August 5, 2005

• Secrets and Lies

  The last two NA meetings I’ve attended had as their topics a couple of
  subjects I know a lot about.  Last night’s topic was
  secrets.  Two weeks ago (I’m back to my regular schedule, only
  going to town when I’m driving the rehab van), we talked about
  lies.  The first person who shared last night (one of my favorite
  dope fiends, an old guy, older than Greyfox and almost as old as I am)
  referred to secrets as “lies by omission.”  That nails it, as I
  see it.  He also talked about how it is inappropriate (according
  to 12-step dogma) to tell all your secrets in open meetings, that this
  is what a sponsor is for.

  Greyfox and I both shared and were consistent with our usual
  pattern.  He came right out and said he doesn’t subscribe to all
  that 12-step dogma and pointed out where his beliefs and practices
  differ from it.  I shared my point of view without pointing out
  the obvious, that it differs from the 12-step dogma.

  I talked about how I got clean with the help of group therapy and that
  in working the steps my Higher Power is the only sponsor I’ve ever
  had.  I’ve never been able to find a sponsor in the program who
  has (as I was told when I started going to meetings that I should seek
  in a sponsor) what I want and need.  I even told the long version
  of that story, about how the only person I’d found, either in our NA
  group or the AA group I attended, who had the requisite combination of
  self-assurance and comfort with his sobriety, the ability to perceive
  bullshit in others and the courage to confront it, was a man.  A
  sponsor isn’t going to do me any good if he can’t see when I’m in
  denial or won’t tell me about it.  And I certainly don’t want a
  sponsor whose serenity isn’t at least a match for mine.  This man
  seemed perfect for what I needed.  He was strong, blunt and
  perceptive.  Unfortunately, the dogmas dictate that sponsors and
  sponsees must be of the same gender.

  I told the group that when I asked him if he’d be my sponsor, he
  yielded to political correctness and referred me to his wife.  I
  was so shocked at the time that my courtesy failed me and I laughed in
  his face.  His wife possesses zero observable serenity, attends AA
  regularly and shows up at an occasional NA meeting when she is
  particularly afraid of slipping into active drug addiction or resuming
  some other of her old self-destructive habits.  At AA, she’s
  usually with her husband, but she slips into the NA meetings alone and
  talks about wanting to go out with an old boyfried and get
  loaded.  Yeah, she’d make a great sponsor, wouldn’t she?

  After saying that my group therapy experience with the junkies from the
  Family House heroin rehab program had taught me that the deepest,
  darkest and most shameful secrets are the ones it is most important to
  tell, I carried it a step further.  I said that having learned how
  liberating it was to reveal all my dark secrets in that therapy group
  with people I trusted, I had found a mental and spiritual liberation
  beyond that.  I said I blog my secrets, and lay all my shameful
  acts and worst mistakes out there for the world to see.

  Reactions, as usual when I’m being frank and truthful, varied from
  amused incredulity to stunned admiration.  I’m used to that
  now.  That’s how it has been here ever since I started blogging my
  memoirs.  Some of you recognized the truth and appreciated my
  candor, while others (too politically correct to come right out and
  call me a liar) said it was good fiction writing.  I’ve always
  been able to tell convincing lies, but sometimes, for some people, the
  truth is unbelievable.

  Later on in the meeting, something one young woman said about the
  comfort she found in telling her secrets to her sponsor meshed with
  something the “old” guy had said about “good secrets,” about good deeds
  and random acts of kindness that you don’t talk about, which give you
  good feelings about yourself in the same way that shameful secrets harm
  your self-esteem.  If there had been any lulls in the sharing last
  night, I would have double-dipped and talked about that other kind of
  “good secret”, other people’s secrets, the dark things my sponsees have
  shared with me.  I didn’t get the chance in the meeting to talk
  about that, so when the van was filled with the rehab clients ready to
  go back to the ranch, I took advantage of the captive audience to talk
  about it then.

  That is, I believe, the power in the sponsor/sponsee
  relationship:  the bond of trust.  When someone has done the
  fourth step, the inventory of her life’s misdeeds and her “character
  defects”, and then tells me about them in her fifth step, an exchange
  takes place on the emotional and spiritual levels.  She is giving
  me her trust and what she gets in return is a form of absolution, of
  liberation from that burden of secret guilt she’s been carrying. 
  I  have a small and growing store of such secrets. 
  Individually, for my sponsees they’re a horrific lot of painful
  memories that have now lost their power and most of their pain. 
  In the aggregate, for me they are a treasure with which I’ve been
  entrusted.  It’s a privilege to keep such secrets, and that’s no
  lie.
  

  • 3:17 pm
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