It was cathartic and changed my whole life. I came away from that experience telling people that if you want to get closer to your authentic self, write your life story. I don’t care whether you publish it or trash it. Even if you just call it journaling. If you take it on, you’re going to find out a lot of revealing things about yourself.
When growing up, if you were a people pleaser, you may never have said what you really wanted or felt and always did what everybody wanted you to do. And you probably emerged a resentful and angry person. That anger has to come out somehow, someday. You don’t have to have been an addict, of course, to be a people pleaser, or to be at the mercy of the people who socialized you. But I’m here to tell you that whether you’re an addict or not, if you don’t learn how to serve your authentic self, you’re going to feel resentful, and this will affect all of the relationships in your life.
When people don’t know themselves, they have few, if any, boundaries. They’re confused, and it’s hard for them to get any kind of clarity on anything. When you begin to set boundaries, however arbitrary they are, it gives you a foothold for making a statement about yourself. Boundary setting is a huge deal in realizing who you are. It gives you a heightened awareness of what’s possible.
If you want to discover your authentic self, it’s important for your self-growth to try a lot of different things and do so fearlessly. Also critical for self-awareness is understanding that you may have a tendency to engage in contempt before investigation. A lot of times people come into recovery with the attitude of, “Oh, I don’t like that. No, I don’t want to do that. I don’t want to talk about that.” They display contempt before investigating. For example, if you want to find out what you really like to eat, you’ve got to try a bunch of different foods. You can’t just say “I don’t like Thai food” if you’ve never really tried it. You’ve got to experiment and rid yourself of contempt and fear to ever discover who you are really capable of becoming.
Are the most authentic people, the ones most true to self, also among the happiest people? Not necessarily. But I do think the most authentic folks are the most centered, the most fearless, the most accepting. But are they happy? I think a more fitting word is “content.”
Though self-awareness isn’t necessarily synonymous with happiness, I believe that contentment is a possible outgrowth of self-awareness. Today, I know contentment. Are there still things that I’m not content with and want to change? Yes. I want to feel more peaceful and be less driven. Am I going to get around to that? Yes, but meanwhile I’m content.
If you’re going down this self-exploratory path, you must accept that it’s not going to be easy. You’ve got to be constantly vigilant to avoid slipping back into old toxic patterns of behavior. Whether you are in recovery from an addiction or not, the payoff is the promise of self-realization and contentment. The promise is the real you!
Dark Nights of the Soul
KRISTEN JOHNSTON is one of the most genuinely funny people I have ever known. She lights up every conversation with her disarming wit and candor. You may remember her as the two-time Emmy Award-winning actress in 3rd Rock from the Sun and as an actress in two of the Austin Powers comedies. She also authored the addiction-recovery memoir Guts: The Endless Follies and Tiny Triumphs of a Giant Disaster. Here is what she had to say about the authenticity that can emerge from trauma and hardship:
“I’m convinced that the only people worth knowing are those who’ve had at least one dark night of the soul . . . Recovering addicts and alcoholics sometimes refer to this as their ‘bottom,’ but it happens to almost everyone, at some point or another. It’s that life-changing moment when everything you’ve always wanted to become, everything you actually are, and everything you know you’ll never be, all slam into each other with the deadly force of three high-speed trains. It’s the night of your reckoning, the terrifying moment when your mask falls away and you’re forced to see what’s actually been festering underneath it all these years. You finally see who you really are, instead of who you’ve always pretended to be.”
PET PEEVES, FINGER POINTING, AND YOUR “SHADOW”
Self-awareness also involves learning about the “shadow” side of your nature, those unconscious aspects of self that influence behaviors and beliefs, yet remain mostly hidden. The late Dr. W. Brugh Joy, author of Avalanche: Heretical Reflections on the Dark and the Light, a book about excavating those hidden aspects, your shadow material, conducted Dark Side Conferences across the United States. One exercise in the meetings involved “the pointing finger,” an examination of what pointing your finger at someone or something reveals about your own judgment or defensiveness, your true self. (As we say in recovery, if you point a finger there are three fingers pointing back at you.)
“Pet peeves are wonderful ways to catch the shadow because the pet peeve is actually the key to something about you,” said Dr. Joy.
This is a delicious exercise: Criticize an individual, work on expressing everything—just unleash all of it—no tiptoeing around, no modulating the energy—just get in touch with these forces and get them out, let them out fully.
Then begins the process of re-weaving the forces back into your own nature. You point your finger, but then you begin to see that there is a pattern to it, that it has shown up in your life from time to time as well, this very same thing. Not the same person doing the exact same thing, but you begin to read the pattern. Is it abandonment, or is it a rejection mystery, is it martyrdom? There are various kinds of patterns that you’ll see. Then you trace it back as far as you can go in your own life, where other circumstances had exactly the same kind of patterning to it.
(For more about Lesson #1, including the results of several research studies, visit our website, www.Recover2Live.com.)
LESSON #1: PARTING SHOT
Stop what you’re doing right now (reading this book) and ask yourself the following simple questions. Some will be more relevant to you than others. All should make you think—and that’s exactly the idea:
• Do you like what you see when you look in the mirror? Do you smile at yourself?
• What are your two best qualities?
• What are two of your personality traits you don’t like?
• Would you want to be your friend?
There are no right or wrong answers, of course. Just your answers. Socrates’ advice resonates down through the centuries: Know thyself. Introspective questions like these help you do just that.
ACCEPT PERSONAL RESPONSIBILITY
The willingness to accept responsibility for one’s own life is the source from which self-respect springs.
—JOAN DIDION
People in recovery from addictions must take responsibility for their own actions and eventual wellness. Imagine how much more harmonious and healthy all human interactions would be if everyone stopped playing the blame game and the role of victim.
MEET JACK GRISHAM. As Jack’s father lay dying in a San Diego naval hospital following a heart attack, he looked up into his son’s eyes and mumbled, “I love you.” It was only the second time in twenty-three-year-old Jack’s life that he had ever heard his father say those words.
Not knowing how to respond, Jack replied with the only thing he could think of that might make his father happy: “I’ll go home and mow the lawn.”
The next day his father died, and Jack immediately bagged up all of his father’s clothing and other belongings and threw them into Dumpsters.
Not long afterward, Jack’s mother