Are You Being Authentic In Recovery?

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So let's keep it in that light. All right. Have a good time. Learn something and then get the real help that you need from a professional. Remember the old days when things were simpler? It was a simpler time. Life was pleasant and easy. We didn't have all the stress and the strain of what we have today. And that was when we felt we could be authentic. It was easy. You could genuinely just be you. even if you were in recovery, or perhaps you weren't.

But the days of those simple times can come again if you just would practice authenticity and perhaps integrity. So let's go back to that time, a simpler time, where you could be authentic. Join me. Yeah, you know, those days, those days still exist. But you know what, in recovery it's very difficult to be authentic and being genuine. That is something that is in short supply, I guess, in some people's lives. And certainly in recovery it can be very difficult.

But what does it mean to be authentic? And what is authenticity anyway? Well, that's what we're going to talk about today. I found an interesting authenticity as a definition. meaning you're true to your own personality, values, and spirit, regardless of the pressure that you're under to act otherwise. I was like, hmm, that sounds interesting. So true to your own personality, values, and spirit, regardless of the pressure that you're under to act otherwise.

You're honest with yourself and others, and you take responsibility for your mistakes. Your values, ideals, and actions align. Well, you know what? Authenticity in addiction is truly part of what it is. If you're an addict, you're being authentically you. Your value, your spirit, your personality, they're not surrendering to the pressures that you're under to act otherwise. You just have a really bad case. I don't care. And that's how you act. Self-destructive and I don't care.

So are you being honest with yourself and with others? Yes. I honestly don't care. Are you taking responsibility for your mistakes? Absolutely not. And your values, ideals, and actions align. Yeah, they do. I'm a crazy addict. And I act like it. You know, that's authentically true. And that authenticity is how you got to be in the place you're at now. perhaps, or you have been in your past. So authenticity is something that actually exists, but it doesn't mean that it's good.

You're authentically bad. So can you be authentic with yourself in recovery? Because really that's the question that I have for you is authenticity in recovery. That's a harder one for people to do. Being authentic in your recovery is Finding ways for you to actually be truthful about what you have done and where you have gone and what you have become. Authentic. I'm going to authentically approach my understanding of self.

Now, if you're going to talk about the values, ideals, and actions in recovery, I don't want to get sober. I don't want to get clean. Okay, you know what? You're being authentic. You're telling me you don't. So if you say that, but you're sitting in a meeting, are you being authentic? I wonder. Because you're sitting in a meeting, a recovery meeting, a 12-step meeting, and you're saying, I don't want to do this. There are many people I've run into in meetings who show up and they're drunk.

There are times when people that I'm working with will tell not go to meetings when they're high or when they've been drinking. Interestingly, I have never seen anywhere in a meeting the rule that says you can't go if you're drunk or high. Many times what you hear is, we're glad you're here because we can help. So they're being authentic and offering help to you.

But you're not being authentic if you're just showing up and you're drinking and then you leave and you blow it off and you decide, man, I'm just going to go out and do this again anyway. So authenticity is important in recovery because that is really where you begin to have the level of insight and self-awareness that you understand that life can't continue the way that it's continuing with you being high or drunk all the time or even binging alcohol.

Uh, occasionally as some of us do, but authenticity is like really tough because I am have, I'm going to have this time when I have to sit with somebody and be authentically honest, right?

about who i am like i'm gonna i'm gonna do that whether it's a counselor or a sponsor or a friend or a pastor or your wife or your husband or your mother your father your brother your sister your child in recovery we have to go through those times when we have to be authentically open and honest about who and what we have become and who we are because you're never going to fix What you can't acknowledge is a problem. So the authenticity part of it is important.

And many people will come into their recovery early on and think that they're being authentic, when actually what they're doing is just smoke and mirrors. They're just putting lipstick on a pig and calling it the Mona Lisa. No, it's a pig.

And so finding ways to be authentic is hard especially early on in recovery if you are in recovery you know what i'm talking about if you're trying to get into recovery perhaps you don't but it's very difficult to be authentic authenticity remember that i said earlier in part of that definition that it's about your values ideals and actions aligning so the values i value my life i value sobriety I'm going to put sobriety above everything else. Okay, so that's also an ideal.

I have an ideal lifestyle or a place that I want to be. And then your actions align with that.

So it's kind of like if you're, I don't know, a Jew or a Christian who's going to synagogue or to church and you go on Sunday, but you're going in after you've been out to the strip bar or and uh you've been drinking and womanizing on saturday and you go into church or the synagogue on sunday or in the synagogue on saturday and yeah so you've been out i guess if you're a jew that would be going on friday well if you're a jew i guess not because shabbos starts at sundown so you're not going to

the strip club then are you you're going on thursday Well, you get my point. So finding ways to be authentic is like not just showing up and being a hypocrite. So you go to the strip bar and you get drunk and you're womanizing and then you find yourself in church and you're saying, oh, I'm a sinner. And then you go back out the next week and do the same thing. Well, your values, ideals and actions are not aligning, are they? So you're really not being authentic. You're being a hypocrite.

So if you're true to your own personality, values, and spirit, you have to change. If you're an addict, you have to change. So finding out something about authenticity is the entrance into the process of recovery, especially early on. Lying is not a way to be authentic, right? That's disingenuous. No, I'm fine. If you're asked how you're doing by somebody who wants to help you in recovery, you seem sad, you seem stressed, you seem in a bad way. Can I help you? No, no, no, I'm fine.

So you're not being authentic, are you? You're not really putting responsibility where it belongs and you're not taking responsibility for your mistakes. You don't want to talk about it. I was talking to somebody earlier today about, you know, what do you do in a meeting? Well, how do you, what, where do you, you know, when you go there, what are you going to do?

And I said, well, more likely than not, what you're going to do is you're going to sit in the back and you're not going to say anything because this is your first meeting. Because everybody gets all twisted up in knots when they go the first time or second time. And it's difficult, right? Well, we all, everybody who's in recovery knows that. And we see the ones on, I call it relapse row. It's the back of the room. You're not speaking.

And you just kind of, as soon as the meeting's over, you're just making a beeline for the door and getting out of there as quick as you can. So you're really not being authentic, are you, about recovery if you're running away? It's hard to be authentic. It's the hardest thing you're going to do in recovery, I believe. Being authentic means being vulnerable. and being honest, and that's very, very hard.

But I wanted to make a differentiation here between the difference between authenticity and integrity. I found this on something called turningwest.com. Authenticity is essentially being true to who you say you are and to what you say you believe. Authenticity is essentially being true to who you say you are and to what you say you believe. Authentic. Integrity is being true to principles external to yourself. Huh. External to yourself.

Well, when you step into a recovery process, that is an external thing. That is an external voice. Those are ideas that are not yours. Actually, in recovery, they would be counter to what you authentically have become, which is a terribly flawed person who is engaging in drugs and alcohol, women, porn, whatever. So your authenticity is that. So integrity is now something you're going to build in recovery. You're going to build on the idea of being Having a different set of principles.

A principled person is somebody who has a guiding force that they are relying upon that is not the voice in their head, but is something else. And in the case of people who have the walk in faith. Their integrity is going to be based on a scriptural understanding of rules and boundaries. If you're not a Christian, it could be something else. Maybe you're a Buddhist. Maybe you're a Confucius. I don't know. Something. But there are some guidelines.

And in the 12-step process, we have the guiding principles, the principles of recovery. You have to follow the rules in order to get there. So using integrity... It's like I question whether, you know, can you have integrity without authenticity? Can you have authenticity without having integrity? I don't think so, but they are very, very different.

So the idea that I'm going to work on my authenticity means I'm going to be open, honest, and avail myself to whatever is being spoken to me about me, and I'm going to receive it. And oh boy, is that a hard one. The truth, especially when you're told the truth about yourself. Oh, man. It's one thing to tell yourself, I'm a piece of garbage. It's a whole other thing for somebody who you care about look at you and say, you're a piece of garbage. That's a wounding, man. That's a knife to the chest.

And that can be a hard one for people. So being authentic, part of it is also being able to receive truth. those words, those hard truths of who and what you have become. That can be very difficult. But I think that when you are being authentic in recovery and you're walking through the process of finding ways to understand self and understand what you've done, you can get to a point where you are able to live with integrity.

Those principles that are external are things that you strive to get to. And so if you have an understanding of what those principles are, something as simple as like, I don't know, the Ten Commandments, thou shalt not steal, thou shalt not kill, thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's wife, those kinds of things, those are external. And that's integrity, right? These are principles that I live by. You know as well as I do, when you are in recovery, All bets are off. All rules are out the window.

We have a survival instinct, and our go-to is to lie and manipulate and deceive and hide. We're criminals, and it's interesting. When I try to explain the difference between NA meetings, Narcotics Anonymous, and Alcoholics Anonymous, there's one difference in that room is that most people who are in NA meetings are committing crimes. That's why they're doing something that's illegal. Shooting fentanyl and heroin and crystal meth and crack cocaine, those are illegal narcotics.

So you're a criminal. Many people who go into AA, they're not criminals. So it's a different mindset. Different principles, different type of integrity. So how do you build integrity? You have an external guiding force that gets you there. So perhaps if you look at how am I going to get there? How am I going to get into recovery? Give yourself the opportunity to surrender over to something that is a guide, right? And that's the first part of recovery.

I'm going to use some other principles than the ones that I've been following to to get me to the point where I can have some authenticity, where it's safe to do that. So in the rooms, we talk about things like character defects and change and making amends. And those things are the things that we strive to use as tools and actions and behaviors to get us to the point of being authentic. of having integrity. You cannot do those things without authenticity.

So there are times when people will discuss with me the merits, the failings of AA, the 12-step process. I understand there are people that don't walk in faith. So as they put it, the invisible man of the room is kind of not their thing. However, If you don't like that, then don't listen to the God talk, but sit there and follow the guiding principles of recovery and the structure of it.

Because the value of doing a self-evaluation of looking at your innermost horrible person that you have started to live and become is really that authenticity. I'm going to be authentic about who I am. And so when you're working on trying to make change, you have to make a change that You have to dip into authenticity. Genuine. Real. And when you do that, you're going to get there. But I think the guidelines to that really are based on integrity.

If I know that I am a liar and I lie all the time, I'm going to work really hard to be something other than a liar, even if it causes me pain. So I'm going to just be authentic to myself.

me and be truthful so i've lied to you i've deceived you and i've been doing it for a while here's the thing about that and many people struggle with this in recovery early on it damages relationships if you tell your spouse that you have been lying to them and you have been going out with your friends and getting high when you promised her that that's not what you were doing And I've had cases like this where the spouse has gone out and is smoking crack cocaine and they swore that they weren't

doing anything. And now it's time for you to tell your spouse that you have been lying about this. It's going to cause some damage. But hey, guess what?

If you don't be open and honest about it, how in the world are you ever going to become clean and and or sober if you can't be honest because that thing that you did it happened whether you told the person or not so hey this is what i've been doing and i'm coming clean because i want you to know i'm changing see and right there now you're being authentic and you have integrity if it damages the relationship it's going to damage the relationship one way or the other and can you imagine what's

going to happen to the spouse who finds out afterwards that you've been doing that and you didn't say anything and you went through this recovery process and all that work you did demonstrating authenticity and trying to have integrity and you were deceptive in the process, pretty much everything you've been working on is now going to go away. So we are not meant to be dishonest. Our society is one that's based on truthfulness.

What's going on right now in our society is a bunch of people who are being inauthentic. Or maybe they are being authentic. They're manipulating and gaming everything to pretend and deceive everybody with the truth. The truth is whatever I'm saying it is. Nobody even knows what the truth is anymore. Because there is no integrity anymore. That's in short supply, thanks to our narcissistic tendencies with our Facebook and Snapchat and TikTok and YouTube. Anybody can be anything.

Now we got AI generating fake people. We got deep fakes going on. Nobody knows what's going on. We don't. We're not showing integrity. And that's kind of jokingly why I was playing this sappy 1950s, 60s goofy music. Because back in the day, a man's word was his bond. When a woman told you something, you believed it because it was the truth. Yes, we did have drugs and alcohol and we had problems back then. But we actually valued our integrity. We wanted people to trust us and to believe us.

And we wanted to be true to ourselves and true to our beliefs. And I think that's probably what's been going on that's in short supply today, unfortunately, sadly. So my message to you today is one that's based on the idea of changing your integrity to then grow authentically. And you can see when people are authentically changing. You can feel it. It's weird. We're creatures of, you know, we're flesh and bone.

But it's interesting when you meet somebody and you know that they're genuinely, sincerely changed in recovery. You can tell. I can tell it. I can spot it in a second when somebody is actually working on recovery and when they're not, they're, they're getting their sneaky on and they're, they're, uh, they're, they're being deceptive. I can tell because I can feel it.

And I, yes, I'm a trained clinician and I've been treating addiction for a long time, but I can tell authenticity when I see it in recovery. I can see it. I can feel it. I can hear it. When you see it in that, in, in yourself, you'll see it and you'll understand that it's there. So look inward. Start using insight to bring out that authentic person. And if you really want to be in recovery and change, stop lying. I can't emphasize that enough. Stop lying. That is disingenuous and inauthentic.

You are only deceiving yourself. And ultimately what's going to happen is you're going to die. Honestly. You're going to die. Left untreated. Addiction kills. And I don't want you to die. I want you to get better. So be authentic. Have some integrity. And dig deep inside yourself to get to that point of recovery. You'll be grateful when you do. Trust me. Because life is a whole lot better when you're clean and sober. It's a whole lot better.

Well, that's it for this episode of Doc Shock, Your Addiction Lifeguard. I hope you've enjoyed this episode. Honesty, integrity, rules to live by, principles, the good stuff. If you need help, reach out to me. I'll help you. You can reach me on my website, wellspringmindbody.com. And if you don't want to reach out to me or you're in a different country, you're just not sure, hey, there are people in your area that can help. Go to a meeting, go to rehab, check into a hospital.

But please, whatever you do, don't try to preserve your addiction by killing yourself. That's crazy. You don't want to be crazy, do you? Of course not. So get the help when you need it. So I hope you've enjoyed this one. And until the next episode, this is Doc Jacques, your addiction lifeguard, saying see ya.