Step 1 Honesty with Self and Others....About What?

Tonight I went to a literature meeting where we read and share on topical selections from As Bill Sees It. Someone volunteers a topic and then people are free to select readings from the Table of Contents listed for that topic. Tonight's topic was Honesty. While people we reading various readings and sharing their experience, I began browsing through all of the readings for Honesty, looking for a selection which talked about what I consider one of the most important paragraphs in the Big Book related to the topic of Honesty: the first paragraph of How It Works. It wasn't included anywhere in the readings on the topic of Honesty!

I was surprised to find that the editors of As Bill Sees It didn't seem to pull any of the three great Honesty lines from that paragraph. I did find one reading that did talk about the importance of honesty with ourselves, as well as honesty with others. So I voluteered to read that passage and then shared with the group "As Mike Sees It" -- and how the first paragraph of How It Works gives me great insight into how honesty played a critical role in my own moment of clarity, the morning when I woke up sober for the first time.

The first reference to honesty in that paragraph talks about how rarely we've seen folks fail in this process who have thoroughly followed these steps.... Those that do fail seem to be "constitutionally incapable of being honest with themselves." Not honest with others. Honest with themselves. The second reference follows: "They are naturally incapable of grasping and developing a manner of living which demands rigorous honesty." Here the scope of honest seems to extend to more than just ourselves, but also to our whole manner of living. This new manner of living seems to require some sort of high level honesty, to be sure. The third reference to honesty comes in the last sentence of the paragraph where it refers to those who suffer from grave emotional and mental disorders: they too can recover "if they have the capacity to be honest."

All of the other readings tonight seemed to talk about honesty in the context of the 4th/5th steps and in the context of our relationships with others, both before and after we got sober. I don't have any particular issue with any of that, but given that I'm focusing on the 1st Step this month of January, I'm more attentive to how honesty played a key role in my getting sober and continues to play a key role in my staying sober.

For me, especially in the context of the first step, honesty is important almost entirely in terms of how I am willing and able to be honest about who I am as a human being who happens to be an alcoholic. My own moment of clarity involved my "waking up" to who and what I was: an alcoholic. A man who couldn't and can't "stop" drinking. On that particular morning, I thought the same thought I'd woken up to for almost a year: "I just can't stop drinking!". What was unique about that morning was that, unlike in prior experiences, the fact that I couldn't stop drinking was not a problem or something to be ashamed of.... It was just a biological fact. My body was different in terms of how it processed alcohol (and whatever form that might take...).

But I didn't lose the obsession to drink with this awareness of who I was. That didn't come until seconds later, I saw myself sitting in a circle of folks at the Kaiser "multi-family group" which met on Thursday nights and included about six kids who were trying to get clean and sober, as well as their parents and siblings. The morning I woke up sober, I saw myself sitting in that circle of people and when it came time to "check-in" (we parents would check in by saying, "Mike name is Mike. I'm here for my son, Pat. We did (or didn't, if Pat had a relapse that week...) have a sober household. And I do or don't have something to talk about." That's how I had been dishonestly checking in with those folks for the last ten months or so. Never did I tell the real, rigorous truth to them in that group, or anywhere else for that matter.

But that morning of October 20, 2001, I saw myself raising my hand in front of those imaginary people and say, "My name is Mike and I am an alcoholic." When I made that disclosure, even though it was to imaginary people to be sure, I had a clear and dramatic removal of the obsession to drink. An obsession that had been with me since my first drink almost 30 years prior.

I was free. And this freedom from the obsession to drink came about, I believe with all my heart, because I was finally honest with myself and with others about who I am as an alcoholic. I am convinced that this freedom has remained constant, in large part, because I've developed a new way of living which includes the critical component of being honest about that reality on a daily basis.

I was on my way....

Take care!

Mike L.