Steps 8, 9, and 10 show us how much we have to gain by being authentic. These three Steps provide us with an opportunity to experience our potential self—our authentic-self. We see that we are much more than the self we became in order to manage our anxiety and control life. This fabricated-self limited our possibilities because it prohibited us from staying in close contact with our experience. It forced us to play roles. It created a caricature of a person. We became masters at manipulation and deception. We were inhuman and cruel.
Our false-self determined that some ways of being were OK and others were not. We disowned parts of ourselves so we could live according to its perfectionist demands and specifications. There was no room for us to be our authentic-self under the reign of this tyrant. We were exiled from our own life. Isn’t that absurd? No wonder we had so many problems. No wonder we were lost and empty. When we denied our authentic self to meet unreal expectations, we disconnected ourselves from the best in ourselves in favor of the worst in ourselves.
Steps 8, 9, and 10 reunite us with our true-self. They help us put the best in us in charge. They require that we use our self-understanding and insight into our character defects to right our wrongs. By taking responsibility for the harm we have caused and sincerely making amends, we start to experience serenity and peace of mind.
By stepping up, owning who we really are, and taking responsibility for our actions, we continue the reconstruction of a more positive self-concept. Fritz Perls (1969), the founder of Gestalt therapy, stated, “Authenticity, maturity, responsibility for one’s actions and life, response-ability, and living in the now, having the creativeness of the now available, is all one and the same thing.” Authenticity is central to our growth and development. It is essential to our recovery and to our maturity.
We must persistently try to reveal ourselves as we are in this moment, without censorship, if we are to reconstruct our lives and increase our self-esteem. We will discuss this in more detail later. For now, it’s important to note that honesty and authenticity catalyze and initiate the process of change. Remember, the paradoxical theory of change tells us that change occurs when we own who we are and what we are doing, rather than by trying to be someone we are not.
Being authentic means revealing your truth—your experience. Authenticity is an intention to reveal yourself as you are in this moment. Without authenticity, we cannot be trustworthy or have deep, meaningful, intimate relationships. The word intimacy comes from the Latin word intimus, meaning “innermost.” To be intimate we must be willing to reveal our innermost experience and truth.
Authenticity is also critical if we are going to benefit from a practice of inward searching and self-examination. If we don’t admit to our innermost self what we know to be the truth, then we are still playing games, avoiding ourselves, and being selectively honest. This will mess up our efforts at creating a better life. Selective honesty is one of the many ways that we can sabotage our recovery. (If you’d like to learn more about the effects of selective honesty on recovery, see Stupid Thing 4 in 12 Stupid Things That Mess Up Recovery.)
Finally, authenticity creates presence. It allows us to live in the moment, right here, right now. When we are present, we are fully experiencing ourselves, our thoughts, our feelings, and the other person. We are fully aware of what is happening in the moment.
Fernando had one hundred days sober, and over six months without a cigarette. He was amazed at what a difference being sober made in how he experienced himself. When he was drinking, his family often confronted him about his hot temper. It didn’t take much for him to blow a gasket, which alienated and estranged his wife and children. They walked on eggshells around him, being careful not to say or do something that would cause him to erupt. He held the entire family hostage with his anger, but he denied that he had an anger problem. After all, they were the ones who screwed up and needed to be held accountable for their actions. He blamed them for his angry outbursts.
I hadn’t seen Fernando for a couple of months. He called me and told me that he and his wife needed an appointment as soon as possible. He opened the psychotherapy session by discussing what he was learning about himself. He was starting to realize that his family was right: he was angry, at least most of the time. He was baffled by how strong and persistent his anger was, even though he was trying to manage it better. He turned to his wife and sincerely apologized for how he had treated her and the children. He told her that he must have created hell for them. He was clearly upset with himself.
When I asked Fernando to elaborate about what he was experiencing, he said he was beginning to see that he treated his family in the same way his father had treated him, his siblings, and his mother. His father wanted to have complete control over each of them and everything they did. This is not who Fernando wanted to be. “Father knows best” was the philosophy that his father had used to inflict his sadistic control on the family. Fernando was now admitting that he was doing the same thing.
He asked his wife if she would support him when he asked his children to join him in a family session so that he could make his amends. He wanted her to encourage their children to attend. She agreed.
When they got home, he asked his children to join him in the next session. His wife gladly supported him in front of the children. This was a very different dynamic, and their children weren’t quite certain what to make of it. Initially, they were cynical and distrustful. Fernando’s wife had previously aligned herself with the children in a parent-child coalition to protect the children from his alcoholism and anger. Now she was supporting him because he was taking responsibility for how he had harmed the family.
Fernando showed up the following week with his children. You can probably imagine how emotional and healing the three hours we spent were as he made amends for his alcoholism and anger. Because he was more present and willing to take responsibility for his inappropriate behavior, his children started to feel better about him, thinking he might be a safe person for them to open up to. Each of his three children shared with him openly and honestly about their feelings toward him. His authenticity invited them to be real with him, and they were. They told him about specific situations where he terrorized the entire family. They told him that they disrespected him and were going to use him as an example of how not to parent when they had kids of their own. They cried as they allowed themselves to feel the reality of what their family had been through. Fernando cried too.
He made amends and told them that he had a deep compassion for them and what they were feeling because this was how he felt as a child too. His authenticity, sincerity, and willingness to make amends for his harmful behavior started the healing for the entire family. They were being restored to wholeness. They were recovering their family life and their relationship with each other.
Authenticity is an incredible gift and reward for having the courage to face ourselves as we are, warts and all. It also helps us connect to a deep compassion for our own suffering, for the suffering we have caused others, and for those who are still suffering. Let us turn our attention to the next hidden reward of making amends, the development of genuine, heartfelt compassion.