1/9/2023 0 Comments I lost my checkbook![]() She suggested that when I came to a meeting: I got together with Mary later and asked her for advice on how to break my deeply held pattern of spinning the truth. She paused a moment, took my hand, and with real compassion said, “Until you are ready to share where you actually are in the here and now, and not where you were yesterday or where you hope to be tomorrow, you’ll never get better.” Yet in the meeting tonight you spoke like things were great, like everything in your life was peachy keen.” ![]() I was shuffling along in a deep funk, lost in my own thoughts. After one meeting she stopped me in the parking lot. She was an older Swinomish Indian woman with 20-plus years of sobriety, and a pillar in her tribal community. Mary was a regular at my Tuesday night meeting. I lived for a while in La Conner, Washington, and would drive in to Mt. Like so many times in recovery I learned a lesson from a wise old soul. My task was to simplify my life to see reality for what it was. Who can invest money in the stock market without questioning whether the game is rigged?Ĭheckbook honesty would appear to be in mighty short supply in today’s world.Who cannot wonder about a doctor’s prescription given the influence of the drug companies?.Who can listen to a political debate without cringing?.I will shade the truth to match the fog level of my neighbor.” The extent to which this game is played in our civic, cultural, economic and political lives has reached epic proportions. As in, “I’ll only be as honest as the world around me. I had to get to my own checkbook in order, and until I could get there I’d never be honest, and without honesty I’d be forever trapped in the fog of my own spin.įor me, honesty had become a relative term. What he meant was that the longer I stayed sober, the deeper my admissions would become as to the truth about my life. He told me that the longer I stayed in the program, the deeper my bottom would become. Cloak my honesty in a protective shield so that I wouldn’t look too bad.Say things for effect rather than candor.Present myself as having figured things out when I hadn’t.My sponsor gnawed away at me in the early days of my sobriety with a thing he called “checkbook honesty.” He rightly noted I would often: How often have you spun a report for your boss?. ![]() How often do you paint a picture of your life that is overly rosy?.How often to you engage in an argument with a knowingly faulty premise?.How often do you calibrate your emotional response to elicit a reaction from another person?.Do you judge yourself to be an honest sort of person?
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