"We can't save our face and ass at the same time... We're only as sick as our secrets... Rigorous honesty is the most important tool we have in learning to deal with the past and to live today. Although honesty is a difficult tool to practice, it is a most rewarding one. We practice honesty under all conditions because it is the antidote to our diseased thinking.”
The unwillingness to be honest and vulnerable is a common reservation. It can have devastating results. Been there, seen it, and done that. It thought and felt like riding down a waterslide of nails at an un-amusement park. Selective honesty and vulnerability with those we share recovery with is like a cliché from a horror movie that ends up getting people hurt.
Holding back the truth of what we're doing or living through is the barbed wire fence of our own making, that we become self-appointed caretakers. We're the warden of our prison... and some people are okay being locked up. It's a fact. Settling for limitation sucks. As my sponsor once shared at an event, "It's hard to love when we make choices not to be honest and vulnerable, leaving things muddy with ourselves and others."
To be free of guilt, resentment, hurt, and shame means we must speak and share our truth to others... process... assimilate... come to understand our experiences, integrating our fractured personalities. Instead of a jumbled mess waiting for the "Other shoe to drop," we could be whole and free.
Just for today... surrender could mean setting aside my reservations about being honest and vulnerable because they limit the relationship that I have with myself and others. Honesty and vulnerability are my pathway to self-respect and living with dignity.
Calligraphy note:
手无寸铁 | Shū Mū Su Tetsū
"Not an inch of steel." This is a Japanese way of saying: To make oneself vulnerable and open, meeting one's truth with courage and determination.
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