The Truth Will Set You Free

Living the truth is different than just speaking the truth. 

Transcript

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You know, I had a client that I worked with for probably a year, year and a half. Let's call him Sam. He was a pretty reliable client. Seemed to be working his recovery pretty well. He never lied to me. Not once. Every single thing he said in my office was true. He went to meetings. True. He called his sponsor. Every day. True. He passed drug tests that were mandatory in his IOP program. True. And the whole time. Three weeks into a full-blown relapse. Because there's a difference between telling the truth and being truthful. And that difference is where addiction lives. You see, being truthful takes a lot of effort, but telling the truth is easy, especially when it's not true. Today we're going to talk about that gap. And about a line from scripture that people quote all the time without ever stopping to understand what it's actually asking about. The truth. And being truthful. I'm Doc Jock. Stay tuned. This is Doc Jock, your addiction life go. And if you're here, you already know that addiction is brutal. Recovery is hard, and the road between them is longer than anybody tells you. I'm Dr. Jockey Burke, the licensed professional counselor and addiction specialist. This podcast exists for one reason. Walk that road with no sugar coating, no magic dough, just the truth about what recovery really looks like. Quick note, this show is for information and entertainment only, not professional treatment. A real human being is. Now let's get to it. Know the truth and the truth will set you free. Everybody quotes that. Almost nobody reads the sentence before it. The if clause is the sentence before it. If you hold to my teaching, then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free. The freedom condition is the holding to the ongoing practice, not a single moment. It's the holding on to that practice. I'm using this out of its original context. I know that. Truth isn't an event, it's a discipline. And most people treat it honesty like a hurdle to get through the one big confession and then you're done. That's not how the verse reads, and that's not how recovery works. It's not about getting over the one thing in front of you, the one hurdle in front of you. There's a different thing about it. It's the same idea about abstinence versus sobriety that I talk about all the time. Abstinence is from the head, sobriety is from the heart. Telling the truth once is a head thing. Living truthfully, that's a heart thing. Abstinence is up, and I'm pointing to my head, it's up here. Sobriety is in the heart. Honesty follows the exact same split when it comes to how you're living your life in recovery. And when you actually transition to working on recovery rather than just playing with the idea of it. So it it sets the stage for you to be able to stop lying. And there are many faces of the lie. Addicts, they rarely tell big lies. It's all about telling the small lies. They tell the truth when it suits them. They tell true things dishonestly. There's a minimization that goes on when it comes to truth telling. Um I just had a couple. When it was like a 12-pack or a 32-pack. Technically, drinking was disclosed, but the truth wasn't. You just, you know, I had a couple. You I see this all the time when I watch these videos of police officers when they pull somebody over and they say, Have you been drinking? And they say, Yeah, I had one. Yeah, like one gallon, but they so they they're telling the truth. They're just not disclosing the truth. What they're saying is is truthful, but it's not honest. So minimization, that's one aspect to it. The omission, not not telling all of it. Nobody asked, so I didn't say anything. And that's where you're getting your sneaky on and comes in. And I've talked about that many times. The the episode that I talked about, Matthew Perry and the ketamine issue, you know, he switched drugs and called it treatment. He never counted it as a relapse. And he was and he was he was being truthful when he said that he was using ketamine. He just wasn't being honest because he was using ketamine beyond what he was supposed to be using it. He was using more than when he was being treated. That's dishonest. Now, was he truthful? Was he was he telling the truth? Yes, but he was dishonest at the same time. So the omission, like I left that part out, or I just I told a little bit about it. Then there's the lie that you tell yourself first. That internal kind of negotiation you do before anyone else gets deceived. You have already won an argument in your own head that nobody else was in the room for. They weren't there. Secrets protect addiction. And those secrets can only happen in isolation. And what's my phrase that I use all the time? It's like my catchphrase: isolation is addiction's best friend. Self-deception is isolation. So then isolation then serves its master, which is addiction, which is what you're doing. So the lie that you tell yourself first is the one that you can tell publicly. But you had that lie going on in your head first. One of the real generalized stories that I have is that there's a pattern to hit. A client will tell me the truth about everything except the one thing that matters. And the omission does more damage than a lie would have. Trust me, because it brought weeks of runaway usage. I've had clients who have been using for two, three, four, five months, and they don't disclose it to me. They won't say it out loud. I may know, and sometimes I will bring that out, and I will say, you know what, I don't I don't think you're really being honest with yourself. I never say honest to me, because when they're talking to me, what they're doing is they're speaking to themselves. They're just saying it out loud. I just happen to be there bearing witness to it. So I'll say, You're not being honest with yourself. And they kind of look at me a little quizzically. What are you talking about? Well, it you have been using, haven't you? And and I get them to say it because I need them to speak the truth, right? In an honesty moment. And I can't, it can't be a threatening kind of thing. They can't be they can't feel like they're threatened or in a threatening situation. So the truth hopefully will then set them free. You know, as a as a scriptural reference beyond uh what I gave you before, in Psalms 51.6, there's there's another some words about truth. You're you you desire truth in the inner parts. The goal was never just clean sounding answers. It's an alignment between what's happening inside of you and what comes out of your mouth. The gap between the inside and the outside, and that's the gap where relapse lives. Dishonesty versus honesty, truth versus lying, as we know, and we see it all the time, and I deal with attorneys where I've seen this in the courtroom scenes. They will somebody will ask a question, and the person in the story who is uh the defendant, they're told and coached by their attorney, only answer the question you were asked, do not add to it, because that will lead to other questions. And what they're trying to do is tell the person to be not honest but truthful. Were you out on Saturday night at 8 o'clock on October 18th? Yes. You're not saying anything more. It's like, were you out? Yes. And they so what you're doing is you're setting it up so that the attorney has to keep asking question after question after question to get to the full picture, right? So you're not being dishonest by doing that. You are speaking the truth, but it's not really honest truth, is it? It's not full disclosure. And that's what I got to get clients to do in my office is to engage in full disclosure. What the hidden truth costs you. A hidden truth is like swimming with your fists clenched around something. You're holding on to something. You can still swim for a while, but you're swimming one armed. You're not using both arms, you're burning all your energy holding on to it. And eventually, you're going to be too tired to keep your head above water. You don't drown because of what's in your hand. You drown because of what it costs you to keep holding it. We we when we're doing rescues and we get people out of the water, we are we have hands on them, and we're generally using only one other hand to get ourselves and the victim out of the water. It's exhausting. But the cost to keep holding on to it is worth it. In in the hidden truth, no, it's not. Every hidden thing, you have to maintain it, right? So there's a cost to that maintenance. You have to remember your story. And when you start telling lies, and when you're not being fully honest, those are I'm I'm using finger quotes, those are lies. You have to manage conversations instead of just having them, because you got to remember what in the world it is you told where you were, whatever. And and it's interesting because the people closest to you, they're listening and they're remembering. So they they're keeping track and they're tracking with you as you're as you're saying things. And so they may catch you in these fabrications and call you out on it. And then you have to come up with some other story. And story after story after story creates a lot of lot of discontent, a lot of upset, right? So there's no peace there. Remember, sober is not the finish line, but peace is the finish line for recovery. The opposite of addiction, according to me, Dr. Jacques, Doc Jacques, the opposite of addiction is not sober and clean. The opposite of addiction is peaceful. The peaceful person presents the conversation instead of managing it. And the peaceful person carries a a different truth, right? The person carrying a secret is always managing the story. They're not just living it, right? So you gotta keep the hidden that hidden true that hidden truth is is just so costly. There's so much maintenance to it. When I kept silent, my bones wasted away, my strength was sapped. There's a saying. Well, what that person is describing three thousand years ago, exactly what my clients describe in my office. The physical exhausting weight of the unsaid thing. That's not a religion problem. That's a human condition problem. And it's something that people have been struggling with for a long time. And if I read a very, very old text, like the Old Testament or the New Testament, what I'm seeing is the same human condition that they were living back then is the same human condition we're living today. We just have different society, we have different technology, we have different lifestyles, but the condition is the same. Whoever conceals doesn't prof prosper. Whoever confesses finds mercy. It's not a clinical read. Not a moral read. What's covered doesn't heal. It just goes underground and gets more expensive. Again, we're back at that cost. You have an enemy that's attacking you. The enemy is addiction. The enemy is the enemy. Addiction is is the tool that the enemy is using. The enemy doesn't need you to relapse today. It just needs you to keep one secret. Because the secret keeps the door propped open. Every hidden truth is the enemy's foot in that door. So one lie, one hidden one hidden thing is dishonesty. Right? So the dishonesty then becomes a pattern in your life. It becomes the thing that you start practicing. Dishonesty. If you change that approach and truth as a practice, that can be established, but you have to learn how to do it. You know, you became very adept in your addiction at learning how to not be truthful. And, you know, if you're when you first started your addiction, the lies were probably pretty simple because they were easy to do, because you weren't seen as being dishonest as a person. And so it's easy for you to just give a little bit of dishonesty and get away with it. The longer you're in your addiction, the more elaborate those lies get. But at the same time, the more into your addiction you are, the less people care about what you're doing because they kind of started to give up on you. So you don't have to go into long defenses for your lies. Step four and five in the step process, that's that's where you're connecting the uh the idea of honesty and truthfulness with the practice of it. Because you got to go through this thing we talk about in step four, fearless searching moral inventory of your character defects. That's the know the truth part. In step five, the witnessing of that, and you know, you're saying it out loud in front of yourself and another person in God, the nature and extent of those character defects. Not the version that you'd show somebody a truth uh in church, like know the truth. That's different, right? We're taking this out of context. I realize that the real one, the one with the things that you've never said out loud. That's the truth, the hard truth. That's what I call it, the like the hard truth. We're gonna have a hard truth conversation. Step four is that. Step five, after you've gone through that torturous thing, and like I've said before, usually when people are gonna jump out of the 12-step process, it's a step four, because they're not gonna want to do that. Step five, admitting to God, to yourself, and to another human being, that's the hold on to it part. You have to say it out loud in front of a witness. Not because God doesn't already know, but because addiction survives in secrecy. And speaking it out loud is what kills the secrecy. It's like the oxygen that kills the germs. Get it out in get it out in the air. I've had people who have come into my office and they are are so wanting to unburden themselves with these truths that are just so torturous. And they really, I mean, they just break down crying when they start speaking the truth. And it's it's really it's a tough thing to witness it as a therapist, and you're watching the person and they're really struggling and they're crying and they're upset. It's uh it's it's tough to witness, um, but at the same time, I know it's a huge step into the world of recovery that they're engaging in. So it's it's important. Well, what is the idea of like holding to the truth look like in a normal week? What does that look like? Well, if you're working on recovery, um calling your sponsor about the bad day, not just the slip, not just about the good day, but about the bad day, that's a big one, right? That's holding to the truth. You're saying it out loud, you're having a bad day. Telling your counselor about the accident while it's happening or right after instead of a week later, or or when it's been cleaned up and it's kind of past tense, so you can just kind of dismiss it as a thing that you did back then. See, you got to be in the moment, and that's holding on to the truth. Holding on to it means I'm gonna actually engage in an honest with myself kind of conversation I'm gonna have with another person. Um, when you go into a meeting and the idea is like uh, you know, depending on the meeting and who's leading it, who's chairing it, but it might be a thing where it's like, you know, the how are you doing thing? What's today like? And in a meeting, you give the real answer, right? The breakthrough for many people when they start working on recovery is when they go to meetings and they actually speak and they start speaking the truth, and that takes a while, no question. I mean, when you go to meetings, you're in a kind of a foreign environment, and it's not something you're used to, and it may not be something you're frankly comfortable with, and that's okay. Um, but being truthful and speaking the truth occasionally, about I don't know, fifth, sixth, seventh meeting you go to, you're gonna feel a little more comfortable because you don't feel so weird being in this room with these people you don't know. And speaking, speaking in a meeting, but speaking with real answer to how am I doing today? Um without defensiveness you know, did I lie to my wife last week? Yeah, I did. Period. No excuses, no polish. There's just it's just the truth, right? Did I lie to my wife last week? Yeah, I did. Hopefully, you're saying that in front of another person. Again, sponsor saying it out loud in a meeting because you're not gonna get any crosstalk, so you just say it, you're not gonna get criticized or questioned. More importantly, with a therapist who's again well trained and understands trauma and addiction. But there's no polish to it. You're not polishing a turd, you're just being honest. Because, you know, if you polish a turd, you just get a nice shiny turd. Still a turd. Consistency over time is really the tell. Truth once performed, truth over weeks, that's character change. Sub sobriety doesn't fix character. I said that in some podcasts previously. Sobriety doesn't fix character, character is fixed with honesty. Um how do you how do you manage that? How do you manage keeping that? Well, let's go into like the idea of of how you find the freedom part in this honesty. Freedom is something that it needs to let me let me define it for you. Freedom is not having to remember your story. It's not, it's not flinching when the phone rings, it's not being able to look at your wife or your husband without doing all the math first. It's it's the client that I described at the beginning. Imagine his version of free. Nothing to manage, nothing to maintain, nothing in his clinched. Fist. You gotta connect to it. Peace is truth telling. And that builds over time. You start with a little bit of truth and it leads to more truth. The discomfort that you felt when you were lying and you're doing all the math and the calculations and the juggling of everything that you said. That's kind of difficult to do. You can't get peaceful while you're still carrying secrets. You can't. Because secrets require bracing, and peaceful is when you stop bracing for impact, for discovery. Just it's the truth. Like, where'd you go last night? I I p went out and drank. And you notice the pause there, like I went out and drank. I just that's it. And then when you start telling the truth, where'd you go last night? I was at home. Did you drink? No, I didn't. That's it. Like that's that's the truth. Um saying the truth once, and you're free. That's not what that Bible verse says. It says know it, hold to it, but live in it. And the freedom is what that practice produces. The truth is the goal. You chase it every day. And every day you catch a little more of it, and a little bit more, and a little more, and then you're a little more free. It's a practice. Um I'm gonna give you a little bit of a challenge. I was thinking about this. This week, I want you to tell one true thing that you've been sitting on. Not the biggest one, just just one. Just pick a small one. Say it to your sponsor, say it to your counselor, say it in a in a group, say it to somebody. Say it in front of a witness. That's the whole assignment. That's it. One truth out of isolation. One truth. You're out of isolation. Try that. See what happens. See if you can live through speaking the truth. And see if it feels a little better. Well, hey, that's it for this episode of Doc Shock Your Dixon Lifeguard. I hope you enjoyed this podcast. If you have, like, subscribe, recommend to a friend. And if you are in need of help, go get it. Go to a rehab. Go to a detox time. Go to a hospital. Go to a helpful. If you would like to reach out to me, do that, I will help you with my hand and listen. That works. That's right. Okay. So until next time, this is about your different lifestyle saying CM.