Tell Me, What is the Truth?

Whether addict or partner, we are all in the same boat when it comes to issues of trust and discernment. We’ve all grown up accustomed to being gaslighted. Recovery means recovering the ability to trust our own experience—with a huge caveat: this is one of the greatest selling-points for sobriety. There’s not much effectiveness in trusting our own experience when we are gaslighting ourselves, which is what we’ve learned to do as addicts and/or co-dependents.

So as harsh as it may sound, we earn the gift of trusting our own judgment through abstinence and sobriety. That alone should be motivation for all of us to get and stay sober. Without clarity of thought and feeling, life is a terrifying mind-screw; a labyrinth of mirrors of who and what to trust.

This is very tricky since part of self-deception is the faulty belief that my own thoughts and feelings are clear. That is what makes isolation so dangerous, and healthy confrontation with consensual reality so important.

And yet if I end up in a cult-like environment, I can be gaslighted by the consensus reality of the culture. But we might take note that in cults, there is always a singular “master”—with servile disciples—who has the last word on what is right or wrong, true or false, healthy or unhealthy. What makes cults so alluring (after all, they’ve persisted for centuries), is the false illusion of certainty: at least my guru knows the truth and I can rely on it to avoid the terrifying prospect of self-doubt. And yet moderate self-doubt is the only empowered way to face life with the possibility of growth. We only grow when we discover that what we thought was true is not accurate or complete enough.

Think about it. If everything I think is accurate and complete, I can either love the life I’m experiencing, or not. If I don’t, I’m in trouble. Nothing will ever get better. So I may as well self-medicate while I wait for it to end. Most of us are looking to experience our own lives in a way that we love. We call that “happiness”.

If you honestly love how you’re experiencing your life (which is completely different from loving what happens to you in your life), then I would say you have reached the higher levels of living in recovery. In my opinion, not possible without sobriety supporting it, and in turn abstinence from escaping experiences supporting the sobriety. The ultimate abstinence is not about not doing this or not doing that... As we know, there are infinite ways to evade the experiences we don’t want to experience. It is abstaining from any effort to make something that is real go away.

What are you experiencing today to which you say “I wish it were not so”?

By Trailer screenshot - Gaslight trailer

Recovery means recovering the ability to trust our own experience.

We earn the gift of trusting our own judgment through abstinence and sobriety.

What makes cults so alluring is the false illusion of certainty.

We grow when we discover that what we thought was true is not accurate or complete.

The ultimate abstinence is to abstain from any effort to make something that is real go away.