Rigorous honesty. Now there’s something I don’t think I’ll ever be able to live up to. Even though we’re told that this is a program of rigorous honesty. An ideal that is for me hard to achieve.
We were talking about lying and the 10th Step today.
Boy, the lies I told, when I was out there drinking. And I was never a truthful child growing up to start with. So, by the time I got to the program I brought all those things in with me. Hardly rigorously honest. I was going to have to get all these things stripped from me. I had stories I told, which I believed were true, because I had told them over and over before I got here. Those were things I needed to discover and discard. Not an easy job. But if I wanted to stay sober, I was going to have to find a way. And the 12 Steps helped me to do that.
Most of us there today had to admit that we aren’t always completely honest. Traces still pop of from time to time. Usually these are fear motivated. I can remember walking across the floor of a ballroom, when I was early on in the program. I was telling someone a “war story” and suddenly realized it wasn’t true and stopped what I was saying to this man. He told me to go on with it, but I couldn’t. Nor could I tell him I was lying to begin with. I remember how awful and trapped I felt at the time. Even in those early days, I was beginning to develop a conscience.
The worst lie I ever told myself was that I was not an alcoholic and that I could control my drinking. If I had to, I said, I could stop drinking anytime I wanted to. Of course we all know what happened. I couldn’t. That’s a lie I need to avoid the rest of my life.
It was a lie, which almost killed me.
And that’s where the 10th Step comes in. It’s not always what I say to someone else. It’s the lies I might be tempted to tell myself. That’s where the real villain is. The fact is that I can still fool myself into believing something that is far from the truth. That’s where I need to talk to another alcoholic, who can help me stop this kind of dishonesty before it becomes a chain of lies, which can lead me back to alcohol.
Anyway, I was thinking about this, when I got home today.