Just For The Day
Just For The Day
#15 - August 28, 2025 - Exposing Secrets to the Light
Jay and Diane share the August 28 NA daily reader that explores how bringing our secrets into the light diminishes their power over us and fosters healing through vulnerability and acceptance.
Question: What is keeping you from sharing your secrets with a "trusted" person, yourself, and your God?
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Welcome back to another episode of Just for the Day. I'm Jay and I'm a recovering addict.
Speaker 2:I'm Diane and I'm codependent, and today is August 28th. The title of today's reading is the Light of Exposure, and the quote says these defects grow in the dark and die in the light of exposure.
Speaker 1:The fifth step asks us to share our true nature with God, with ourselves and with another human being. It doesn't encourage us to tell everyone every little secret about ourselves. It doesn't ask us to disclose to the whole world every shameful and frightening thought we've ever had. Step five simply suggests that our secrets cause us more harm than good when we keep them completely to ourselves.
Speaker 2:If we give in to our reluctance to reveal our true nature to even one human being, the secret side of our lives becomes more powerful, and when the secrets are in control, they drive a wedge between ourselves, our higher power and the things we value most about our recovery.
Speaker 1:When we share our secret selves in confidence with at least one human being our sponsor, perhaps, or a close friend this person usually doesn't reject us. We disclose ourselves to someone else and are rewarded with their acceptance. When this happens, we realize that honest sharing is not life-threatening. The secrets have lost their power over us.
Speaker 2:Just for today, I can disarm the secrets in my life by sharing them with one human being.
Speaker 1:Office quote yeah, secrets, secrets hurt someone. Yeah it's the stripper in the office he's asking whether he should tell his girlfriend that he, that she, rubbed up on him, or something like that um, yeah I really like this, the this.
Speaker 1:I mean this is you know, we talk about how what we put into the darkness of our lives grows and can destroy us. So I really liked this reading. I especially liked this last line the secrets. When this happens, what will? When we disclose ourselves to someone else where we're rewarded with acceptance, and when this happens, we realize that honest sharing is not life-threatening, the secrets have lost their power over us. I think it's a fascinating statement. It's suggesting that the power that secrets wield over us is attached to our fear, not to the secret itself, but to the fear that we have about about it being life-threatening to share openly with other people.
Speaker 2:Well, that's interesting. There's a reason that the secrets are secret right Somewhere along the line, the idea of the secret accumulated shame or guilt.
Speaker 1:Right.
Speaker 2:And it became something that you felt had to be hidden from the world, right? And so, yeah, there's that fear of what happens when it's exposed. What happens? Will I be rejected? Will everybody look at me differently? There's all this attachment that it goes back to, that guilt and shame, right, that they're associated with the secret right, it's not the secret itself.
Speaker 1:Oftentimes the secret itself seems scary, but it's actually the sharing right.
Speaker 2:Well, it reminds me of childhood it reminds me of childhood trauma that a lot of times we've heard that it's not actually the childhood trauma that traumatizes children.
Speaker 2:It's the way that it's responded to or not responded to yeah that, if a child has trauma but then has understanding adults who are able to talk them through it and help them, counsel them and help them feel what they need to feel and whatever, then that trauma doesn't stay with them. But if they have parents or family who cast it aside or who ridicule them or whatever, that's what creates the trauma that's everlasting.
Speaker 1:Yeah, well, we should qualify that. It doesn't go, it lessens it. People can still be traumatized despite parents' great intentions to try to help them process it. They have a much greater likelihood of overcoming that. Yeah, uh, I think that's very right and it's making me realize that because, like another aspect, the other aspect of that is trauma.
Speaker 1:The traumatizing event is actually not traumatizing. It's the meaning you attach to it. I often, when I'm explaining this to clients, I use the example of two people witness a car crash and a woman dies in the car crash. One person's meaning is, when they see it, it's horrific and the damage to the family and the loss of the family member, right. If that person's more likely to have a traumatic memory about that event because of how sad they are, right and how much it impacted them. Versus person number two, if they believe the person who died had a terminal illness and they were suffering, they're likely to think, oh, that was a mercy, she got taken, and so not always. What I'm saying is is that the meaning actually dictates the trauma, and what I'm realizing here is, as I'm as I'm thinking about this, that the meaning people place on the danger of secrets being known is the issue yeah and the fundamental issue there is is that vulnerability is dangerous.
Speaker 1:They interpret vulnerability is dangerous and it's not. Vulnerability is a beautiful thing, but it can be dangerous explain you when you are vulnerable.
Speaker 2:you need to choose that vulnerability carefully. You need to decide who you're going to be vulnerable with, when you're going to be vulnerable, how you're going to be vulnerable, because a lot of times when you are vulnerable with the wrong people, then you get burned, or if you try to be vulnerable with somebody at the wrong time, you can be kind of sloughed off.
Speaker 1:Yeah Right, and that could be its own little burn. You're saying, if you make yourself vulnerable amongst company that is going to take advantage of you, then you're going to be hurt yeah, it's a wrong time, wrong place, wrong person. I don't think that's wrong. And yet there's also this other part of my brain that says but they can only hurt you if they let, if you let them that's true right.
Speaker 1:So like, yeah, like they're, they're all you're. They can only hurt you if you let them. That's true, right, so like, yeah, like they're only able to damage you in that vulnerability, because you give them that power, and so I'm not sure that those things can't coincide, that you can be vulnerable to people who might manipulate it and simply just not let it affect you, just move past it, because it's their issue if they're going to take advantage of it.
Speaker 2:That's very true.
Speaker 1:But at the same time there are definitely people I'm more guarded around, because it's just easier, because I know who they are right yeah. And there's no reason to subject myself. So it's almost like it's this weird dual-edged sword where it's like, on the one hand, okay, they can't hurt me if I choose not to let them hurt me, that's very true, right? And yet I I do. I am guarded around people that I know. It's interesting.
Speaker 2:Well, I think that there's a formula here. It specifically says that they, they share. We share with God, with ourselves and with another human being. We're not told to just share with just anybody. We're not told to just share with just anybody. We're not told to be vulnerable with just anybody, we're told. Try being vulnerable with your higher power first. How?
Speaker 2:does that feel and in doing that, I think you, you do become vulnerable with yourself and maybe there's a little bit more admitting, going on with yourself, and, and that has to happen before you even approach another person, absolutely but that when you do approach another person, it specifically suggests maybe your sponsor or a close friend, someone who doesn't usually reject us yeah so if I have somebody in my life who often rejects me, that's not the person I want to be vulnerable with.
Speaker 2:But if I have somebody that I have shared other things with and they haven't been spurred by it to anger or to to ridicule or whatever and I can feel somewhat safe with them, maybe that's the person I'm ready to be vulnerable with yeah that it's reminding me of the scripture that goes cast not your pearls before swine. Yeah.
Speaker 1:There's definitely an audience for things that are of value. You shouldn't share that which is of value with those who can't value it Right. They will devalue it Right Now. You can protect yourself from that when they do that, because it's hard to know how someone will react. You have to give them that chance to hurt. You have to give people the chance to hurt you to truly be vulnerable. You have to risk that.
Speaker 2:Right, but when I was trying to figure out this detail of when to do that, how to do that, whatever, I had a really wise counselor. Tell me don't give them your deepest, darkest secrets. Start with something basic and see how they do with it. Yeah right, give, give. Test them out a little bit before you go into your deep, dark secrets. Because, it's true, we have to expose these secrets to the light.
Speaker 2:They have to be exposed in order to see them for how they really are right because we we do have a tendency to envision them as these deep, dark monsters that are hiding in the corner, or, in my case, in my shed, in my backyard, right that we have these things hiding away and we think that if any light hits them, it's going to be the dirtiest, darkest, just disgusting, appalling, whatever, and we need that light to show it it's.
Speaker 1:it's not even that we're exposing it to other people you're exposing to yourself you're exposing it to yourself because you think you're making a bigger, a bigger deal by giving it its power and, in reality, majority of the time when you bring that out into the light, you realize this is oh wait, this is not as big of a deal as I thought it was going to be no, and how many other people have the same monster in their life?
Speaker 2:or the same secret and you learn that, just like when we go to group and we're afraid because we haven't shared for you know codependence, we often show up at Al-Anon. We've been keeping these secrets about what's happening in our home life for so long.
Speaker 1:So, long.
Speaker 2:And then we show up and there's, you know, a dozen other people in the meeting who are having the same thing and we're realizing, oh, this isn't unique, this isn't awful, this isn't like I'm just like everybody else. I'm just like everybody else, and so I think a lot of times, when we expose that secret, that's what we're discovering.
Speaker 1:You know this is something that always happens with suicide. It's very sad that most people suffer with suicidal thoughts alone, thinking that they're dangerous. And everybody has them, and you know it. It's this very bizarre thing where some people are so afraid of how other people react, and if we were honest with each other about how often we had those thoughts, everyone would be like, yeah, this is a normal experience for a human being.
Speaker 2:Oh my gosh, think of the emotional support people would be able to get if people weren't afraid to speak out and say they had something going on.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I like what you called out here at the beginning. Just one other thing that stood out to me was it proceeds in a formula starts with you and God and then to another trusted person, and what I like about that is, as we expose ourselves to God, we're actually exposing ourselves to ourselves and you're getting a greater clarity on your own individual life and being, and that aids you in being able to be honest with other people. As you become increasingly honest with yourself, you can actually be more honest with others.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and I think sometimes there is that barrier to being honest with ourselves in that we don't necessarily know when we're telling you don't know what you don't know. That's right, right. And so the idea is, how do I know I'm lying to myself If this is the story I've always told. And I think that is part of the value of starting with God, starting with your higher power, because as you start to kind of work things out with your higher power and maybe with a sponsor or whatever, a lot of times that's where you start to learn the lies you've been telling yourself.
Speaker 2:Maybe that's where you learn how you've connected things to self-worth or you learn different ideologies or beliefs that you've picked up from childhood that are wrong. But as you start working through them with a higher power or another person, that's when you start to admit them to yourself. I think that it's hard to sit down and just kind of you have no problem talking to yourself and working through this, so this is not a foreign thing for you, no, but I think a lot of us have trouble being able to sit down and say, okay, why does this bother me so much? And actually coming up with the answers, the honest answers, and kind of recognizing it is very difficult to have an internal dialogue that is honest.
Speaker 1:I struggle with being honest with myself as well. Okay, it is not easy to do no, it's not it's part of the human condition. I actually think it's a. It's a mechanism our brains do to preserve our self-esteem it's a survival technique yeah is if we, if we were aware of all the things that we did wrong innately, we would hate ourselves, because we do a lot wrong, I do a lot wrong and and we and it doesn't come easy to accept yourself.
Speaker 1:You're hyper focused on because you want to be included in a group and you want to be a part of other people and you want to be, you know, loved, and so you, we're very critical of ourselves and it's very sad.
Speaker 2:So well, and and that's one of the beauties of group is it talks about. Here. We're rewarded with their acceptance and I think that one of the beautiful things about recovery groups is how accepting they are, that you can go in with almost any information and they just nod and somebody in the group's like I've been there I understand someone has done something worse we all know it, we've all heard it yeah, and and because of that, our hearts just go out to people and when people are open and honest in groups, I think that there's there's definitely acceptance that comes along with that, and understanding and love and compassion and all these things that maybe we didn't get when those secrets became hidden behind fear.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Great reading, anything else.
Speaker 2:No.
Speaker 1:Okay, well, just for today, choose to disarm your secrets in your life by sharing them with one human being. Thanks for joining us.
Speaker 2:We'll talk with you tomorrow.
