Episode 12 - The Stage of Our Lies

Episode 12 - The Stage of Our Lies
Show notes from the hosts:
In this episode Taylor and Eric discuss what it means to get honest with ourselves and others  in sobriety.
Banter between hosts.  Introduce big reveal...on IG account. sobernshameless
 Honesty is our topic
Eric: Honesty in Recovery? How does that work. Taylor: We are selfish drunks and don't always know it, until we get sober for alcohol.
Taylor: Is omittance a form of lying? No, we need to know the time and place to say things. Just don't lie to yourself
Eric: as a people pleaser/co-dependent. We tend to follow others and want to make them happy so will say anything.
Taylor: moral compass was off
Eric and Taylor talk about the days in addiction about lying and the relief was felt once they were honest with themselves first.
Taylor: we are always needing to be "On"  and this is where the lying came in
Brutal Honesty can be a defense mechanism
We gaslight others, lying becomes the name of the game
We need balance
See honesty in different ways
Eric asks Taylor: How does honesty show up for you in the middle of your recovery.
The "Pause" moment allows him not to engage, instead we learn how to respond.
Taylor responds to what honest looks like during addiction vs. recovery
Eric talks about being open to others' stories in order to grow in honesty
Honest reality told Eric he was the bigger cause of his own problems
Nothing is solved, but honesty is a work in progress
Honesty leads to undoing the facade that we have built.
The biggest lie, Do I have a Problem?
Getting out of our own way, we can be honest about our problems.
Maintaining honesty
None of this is linear. This happens differently for all of us.
Eric:Honesty is a process in recovery
Inability to look inward
With honesty comes fear, shame and anxiety.
Why recovery if we have to experience shame
Eric: Growth happens when blinders are taken off
Taylor: We have to learn to be ok with not being perfect
Work in Progress Eric shares personal story
Honesty allows for values and boundaries to come back
Thanks for keeping us sober


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Transcript

S&S EP12

Host - Taylor: [00:00:00] Sober and shameless episode 12.

Hey everybody. Welcome to the show. I'm Taylor Klinger. And I'm Eric. Andrew. And this is Sober and Shameless shedding the Shame, the podcast that flips the script on what it means to live a sober life in each 

Host - Eric: episode of Sober and Shame. The host, along with the occasional guests, will pick a topic to shed their shame about, explore ideas on how to grove through those challenges and provide organic, lighthearted, honest, and unprofessional commentary about their experiences with addiction, strength through recovery and life and sobriety.

We did it. Yeah. Woohoo. 

Host - Taylor: We did it. We made it through the week guys. 

Host - Eric: We're here. Wow. Can you believe me? Wait, I gotta tell you, there were times in this week. I wasn't sure really? So we're here 

Host - Taylor: though. Yeah, [00:01:00] yeah. No, I, well, I, I 

Host - Eric: tend to be a little bit over dramatic with my life, so maybe I'm being over dramatic right now, but certainly there was a time where I'm like, oh my God, can we just get to the weekend end?

Host - Taylor: This is me 

Host - Eric: playing oh's, the smallest violin you're 

Host - Taylor: playing there, Heather? Yeah. It's me playing the world's smallest violin. I appreciate 

Host - Eric: that. Um, can you turn it up a little bit? Cause I can't hear it.

Oh boy. All right. Well, I get a lot of love here, don't I? 

Host - Taylor: Hmm. Oh, man. Hey, don't we have something really exciting to announce that we said last episode was gonna happen? We do. Right? 

Host - Eric: Oh yeah. This is, this is a big 

Host - Taylor: reveal. Ooh. Ooh. Yeah. And who knows whether or not we actually decided on a prize? Uh, we, I, you know, it's been a week.

And who's to say whether or not we actually decided on one? We're still not even really sure. Who knows? No . Just kidding. Just kidding. We do know what we are [00:02:00] giving away. We promise. And if you follow us on our social media at Sober and Shame. For Instagram, you would know we asked all of you to write in suggestions and comment on some designs for a sober and shameless t-shirt.

Wow. Yes. This is what we ended up going with for our first prize. And before we announce our very special winner, let's hear from the sponsor of our very first prize.

Hi everyone. It's Cassie from Clinger Crafted. Clinger Crafted is a woodworking business that my husband and I started after we got married. We are a small business that makes modern rustic decor out of the wood shop in our garage. With both of us being heavily involved in the recovery world, we are always looking for ways to give.

Which is [00:03:00] why we were so excited to sponsor this giveaway. If you ever find yourself browsing our website for your next home decor purchase, feel free to browse our recovery support page. Here you can find the links and resources for those struggling with addiction. Check out our website@clingercrafted.com and congratulations to this giveaways.

All right. Now, how about we announce this winner? Yes. Congratulations to Tyrell. Woohoo. Yeah. Woohoo. We are so excited and happy. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for all of those who participated. Yes. All of the donations, as we've said before, all those. Send donations to buy me a coffee.com/sober and shameless, all the proceeds go to our show.

The [00:04:00] overhead cost of our show. It's what makes this run. It's what makes this possible. All of you out there, all of the listens, all of the shares. And all of the engagement on our social medias. Thank you. Thank you, thank you. Every single one of those individuals that did donate hats off to you guys. We really appreciate it.

Thank you very much. 

Host - Eric: Absolutely. Thank you so much You. Helped us, uh, get a lot of coffee. We appreciate that. Um, but we have to continue with our coffee. So, 

Host - Taylor: and as another way of saying thank you, let's roll into the topic for today. Yes. For content.

I think we're gonna start slowing things down a little bit, right Eric? Yep. 

Host - Eric: Yep. We're gonna start doing some deep 

Host - Taylor: dives, some deep dives. I like it because we've spent a lot of time in those first 10, 11 episodes giving a lot of surface area, a lot of broad understanding of things. But you and I [00:05:00] discussed, it would be a great idea to slow things down a little bit and really hone in on some very specific topics and spend a lot more time and energy focused on those things, right?

Absolutely. 

Host - Eric: Yeah. And I, I'm looking forward to this, uh, deep dive in this first topic because we are going to talk about, 

Host - Taylor: Honesty. And that's our show. Thank you everybody. Hope you enjoyed it. Um, , 

Host - Eric: there's your deep dive . You said the word honesty. Hey, by the way, Taylor, for some people that would've been more than enough of a deep dive.

Joking, honesty. Well, I know cuz I was there. Honesty in recovery, you got a bunch of people that are, you know all about themselves and you tell 'em they need to be honest. 

Host - Taylor: How's that work? It's definitely an interesting topic. I do think it's a great one though. I'm really glad that you brought this up for today's topic because it allows us to look deeper into what honesty really is and then how it actually applies in the world of [00:06:00] recovery.

I can tell you that before I got sober, I thought I was an honest person, but the looking. Is different from the other side and you really don't know how things have changed until you've started to gain some traction. And you can't start gaining traction until you start taking a look and being mindful and aware.

And I think that really plays into this whole honesty conversation, is awareness around the things that we were being dishonest. If we need to be honest, then what were we being dishonest about? Right? Where were we lying, right? Yep. You know, the idea 

Host - Eric: of trying to hold on to the way that I had been doing things for a long time in my addiction, which was lying to people or not telling the whole truth.

That's the way I would always phrase it. I'm not, I'm just leaving certain parts out. I'm not really lying to you, I'm just leaving certain 

Host - Taylor: parts out. Is omitting a form of lying and. Honestly ha. Something we can only [00:07:00] answer ourselves, right? Some would say no if you leave something out that's not a version of lying.

Well, for me, I think if you know better, you should do better. I agree. 

Host - Eric: I, but I, I'll, I have a question as we get into this too. Okay. When we deal with honesty, and I, and I know early on this was, for me, a big part of it was, well, do I have to. Everything to everybody. How does this work? Because if I start telling everything, I may blow the world up because people aren't gonna be real happy with me.

Host - Taylor: What is the name of that movie? Where he walks around and he has to be brutally honest to everybody. 

Host - Eric: That was with, um, the guy, the, uh, what, why am I forgetting his name? He fireman Bill, the 

Host - Taylor: invention of lying. Oh, was that the name of the movie? The Invention of Lying. Oh, okay. All right. Yeah, cuz before then, everyone had to tell the truth about everything and more or less there's value in lying.

So I don't know if that's a great reference to make for this [00:08:00] episode, but I think the reason why I thought about it was because of what you were saying about do we need to be honest? All the time and tell everybody everything. Don't get us wrong. That's not necessarily what we're saying, and I think that's the point you're making and that's the only reason why I brought up that movie at all whatsoever, is there is a time and place for things.

But you don't need to lie to yourself. And I think that's the biggest thing is lying to ourselves, not necessarily worrying about other people, especially at the beginning, if we're just focusing on the beginning of this journey right now is Yep. Being honest with ourselves. Right. Well, and I 

Host - Eric: came into this whole journey, um, with some other, go figure, some other baggage.

To to come along with it. And that baggage included perfectionism and codependency. And so in my world, keeping certain things from people was only to protect them, was the way that I saw it. My job was to make you happy, so I was not gonna ever [00:09:00] tell you something. It was gonna make you unhappy. So I was going to like everything that you liked, even if I fucking hated it, and I was going to tell you whatever I felt you needed to.

In order to stay in my life. So honesty for me showed up in some other ways that were really kind of difficult in the early days to kind of get over. 

Host - Taylor: Yeah, and for me, I've talked about it before. I was being very dishonest and at the end of my drinking career. I didn't care. I was being dishonest anymore because I lost all my morals.

Not all of them, right, but I lost good portion of my moral compass towards the end, right? I didn't care about lying anymore. I didn't care that I couldn't stop drinking. I accepted my fate. and I was in a very, you know, fuck this and fuck the world mentality at that point in time, and I felt like there was no escape.

So fear was running my life right? I didn't care because I cared so [00:10:00] much, and that was my way of dealing with it. So it's hard because believe it or not, everybody, I am thinking about this in real time. I didn't come up with a response to this. Eric came up with this topic ahead of time, and I'm trying to give the most genuine responses as possible by not pre-planning this.

So when I look at the beginning of my recovery journey, I know for a fact that I was beyond. Being dishonest with myself, I could not discern my true nature from my learned nature, and I couldn't discern who I wanted to be and who I thought I was and who I actually was, and the behaviors that contradicted it.

In all of that, I didn't have a foot to start. And so honesty really started with being sick and tired of tracking all the lies long enough for me to just start letting all [00:11:00] of those walls crumble around me and breathe a little bit. When you're no longer taking tabs on the stories you've been telling, because sometimes you get to a point in your journey where you're just telling these stories that you don't even know whether or not they're true or not anymore, but when you let those walls just crumble.

And you start one person at a time just saying, yeah, I told that story for like 10 years to you, dude. But it's actually a lie. The weirdest thing starts to happen. You get a little bit of a sense of relief. Yep. And I'm not saying that's an actual conversation that occurred. It's an example of kind of what my brain needed to go through in order to make efforts on changing my behaviors was being honest about stories that I had been telling myself about Little.

Right, and just drawing attention to it, 

Host - Eric: and it's a relief, right? I know for me, so I had lost all sense of self in all of this because I felt like self was only going to screw things up. So I was going to be the [00:12:00] ameba and adapt to whatever I needed to adapt to, and I had no belief in me. So the one thing that really happened for me early on in sobriety in.

Honesty was the realization that I deserved, to be honest with myself, first, I needed to tell myself the truth, and by doing that, it'll open the door for me to start being honest with other people. And you had mentioned this before, and I'll mention it. Because I'm guessing from talking to other people, this may be somewhat universal, this part of it, but that relief, that relief happens of, oh, I don't have to make up this story anymore.

I don't have to keep telling the story and making additions like I'm writing this book in my head as I keep telling the lie, right? I have to play it out, or it's not real. So I had to make it real in my. And when that was all over, wow. That was like a brain just totally relaxed. 

Host - Taylor: And you'll actually hear in the world of recovery, a lot of people [00:13:00] refer to their stories as stages, as the world is a stage, kind of like Shakespeare.

All the world's a stage, and I'm it's greatest critic, right? That's how we act in our lives. We use the phrase act, we use the, you know, very specific words come to mind when we frame our stories. They are acts, they are plays, they're performance. And while we are on stage the stage of our lies, we get exhausted.

We get sick and tired and we just. To take five. And realistically, we want a whole lot more than that. We want to just get off the stage and quit performing. And some people say, I never perform. I always am real with people. I tell them exactly what I think about them all the time. [00:14:00] I am the most honest person out there.

I will tell you if your clothes don't look good because I'm saving you from your. When you have a personality like that, and they're in the early stages, their frame of honesty is very skewed in my opinion. They have a different workload in front of them because the stage that they're standing on is they think that everybody in the world around them wants to hear what their jaw jack has to fricking pronounce to the.

Their version of control in their own lives is telling everybody their thoughts about everything instead of worrying and focusing on themselves and how they show up in that situation. And as this all relates to honesty, there are different personality types that display character traits, which [00:15:00] lead into the discussion of honesty in very different ways.

I know people who are like that, and I was never one of them, but I had moments where I would be very aggressive towards other people with honesty as my sword and shield usually being utilized to cover up an insecurity, a fear, a regret, or a discomfort that I was experiencing in my life. So almost over honesty contributed to a part of me being dishon.

That's really weirdly worded, but like I said, I'm kind of free flowing this and I hope it's making sense. Is it making sense or am I just 

Host - Eric: talking outta Yeah, absolutely. It's ma, it's making sense that you, and this is where I think, you know, we, we always bring this up, but I think where balance comes in, the idea of, of what that really means, you know, sometimes being brutally honest and you said it is a control mechanism, you know, if I can tell you all your faults, you're not gonna have time to tell me.

[00:16:00] And that's okay. Cause I don't want to hear them. 

Host - Taylor: Control or defense mechanism. Right. I maybe defense mechanism in this scenario a little bit more accurately. Right. 

Host - Eric: And, and then even controlling the discussion, dis controlling what is said. Trying to veer that person away from maybe something that was initially brought up by them.

That was your fault, but you veer them off by starting to point out all their faults. 

Host - Taylor: Yeah. And it's really hard when we have these discussions about, We have to look at our level of manipulation, our ability to manipulate and almost gaslight ourselves and others into believing things that really don't exist.

Host - Eric: Absolutely. I, I agree. I, and I think the big reason for picking honesty as a topic to dive deep into first is, is such a big part of. We have to get honest with ourselves, we have to get honest with others. Um, and we have to fund a balance in all of that.

So as we move into our world of recovery [00:17:00] and we get down the road a little bit, we start to deal with honesty in different ways, and we start seeing honesty showing up in different ways. And I think we start to view the moments that we're not being honest, like we see them clear. As we move on down the road.

Then in the early days when we first came in and somebody said, well, are you being honest? We're like, of course. I'm being honest. I'm always honest. I tell people the way it is. Right. So how does that look showing up for you in kind of the middle part of recovery? Well, 

Host - Taylor: it's through working a program for me that allowed me to peel that back in a structured manner and having conversations and.

With people who could challenge me and get me to look at things from different perspectives without this big gorilla defense mechanism, constantly knee jerk [00:18:00] responding to the world around me. I feel like the longer I got away from alcohol, the less I was quick to a response, the less I was quick to need to engage and that time buffer.

That pause moment allowed me to actually listen to other people long enough so I could actually start looking at my own bullshit and create plans with my therapist as well on mental exercises that I could do to walk myself through awareness challenges on stories that I was telling myself. So I. Start becoming more aware of what my brain was actually saying and what my brain was actually wanting.

So as I said in the scenario where you get argumentative and you start telling everybody the brutal honest truth with some time away from alcohol and hard work and [00:19:00] dedication in a form of a recovery program, you will then start to notice that behavior. While it's happening, and you'll almost be an outsider third party to it and can stop it faster and faster and faster cuz you start flexing those muscles and maybe get stronger and stronger and stronger sooner and sooner and sooner.

And when you can start to pause those moments while they're occurring, you can really hone in on, wait a minute, Taylor, why are you deciding right now? To be over the top really honest with people. Holy crap, you're uncom. You have a lot of fear. Because somebody yesterday said something to you that upset you, but you refused to acknowledge that you were experiencing an emotion.

Mm. And you started responding the way that you normally would when alcohol was a factor. Suppress, regress and shy away from default to the I'm fine formula, which I'm [00:20:00] fine, means I'm freaked out, insecure, neurotic, and. But I'm also suffering from the male aspect of this too. I have to be, you know, masculine.

I can't show my emotions. But now instead of acknowledging cuz you don't have alcohol as an out anymore, that you're experiencing anger and frustration towards your coworker who told you something you really didn't wanna know about yourself, and they were honest with you about it. So you decided to immediately knee-jerk respond and get honest to them about, so, And you were mean about it, and now you're the next day down the road and you're being mean to your wife and you're being mean to your dog, and you're being mean to the mailman, and you're wondering why all of a sudden the world's working against you.

Right. In this scenario, the hindsight provided to me from working a program isn't that that scenario doesn't exist. A 100% exists down the road of. [00:21:00] The shift is the, oh, wait a minute. No, the world's not working against me right now. Uh, Bob told me yesterday what he thought about me. It upset me and I didn't allow myself to be upset, and I need to allow myself to be upset.

And not only did I not allow myself to be upset, I responded in a way that is a person I don't want to be anymore. And that makes me feel gross. Well, fuck. How am I gonna get back to Serenity? How am I gonna get back to status quo? How am I gonna get back to where sobriety feels good again? All right, well, I gotta do some work and to not go into too much of it.

But that work would consist of going and having a conversation with Bob and saying, Hey man, I don't know what came over me. I shouldn't have responded the way that I did. That wasn't right for me. I'm. Hey, no worries man. I get it. Not a problem. Awesome, thanks. Because nine times outta 10 what we worry about inside our head and what really happens is two very different things.

So there's kind of a long-winded response for you, but I was trying to paint a picture of like [00:22:00] how honesty does morph and change as you go through the early stages and into later life of. 

Host - Eric: Recovery and you painted a really good picture with lots of pastels. Thank you. It was good. I loved it. I, I loved everything that you said.

A and there's a lot in there that I, I'm gonna piggyback on, but, so each individual person has a reality that we work in. And that reality is based on constructs that we build for ourselves. So think about that early recovery person, and I'm talking about me. So we'll, we'll use me, comes into the rooms or comes into the concept of recovery with the idea that everybody has been out to get me, that none of this is in my control.

Everybody's against me and all this stuff's happening, and what do I gotta do to make everybody happy with me so I can have a happy life? And I needed to tear down those constructs. So how does that happen? Well, for me, how that [00:23:00] happens is listening to other people's stories and listening to how they have become honest, you know, listening to how they brutally have become honest with themselves.

And with people in their lives that they love, and more honesty in terms of what they did to screw things up, not what the other person did. And I think that's the key. And you know, I'd said earlier that honesty started with me realizing I needed to be honest with myself. And so I start by being honest with myself, that then I can be honest with others and realize that it's not everybody doing things to me.

It's me creating through gaslighting and everything else. These, these scenarios that make me out to be a real. When I didn't think I was, and I had to come to grip with that, I had to come to grips with the reality, the honest reality that I was the cause of 99.9% of my own problems, whatever they were in the way that I was approaching them, and the way that I wasn't approaching them.

Right. You know? [00:24:00] So by going to the bar and drinking versus dealing with a problem that. My choice was to go that direction. So I needed to realize I needed honesty for myself first, and I needed to listen to other people's stories to realize how they were then incorporating honesty into their life.

Because I didn't know how to do that. I didn't know what that meant. So I needed to be taught, and I needed to be taught from others who were doing it. Now, whether they knew they were teaching me or not is, is, doesn't matter. What matters is that when they told their story to. I heard them tell how honesty is showing up in their life, and that helped me learn how to put honesty in my life.

Now do I have it all? Perfect. Right now? Nope. I don't. In fact, just recently the realization that I can, I, I need to be better at that, and I think that's important for me to realize that. So this is a work in progress. Honesty for me is slowly getting on [00:25:00] track to where it's supposed to be for me. Um, 

Host - Taylor: do you feel like honesty equals chaos?

When we talk about this stuff, as you've described, what you've gone through and I've described what I've gone through, some of the reluctant that we have towards being honest is it equals the undoing, the undoing of all that we have tried to build conscious or unconscious about who we are and how we identify and interact with the world around us.

And in that undoing it's synonymous with chaos. And chaos means unknown. Unknown as fear. And I can't risk, the risk is not worth the reward because once I start being honest, I can't gain back. Nope. My lies, 

Host - Eric: once I tell you, I can't UNT 

Host - Taylor: tell you which leads into the biggest lie. Do I have a problem? Yeah.

Host - Eric: And that in itself, the answer, depending on which way you go, [00:26:00] will create chaos. And I think it creates chaos because you are now tearing down a construct that you believed and you're gonna have to. 

Host - Taylor: And this goes back to the initial first question where we are at the beginning of right, this journey with honesty.

I know I'm bringing it up kind of in phase two, but it just struck me. The craziest thing is the reason why honesty is so important in the world of recovery is because that right there is the elephant in the room. That's the question that makes or breaks a lot of people's recovery on whether or not they can answer it.

They can get sober and pretend that they don't have a problem that exists, right? But it's a rocky road. All of it's rocky. But that one I feel like is a little bit more rocky and when we start to get honest with ourselves about those basic items. It then leads into getting out of our own way, right?

Because once you relieve yourself and you step to the side of your ego, in that scenario of Do I have a [00:27:00] problem, honestly? Yes. Right. I have a problem. Right? You just step to the side of yourself. Mm-hmm. . And for a brief moment, you actually felt relief admitting that in a weird way. Right? But then you're quickly met with the chaos that comes with that door you just opened.

Right? And that door leads to all the lies you've been telling and all the bullshit you've been dealing. and that is a door, you quickly want to sh slam back shut again, which a lot of people do, right? They get a little bit further. They, they open that door, they st they stick their foot in and they're like, Ooh, fuck that shit.

I'm out. Right? And they're back off to the races for another 10 years, five years, right. Whatever. And so we have to continue being honest. Yeah. And I think leading into the final section of. Maintaining that. What do we see moving forward?

Host - Eric: I just wanna remind the listeners too, that none of this is linear. So what I mean by that is you [00:28:00] can't look at your recovering and go, okay, within the first six months this will happen, and the next six months that'll happen in the next six months. So please don't take our beginning, middle, and end as a linear discussion.

It's more in terms of how we're. Through this so we can let you know the. Parts of this. So honesty, the concept of honesty in how we deal with it is an ongoing process. It's, it doesn't just solve itself and then you move on from it. You are continuously working on it. So you might like, I love, uh, Taylor when you said the idea of opening that door and as we open that door, it opens up all the stuff that we have to be real about.

And some of us wanna slam that door shut. And in fact, I think some of us. And we maybe walk away from it. There 

Host - Taylor: are still doors. I slam shut in the world of honesty. Yeah, yeah. No, I'm not done. I am still a work in progress. Yeah, and that's good news, right? Means I'm human. 

Host - Eric: Right. So how does this show up if we're looking at this moving forward?

Because I [00:29:00] have to keep taking an inventory. I have to keep asking myself, was I as honest I could have been in that moment, whatever it might be. It could be my job, it could be a relationship, it could be a friendship, it could be whatever. So being able to look at myself and take my own inventory on what happened and where can I get better at that?

Where can I get closer to being more pure? In my honesty, within my recovery. And that always becomes the question for me. And I, I almost look at it like when I was in college, at grad school, I took a research class and one of the things a professor said about it was in experimenting about anything, we never come up with the answer.

Each experiment gets us that much closer to the answer, the true answer. And I kind of look at that in terms of, and relate that to sobriety and recovery because every time that we have an experience with. It gets us closer to that pure honesty that we wanna be. Now, we never get there perfectly, and it's a long W [00:30:00] work process, but we take baby steps.

So back to that progress, not perfection, right? Yep. So for me, A lot of this is exactly that is first off, forgiving myself that I'm not perfect with it, and that's okay because I as a perfectionist, need to do that. And secondly, realizing that I didn't get here overnight with drinking and alcohol and all, and all the shit that comes with it.

And I'm not gonna solve it all overnight either. That it's a process and honesty is just one of many different areas. That is a process. You know, so for me to continue to be open to that process and continue to get better every day with it is the key to my success with my own recovery in terms of honesty.

Host - Taylor: I love all of that, and I really like your example from the professor. That's a really good way to look at this thing is we're gradually working towards, and [00:31:00] that phrase you said, I love it. In the world of recovery progress, not perfect. I want perfection when I come into this thing. Mainly I want my life back.

That's it. I want you to give me my life back so I can move the fuck on from this and not be here any longer than I need to be. I want to be fixed so I can go, this is a doctor's visit. This isn't psychology. I'm not gonna be here for fucking ever, right? I want to go home. What ends up happening is something very differently, which I.

Contributes to people staying away from the rooms of recovery and recovery in general. An inability to look inward. If I wanted to quit drinking, I could quit drinking. Many of us can, right? Like lock ourselves in a room for a week. You'll quit drinking. Go into an inpatient program and pay a lot of money, or not pay a lot of money depending on the program out there.

Regardless, they keep you away from drinking and [00:32:00] they're very successful. You end up going back out, not because the program didn't work or did work, you end up going back out because. A lack of willingness. So my final thing is we have to be willing to be honest continuously and chip away at all of that story we told ourselves.

Cuz it doesn't come flooding back at one moment. It doesn't come flooding back at four years. I'm almost at four years and there's still shit that I wake up and I go, that's what actually happened, right? I hadn't happened to me not that long ago about a trip that I took with my family like five years ago, and my family kept making little tiny hints about some worries that they had about a trip coming up, and I kept going and scratching my head going, why are they worried about this stuff?

I've been in recovery and I would never do those things. And then I woke up one morning and it was then when my subconscious decide to bring up to my conscious brain what had occurred. [00:33:00] And all of their comments made sense and their comments were genuinely, they weren't mean or anything, they were just concerns, right?

Based off of my behavior in the past. And I wasn't catching, I wasn't putting two and two together cuz I didn't remember what had occurred. And in that memory I immediately got honest with. And I apologized. I thought about it. I took the time and respected the, the memory for what it was, but eventually I ended up going and apologizing because as I learn new things and learn how to be honest about some things and honest with myself, I then have to take responsibility.

Because once I am honest, I am responsible. And when we are honest, we have to be careful. And I think this will be the final thing that we can talk about here today. Is through all this, honesty comes, shame comes, fear comes anxiety and uncertainty. And [00:34:00] there's a reason we did this for so long, right? So a great mental construct to build while we go through this is reminding ourselves that we need to remain humble.

We are deflating ourselves. To inflate our lives, the deflation of ourselves is the deflation of ego and allowing humility to shine through because we've built up such a defense mechanism in order to break it down, our greatest asset is humility, not humiliation. Humiliation airs on the side of shame.

And we have to be careful when we draw the lines on whether or not we are being humble or whether or not we're recalling things and being humiliated when we talk about these things. I never want to say something and feel [00:35:00] humiliated as I speak. What's the point of recovery if all I gain from it is shame and humiliation?

How am. To take ownership and responsibility for these memories that I have coming fresh to the top of my brain and all these whirlwinds of emotions and remain humble without airing on the side of humiliation and shame. What are your thoughts, Eric? First 

Host - Eric: off, I love all of that. I think that that, that is spot on.

I would almost say that when we come in, two things, when we come into recovery, we're coming in with blinders on. We see our world through these blinders, and so the world's all out here in this big place, but we see it just through this lens and through that lens is. All our, our lives, all our stories, all our shit, and how bad everybody is to us.

And I think recovery helps us lose that. So for me, when I think in terms of honesty and if somebody's getting that, what I know for me that I connect to is when [00:36:00] somebody is not only humble, but is very open to understanding what's going on, and very open to the idea of. And when you start to see that in somebody in recovery, then I think that's when they've become honest with themselves.

And that's cuz that's the first step you, you have to be honest with yourself. And when people are saying to you early on, well how much longer do I have to do this? Am I gonna be doing this my whole life? To me, that person hasn't come to the point of being honest, yet they're still hanging on to the idea of like, I got this and I don't really need to be.

And this is a bunch of shit. And I just wanna, like you said, get fixed, doctor visit, get fixed, gimme a pill, let me move on with my life. And so until they stop saying that, they haven't become brutally honest with themselves yet. That's my thought. 

Host - Taylor: And through all of this, we start to see parts of our personalities that we don't like.

Yep. We start to realize [00:37:00] I am that thing. I never thought I could. I've become that thing I never thought capable of becoming. I have done things I didn't know I could do, and I don't know how to come back from that. The redeeming thing is knowing that you can start now, right? And say, I am not perfect, and that is.

I am not perfect. And that is okay. And through that we can then say I'm a whip

I'm a work in progress, man's. I got things I gotta fix. I got things I gotta work on. But I got two hands and I'm here to rock. I'm ready to go. Let's get started.

Host - Eric: So in February, I turned four years, [00:38:00] four years of, of alcohol freedom. However, this whole idea of honesty and his whole idea of being willing to look at ourselves and realize, oh, there's things about myself I don't like and I need to fix them. One of the things that came up for. In that time period was this realization that I was a people pleaser to the nth degree, and that I never set boundaries.

I never stood up for myself into what I wanted in a certain situation, and by keeping my mouth shut and not doing that, what I was hoping wouldn't end because I screwed it up by saying. Ended the realization. All that came to me, like if I was honest with her and I would've told her the truth of what I was thinking and feeling.

Things may have been different. Now, they may not have been totally different, but they would've been different from my perspective because I would've been living up to who I am as a person. So my values and I would be living up to my boundaries [00:39:00] because of my values, and to me, If we're not willing to do that, then we're just gonna struggle forever because we have to be a person and we have to have value.

And I think that comes out of honesty. When we're honest with ourselves. When we're honest with others, those values come back up. Those boundaries come back up, and we're willing to say, no, I don't like that, or, no, I don't want to do. Or hey, I want to go here, or Hey, I want to go there. And this is coming from a people pleaser that is trying not to be that anymore.

So me using the word no, as small as that word is, is one of the hardest fucking words for me to use in any friendship, relationship, job thing, anything. I don't wanna disappoint people. What I realized in February was I'm disappointing myself first and foremost by not standing up for myself and being honest and say, no, I don't like this.

Or, here's my boundary and this is what I want. So I just [00:40:00] wanna share that cause I wanna show you that, hey, this is a work in progress. By no means have this whole recovery thing licked at all, and honesty is something that continually shows up for me every single. And I have to be vigilant about it and change my constructs and change my neuro response to it, which is happening 

Host - Taylor: slowly.

Well, I think you just did a fantastic job about bringing up next week's episode, Eric. All right. Well, that's what I was trying to do. He's giving me a look of weight. What did I say? ? 

Host - Eric: Which part am I talking about? Boundaries. Boundaries. Boundaries. I love 

Host - Taylor: it. Yeah. Didn't you know that's what we're gonna talk about next week?

Me neither. Because we do this episodically. Well, yeah, because, 

Host - Eric: you know, we have no boundaries on this, on, on this podcast, so we 

Host - Taylor: just No problem about shit. No, we, we have no format. I don't know about boundaries. . Yeah, I guess no. Boundaries too. If boundaries is synonymous with format. With all of that being said, Eric, thank you for keeping me sober through another amazing episode.

The same 

Host - Eric: to you, [00:41:00] Taylor. You definitely keep me going the way I need to go with all of this sobriety 

Host - Taylor: stuff. Well, I love you brother, and love you too, man. To all our listeners out there, thank you for joining us for another episode. Again, congratulations to our winner and to all those who have donated to make this show continue on the way that it has.

For all those wanting to contribute and keep this show going. We have a lot more content coming very soon. There's more to come, more exciting things. We're looking forward to it, and I promise we'll let you know as soon as we know what it is. No, I'm kidding. . Have a good weekend, everybody. 

Host - Eric: Yeah, have a good weekend.

We love you guys. Hey, thank you all for listening to this show. We really 

Host - Taylor: appreciate it. Thank you so much for joining us today, and we would not be here without you. 

Host - Eric: New episodes, air every Friday morning. This show is available 

Host - Taylor: wherever you podcast. You can join the conversation throughout the week [00:42:00] by following us on Instagram and TikTok by searching at sober the letter N.

Shame. If you would like to be a guest on our show or would simply like to send us an email about this week's topic, then please email us@sobershamelessgmail.com. You can find all these links and more in the show now. Interested in supporting the show, then buy us a cup of coffee. That's a drink we can enjoy without regret.

Just simply navigate to buy me a coffee.com/sober and shameless, that's S O B E R N S H A N E L E S S. And you can give us a cup if you'd like. We'll send you a sober and shameless sticker in the mail and post a photo on our Instagram thanking you for your support. And finally, 

Host - Eric: Shed shed that shame.

Don't forget to take care of yourself today. We love you and [00:43:00] you are worth it. 

Host - Taylor: Coming in regular, coming in hot.[00:44:00] [00:45:00]