integrity Archives | Genius Recovery

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Secrets and dishonesty plague recovery dreams. The two behaviors create a breeding ground for addiction to flourish and abound. Honesty is the antidote to hiding and deceit. That said, for most people, it is very difficult to master. Some people struggle with telling bald-faced lies. They manipulate the truth to create confusion so that the populace might embrace the improbable and ignore reality. The goal in this endeavor is to trigger doubt and to question the truth. It has been a threatening and sad state of affairs when leadership is tainted with deceit. Many people say one thing and do another. Honesty is more than what you say. It is found in your actions and follow-through.

Sobriety begins and builds with honesty. Twelve-step communities foster an environment for truth-telling. It encourages each addict to say it straight regardless of attitude or behavior. Getting honest with self and others requires vulnerability. It emphasizes that an addict needs to be “emotionally naked” and practice sitting in that space with others who are also recovering from denial and making excuses for dishonest behavior. Honesty is confrontational and holds each person’s feet to the fire to face oneself and move forward with actions that address the need for change.

However, practicing honesty is a difficult challenge. Facing insecurity at a deep emotional level is one of the great challenges in recovery. Most people live incongruently. They discover honesty but resist acting with integrity because of fear, anxiety, or a host of other reasons. Everyone is hypocritical about something. You say one thing with conviction but you live differently than what you avowed as important. People also struggle with being inconsistent whether it is about food to avoid/eat or a myriad of other things that you declare are important. It is human nature to be inconsistent, hypocritical, and incongruent.

When addicts get stuck in this dynamic they relapse. Saying one thing, feeling something different, and then acting differently than what you say fuels a double life. Without accountability and consultation, addicts lose themselves in destructive living.

Many people try to control their image and what other people think of them. They will find out what others approve of and then mimic those behaviors in order to get a smile of approval. This leads to a form of dishonesty that is habitual. Some people don’t even know that they do this behavior or even who they are or what it is they want. They automatically register what fits in with approval from a desired group of people. They never know who they really are because of this blinding sense of emotional dishonesty.

Honesty is the answer to a double life. When an addict slows down a chaotic duplicitous lifestyle, then they stop playing head games with themselves. “Macho” no longer matters. Trying to be a hero to others is no longer important. They are able to better see their victim posturing and excuse making.

Addicts in recovery learn to shift from focusing on external controls of impression management and concentrate on internal controls of being honest, listening to their inner voice and establishing true authentic relationships. They become more sensitive and connected to their own feelings and inner needs. They recognize their own limitations and provide rest for their mind and body. They learn to prioritize and cultivate a piercing awareness of personal values. They live by those values that are much deeper than mere sobriety.

Honesty helps an addict engage in a spiritual awakening toward becoming real. With accountability and consultation, they learn to tune into their inner voice that guides and protects. As a result incongruence readily gives way to congruence. Hypocrisy is transformed to genuine authenticity. Inconsistency is curbed with follow-through and completion. Honesty promotes inner awareness that helps you create a real connection with your Higher Power, yourself, and the people you engage in your life.

Honesty is more than what you say. It’s the action you take. It’s fleshing out where the rubber meets the road that creates honest sincere recovery transformation.

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“What lies behind you and what lies in front of you, pales in comparison to what lies inside of you.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson

The human body is magnificent. The more we learn about the intricacies of our bodies, the more clear it is that there is an amazing life force that creates and connects all of life on this planet and beyond. Some people believe that as phenomenal and amazing as the physical body is most of who we are is spiritual, not physical.

Volumes have been written about the spiritual world but it remains a mystery. Many who decry religion reject the concept altogether. Those who believe and talk about the intangible nature of spirituality accept that discussion about its properties can be like trying to nail jelly to a tree.

Religious practice helps many to chart a course toward the meaning of the spirit world. From a macro view of the world, the influence of spirituality is undeniable…

Today, I would like to suggest a less macro and more micro understanding of spirituality in the common experiences of everyday living.

1. Spirituality is found in the connection of you to the world around you. Addicts live disconnected. They pull the plug on connection to people and the world around them. Their addiction becomes the organizing principle in life. The affair that is created with addictive behavior has been described as a warm blanket more than once. However, spirituality is about the opposite. It is a connection to all facets of living both organic and nonorganic. Meditation is a recovery discipline that connects one to the world around you in the present moment. Being able to connect to the world around you—the birds, trees, plants, animals, rocks and human energy has been described by some recovering addicts as an explosion of meaningfulness where there was once emptiness. I like to think metaphorically that your feelings are the Voice of God.

When listened to, feelings will tell you essential needs that need to be met in a healthy way. The tendency for an addict is to disconnect from feelings of discomfort. Yet, if you sit with uncomfortableness it will tell you what needs to be addressed in your life. You will need to marshal mature actions by utilizing your wise mind to meet those needs in healthy self-fulfilling ways. This requires mentorship and endless practice. It is not magical. So you might say spirituality is about mature adult living and you don’t have to even use the word spirituality to capture this life experience. For example, you may find yourself angry. Rather than emotionally throw up in someone’s lap or stuff the experience and pretend it doesn’t exist, take time to listen to what anger is trying to say to you. Feelings are experienced in clusters. Withanger it is often tied with fear, sadness, loneliness, shame, or other feelings. If you take time to sift and sort each attached feeling they will clarify what you are experiencing and when connected to your wise mind you can better address your needs. This is why I suggest that your feelings are the voice of God! Listen to them and they will serve you well. This is a spiritual experience.

2. Spirituality is found in the experience of vulnerability. Vulnerability is the process of being exposed to possible harm. It is about embracing the fear of rejection, of being taken advantage of, and of embracing your human limits. It is not taught, it is practiced. If you do not practice it, you will not learn it. It is about becoming emotionally naked to another. It is risking rejection. It engages a willingness to remove yourself from the center of your universe for the purpose of sharing another’s energy and making space for someone else knowing that they may flatly reject your efforts.

Vulnerability is accepting this possibility and courageously exposing your heart anyway. It doesn’t make sense to always/only be vulnerable. But when it does it is pursued against all odds no matter what the price. It is a shift from intellectual reason and protection to opening your heart and sharing raw feelings that expose hypocrisy, incongruence andfailed behavior in hopes of finding connection and acceptance. This requires courage but when manifested multiplies meaningful life experiences. Vulnerability is spirituality and counterintuitively creates connection.

3. Spirituality is about the experience of uncertainty. No religion can prove that it is the one true way. Outside of religious experience, no philosophy or experience can prove its methodology of living as the one correct approach. There are many opinions and beliefs. Likely, they are all correct in different ways! You will need to sort out what you choose to think and believe. Ignoring this reality is a choice in itself. For sure, spirituality is a belief plunge into uncertainty. None of us like the experience of free falling. When I was young I would take junior high kids to a cliff at a lake in Wyoming to jump in for a swim. The cliffs were between 50 and 60 feet high! It was far enough to consciously experience the free fall. When free falling you experience total helplessness. There is literally nothing you can do to counter gravity but to fall. This is what it is like to plunge into the uncertainty of spiritual belief. It is having the confidence that in free-falling into your belief, your confidence is not that you will control the outcome but that your spiritual belief will bring you back up. This means that with bravery you are willing to live with the uncertainty that surrounds you every day because of your belief in the basic goodness of who you are and/or the power you choose to trust in your daily free fall.

4. Spirituality is about velvet steel. I call my blog Velvet Steel because of my deep conviction of this spiritual principle. Spirituality is about connection which engages the principle of velvet steel. This concept embraces the word “consideration” which can describe a parent who practices when to apply the strict letter of the law to a misbehaving child and when to back off and go easy. There is no formula. It’s all about cultivating sensitivity to the spirit of another. Sometimes you need to be willing to walk to hell and back to stand for conviction and principle and other times not. It’s about being velvet steel.

In recovery meetings, there is usually at least one person who sees themselves as the hammer—the steel—and gives feedback from that standpoint. It is common for others to consistently be velvet, being easy toward others hoping they too will be easy with them. It is rare that you experience velvet steel blended in feedback. This is because it is difficult. Often it takes a certain degree of steel to be velvet as well as it is important to share a certain amount of steel while being velvet in feedback. That said, spirituality is not all about rules and regs (steel) but it also includes knowing the rules well enough to know how and when to break them (velvet). Velvet steel is a dynamic applied in many different ways and requires integrity and honesty to the practice for it to be a spiritual practice that heals and transforms behavior. Spiritual practice must include a mature application of velvet steel. In truth when applied with sensitivity it reflects an art form.

There are footprints of spirituality in common everyday places that are mostly overlooked by those who are in a hurry or a frenzy of everyday living. Take time to notice the footprints of spirituality that will help right-size your everyday walk with meaningfulness and connection.

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