understand this, but a major function of the twelve steps is to teach us to dispense with foolish pride. Pride keeps us trapped in stupid behavior. For me, this was the step where I really felt that wall coming down.

Walk strong,

MNRecovery