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INTRODUCTION TO TRUTH

If you are an addict you’re probably a good liar. I like myself I like myself I like myself…..” What I really want is to be happy with myself. I’ve been doing the Steps and it helps, but I guess maybe my problem is that I’m not really sure who I am yet – A twenty-four-year old recovering alcoholic with thirty days in the programme.

It’s what all of us want – to like ourselves like a good liar can – to be really comfortable in our own skins. You wouldn’t think that
would be so hard, would you? We all hoped that getting high or avoiding life would do the trick. Sometimes it
did. Sometimes we’d love ourselves, but always only temporarily. Then the self-loathing would be back,
stronger than ever. Self-acceptance still out of our grasp, we’d look elsewhere. We may have tried to reassure
ourselves with being a good liar through overeating, sex, gambling, spending, or some lethal combination of all of these. Still no luck – we hated ourselves even more. By the time we arrived at rehab and AA or NA, most of us had years of self contempt under our belts. How were we ever going to face who we’d been in the past? Somehow, we started …

Alcoholics and addicts are naturally good liars. It is often said that no one comes into recovery without being dishonest and a good liar. Insulted? Sorry, but this pretty much holds true across the board.
We lie for money. We lie for a fix. We lie for a drink. We lie to get ourselves out of trouble. We lie about how
much we’re using. We lie so people will like us. You know your using is damaging prospects, relationships, finances and opportunities, but you pretend they’re not. Lying becomes such a part of us that we lie about totally stupid
things, things that don’t matter at all. We’ve become experts at lying to others, but we’re also experts at lying to
ourselves. The family of the addict also become liars. They lie about the using to friends, they call in sick for
the hungover addict. They say never again…a thousand times. They vow never to give money and enable yet,
for a time, families often do this. They end up loaning money, cars, paying rentals, paying for accidents caused 
from using drugs, paying dealers….they keep it all a secret from friends and family. They hide the truth that
things will get worse, as they always do with addiction. This dishonesty, this business of being a good liar, has long term consequences of course.

This is really embarrassing to talk about, but I lied so much that I thought I really did some of the stuff I lied
about. I know I’m not explaining it very well, but I always wanted to be the one who had done everything, so if
someone would ask, “Did you see so-and-so in concert?” I would say yes and then it would become part of me,
so that I actually saw myself attending that concert. I mean I really thought I did! It’s pretty sick. Now when I
have a memory, I feel like I have to really concentrate to remember if I really did it or if I just made it up … and
even worse, I have to catch myself from doing it even now – A thirty-four-year-old recovering addict with
almost two years’ sobriety. A good liar!

Being a good liar

“Everybody at AA meetings keeps talking about the importance of honesty in all our relationships.
Boy, I don’t know where to begin. It’s been so long since I told the truth.” Dishonesty becomes a way of life
for most alcoholics/addicts. They lie to themselves and they lie to others. About feelings. About substance
abuse. About money. About where they’ve been and what they’ve done. Partly it’s a way of protecting their
drinking or drug use and partly it’s because their minds are so addled and emotions so muddled they can’t really
discern the difference between truth and fiction.

As you’ve discovered, the tendency to be untruthful doesn’t just disappear when you swear off booze and drugs.
Dishonesty is a longstanding practice that has to be unlearned. And the fear that the consequences of telling the
truth (to an employer, for example, or a spouse or even friends) will be disastrous has to be overcome. Neither
of these challenges is easily met. But you can’t have a good recovery without meeting them. You probably
slipped into your dishonest ways in active addiction gradually. You will probably only learn to become honest gradually. Losing the traits of being a good liar isn’t that easy to shake. At first you may not want to let the character trait go. You may feel it is even a benefit rather than a deficit. 

The first person you have to start telling the truth to is yourself. If you don’t level with yourself, you
can’t level with anyone else. You took the first steps in the right direction when you admitted you had a
chemical dependency problem and wrote a life history and/or made a searching personal inventory. Being
honest with yourself means acknowledging your good qualities as well as the not-so-good ones. That may be
harder than you think. You may be so used to beating up on yourself that you’ve come to believe you have no
good character traits.

To be fair, no one can be perfectly honest all the time. Honesty is the absence of intention to deceive – but
sometimes we deceive ourselves or others about our feelings or intentions without realising that it’s out of a
desire to please. We can forgive ourselves for that. But we can also learn to be smarter about evaluating
ourselves, others and situations so we can avoid unintentional deception in the future.
Honesty to the point of hurting others is as wrong as direct lying. ‘Brutal honesty’ is more brutal than
honest and the motivation is often more to hurt than to tell the truth. 

Telling the truth seems harder at first, especially when you aren’t used to it, but in the long run it is easier.

You don’t have to keep tabs on what story you told to whom. You are released from worrying about being ‘caught’ and from the guilt of knowingly misleading someone.

The good news is that the fear of telling the truth about oneself is almost always unfounded. Most people will appreciate
hearing the truth. The few who do not probably have problems of their own that they aren’t facing. You may
be uncomfortable with a negative reaction to the truth, but that’s better than not knowing how the other person
feels, or assuming their reaction will be worse than it is. When you lie to others, you lose their trust, but you also lose their help. And without the trust and help of others the world is a very lonely place.

At first others may not be ready to accept your word as gospel. Accepting that you are dishonest is as
much habit to them as being dishonest to you. It will take long-term honesty in your relationships before it is
accepted as the norm.

A successful recovery is impossible without honesty. Since being a good liar is one of the trappings of
alcoholism/addiction, continuing to make it a way of life is very likely to lead you right back to the well.
If staying honest continues to be uncomfortable in spite of trying what is recommended above, you may want to
re-examine your behaviour. Alcoholics tend to live lives glued together with deceit. Often they continue living
that way into early recovery. Are you? Do you still have a lot to hide? Perhaps you need to take an inventory.

Your goal should be to live the kind of life that would leave you feeling at ease even if plastered across the front page of your local newspaper. Denial – and it’s one, two, three, what are we fighting for? No matter what our history has been, we almost
always approach the programme with hesitation and denial in the beginning. In fact, we usually take denial to new heights – vehemently denying everything and finding exceptions to every rule. One denial first surfaced in Steps One, Two, and Three. We denied we were powerless over alcohol and drugs. We denied that our lives were unmanageable. We denied that anything could be greater than we were or that anyone or anything could help us with our lives. We denied that giving up control was the best way to gain control. You get the picture. In working and gradually discovering steps One, Two, and Three at Pathways, you have already made great progress if you have this assignment and mission ahead of you. You have admitted you have a problem, have developed a belief in a Higher Power, and have been willing to receive guidance and assistance from other people and from your Higher Power. You’ve had to start your life over and give up your best friend – your substance – to boot. As one alcoholic put it, “You can teach an old dog new tricks.”

The work you have done so far in discovering much about steps One, Two and Three is “belief’ work, the
groundwork necessary for life altering and lasting recovery! The truth will set you free, where lying will re-enslave you.
This is an exercise to help you get honest with yourself. In recovery it is essential to tell the truth. As you will
hear at every AA or NA or narc anon (for families) meeting, this is a program of rigorous honesty. Those
who don’t recover are people who cannot or will not, completely give themselves to this simple program.
Dishonesty to self and others distorts reality. You never will solve problems if you lie. You all now need to live
in the facts. Commit yourself to reality(truth). This means accepting everything that is real. Do not go to church
on Sunday and then say, I had to tell a little lie because…..she wouldn’t understand so I had to keep it a
secret….It can be a slippery slope right back into addiction and obsession. Keeping secrets and half-truths are
lies.

People who are addicted over a long period oftentimes think that they cannot tell the truth. They believe if they
do, then they will be rejected. The facts, however, are exactly the opposite. Unless you tell the truth, no one can
accept you. People have to know you to accept you. If you keep secrets, then you will never feel known or
loved. You are only as sick as your secrets. If you keep secrets from people, then you will never be close to
them. You cannot be a practicing addict without lying to yourself. You must lie and believe the lies, or else the
illness cannot operate. All of the lies are attempts to protect you from the truth. If you had known the truth, then
you would have known that you were sick and needed treatment. This would have been frightening, so you kept
the truth from yourself and from others. Let’s face it. When we were in active addiction we were not honest
with ourselves.

Be a good liar and lie to yourself

Yes, a good liar means you have to go as far as hiding the truth from yourself. Defense mechanisms will help you with that task. Here are a few common ones to become more aware of as you continue taking inventory of your life:

1. Denial: This is telling yourself or others, “I don’t have a problem”.
2. Minimizing: This is making the problem smaller than it really is. You may have told yourself, or
someone else, that your problem was not that bad. You may have told someone that you lost a little
money when, in fact, you lost a lot.
3. Hostility: This is getting angry or making threats when someone confronts you about yourself.
4. Rationalization: This is making an excuse. “I had a hard day. Things are bad. My relationship is bad. My
financial situation is bad.” Give a few examples of when you thought that you had a good reason to be
addicted.
5. Blaming: This is shifting the responsibility to someone else. “The police were out to get me. My wife is
overreacting.”
6. Intellectualising: This is overanalysing and thinking to excess about a problem. This avoids doing
something about it.
7. Diversion: This is bringing up another topic of conversation to avoid the issue.

For more help with trying not to be a good liar, get in touch, talk to a counsellor and take this conversation further. You can rewrite your story at any time. Blessings. Call Now 082-442-4779 or email info@pathwaysplettrehab.co.za