He Called Me a Liar

He called me a liar.

It seemed like a little thing at the time. It hurt, but I was pretty sure it said more about him than about me. Now, a year later, he’s irrelevant to my story, but a lot has changed for me. Almost everything.

His name was Steve. I’m sure it still is, but I haven’t seen or spoken to him since that day. He’s just a guy from my past. But it took some deep work, and help from friends, and big changes, for me to become who I am now.

I’d been in an ACA (Adult Children of Alcoholics) step group with Steve and another guy for eight months, reaching Step 10 (“Continued to take personal inventory and, when we were wrong, promptly admitted it”). We met every week for 2 1/2 hours. We’d had a discussion in email leading up to this particular meeting. Steve and I were probably arguing, but we were both pretending to explain our positions dispassionately, as if this was just a harmless exchange of ideas. He’d written, “The 12th Step says we practice these principles in all our affairs, and there’s a principle associated with each Step, and Step 1’s principle is Honesty.” He went on to explain that this can never be conditional.

I wrote that I do make adjustments, that I consider the impacts of my actions, that before saying something I ask questions such as “Is it necessary, is it true, is it kind?” or “Is it harmful, does it improve upon silence?” Steve was quite upset that I would make such distinctions, saying that it’s not up to me, that only God can offer the proper guidance, and that requires always saying what is true, not deciding that I might have some special insight or right to make a subtle decision. As a result, I ended the email conversation with “For me, that doesn’t mean that truth and principle are always automatically the best path.”

Our meeting opened with Steve saying that we needed to talk about the purpose of our group because of my comments about “choosing” when to practice truth. (For the record, I don’t practice lying, but sometimes I will not share something that might hurt someone close to me. Steve called those “white lies” and said they’re just as bad as outright lying, that God’s will means we always stick to the 12 Step principles, that we can’t decide to do anything except what God wants us to do.)

So we started talking, and when I explained again that I don’t turn my will and my life over to the care of a higher power, that I choose in the moment what is the right thing to do, and that I often make mistakes driven by ego or fear or reactivity but am always trying to be aware of these slips and make better choices, Steve called me a liar. He said he’d wasted eight months of his life with me and that there was no point in being in a step group with someone who wasn’t trying to turn his life over to God.

I pulled up my notes from all our meetings. ACA has twelve lists to create during the steps, things like times I was shamed, family secrets, events when the ACA Laundry List behaviors dictated my actions, harms done to me, harms I did to others, ways that I transformed the harms done to me into harms I did to my own kids. Most other 12 Step programs have three lists: a first step list of ways in which we had become powerless, a fourth step inventory of our actions, and a list of people we had harmed. ACA has 12, and it meant I had shared more details about my life as a child, a spouse, and a parent than I had in any of my previous step work. I had exposed quite a few secrets running the full range from what my dad had done to me, to how I had unknowingly hurt my own children. I had all these lists, and I pulled them up, showing how I had never lied. I showed them that I had said and written all along that I wasn’t turning my will and my life over to God, that I asked myself for right action and guidance; even when I had given them examples of putting my hands out wide and asking for strength, I had told them that I wasn’t asking God, that I didn’t know or care who I was asking, that the action of quelling my own ego and looking for guidance was enough for me. I even wrote a few times that I looked for Right Action, using that phrase, and that I looked within rather than outside of me. I showed them this evidence of our work together.

Steve said that didn’t mean I wasn’t a liar because I had led him and the other guy to believe that I was looking for God all along, and since I now clearly wasn’t, he couldn’t talk to me any longer. He asked the third man to follow him in leaving (because Steve loves sponsees and he loves leading them to his way of thinking). I asked if he thought he was doing “God’s will” by calling me a liar, and he said he always does God’s will.

Our meeting ended. I haven’t seen him since. I asked the third man once, the only time I’ve seen him since then, if Steve is now his sponsor. He said of course not, no one is his sponsor. I asked if Steve thinks he is his sponsor, and he admitted that yes, Steve thinks he is.

It bothered me a little, more because I felt sorry for the other guy than because I believed anything Steve said, but mostly I felt relieved and moved on.

I called an old friend who had been in AA for thirty years, who I had recently introduced to AlAnon, and he told me that Steve was right, that I couldn’t be in a 12 Step program unless I was actively trying to find God. He even said that if I don’t find God, I’ll drink and die. (I’d been sober for a decade at that point.) I was at that time going to nine step group meetings a week: four in ACA, three in AlAnon, one in CoDA (Codependents Anonymous), and one in AA. Something hit me: Had I been pretending all along?

I’d done the steps, AA had saved my life, AlAnon had dramatically changed my life (largely by showing me that I was too reactive, that I couldn’t change other people, that I could be responsible for my own choices, that what other people said to me always told me more about them than about me), and that ACA had introduced me to buried memories of shame and belittlement and fear of authority that let me start seeing my actions as programmed avoidance. But I had always danced around the Higher Power concept. I never asked God to “remove all my defects of character”. In all 12 Step programs, the sixth step is becoming “entirely ready” for God to remove our defects and the seventh step is “humbly asked Him” to remove these defects of character. It is, to me, incredibly belittling. I can’t fix myself? I’m so inadequate that only something outside of myself can help me? Instead, throughout my work, I had repeatedly identified and expanded on those defects (though increasingly over time I referred to them as behaviors or reactions, rather than "defects of character”. I tried to become aware of them, and then slowly reduced their impact on my life. Was I in fact a liar, perhaps not quite in the way that Steve meant, but still, not someone who had any right to be in 12 Step programs? I sat with that thought for two days, and I went inside to ask my body. The certainty I felt was deep and solid, and almost blissful. Yes, I had been pretending, trying to fit in.

I had been very open about many things: I always told AA groups that I was also a pot addict and that I was in AlAnon, I always told AlAnon and ACA groups that I was also in AA. If they weren’t comfortable with those statements, they could ask me to leave, or I might leave on my own, but I felt it important to every newcomer, or everyone like me, to understand that one can be in both AlAnon and AA, and one can be an addict as well as an alcoholic. I have had far more people thank me for speaking up and making it a more welcoming place than people attack me or ask me to leave. I’ve even had some meetings where I’ve said that I won’t say the 7th Step Prayer, “My Creator, I am now willing that you should have all of me, good and bad. I pray that you now remove from me every single defect of character which stands in the way of my usefulness to you and my fellows. Grant me strength, as I go out from here, to do your bidding.” But I’d probably never been entirely clear about my non-existent relationship with a higher power. I’d heard people say, “Self cannot rid self of self with self,” but I’d never expressed my disagreement with that, or my desire to learn to trust and respect my self. I had found many things to like and even love about my 12 Step work, but I’d done it all while pretending to ignore the God part.

I then called two other old friends, both of whom had been sober more than thirty years, and who I knew from CoDA. They told me that it’s different depending on geography. They’d gotten sober in New York City without any God pressure and told me that the phrase “Take what works and leave the rest behind” was common there and had probably saved their lives. I decided that I should stop six of my nine meetings because of the self-righteous certainty from old-timers, and that it was time to start making choices for myself.

During the next three weeks, I kept two of my AlAnon meetings. One day a reading for newcomers included “find and read everything you can about alcoholism”, and I said we’d all die before we could meet that goal, that there many wonderful lessons in AlAnon that didn’t require years of study, and that there were other sources for guidance as well. There had also been a line, “Turn yourself over to your Higher Power right away”, and I said that worked for a lot of people, but don’t let it turn you away from the serenity and self-worth to be found in AlAnon if you weren’t comfortable doing that. An old-timer grabbed me after the meeting and said it was entirely inappropriate for me to speak out against the AlAnon program, that she had discussed my behavior with her sponsor and others in the program agreed with her. I had been chairing this particular meeting for months and I pointed out that newcomers came up to me after almost every meeting to express their gratitude and ask questions, and often called me outside of the meeting. She told me that was even worse, if I was spending time telling them things that aren’t in the official program and literature.

I sat on that for another couple of days and decided to drop the rest of my AlAnon meetings. I wasn’t welcome. I regretted not being available to the newcomers, but people were talking about me outside of meetings? Maybe I was doing harm rather than good. (I still don’t believe this but am not willing to engage in that ongoing conflict.)

Two weeks later, I was feeling unsettled. A decade in 12 Step meetings and suddenly I’d gone from nine meetings a week to one. (I kept the CoDA meeting because it was with close friends and we stayed away from the Steps and the Higher Power, read other types of codependency literature, and dedicated 15 minutes to Eckhart Tolle and meditation.) I lucked out and someone suggested a men’s group meeting where people were sober but not in formal recovery. Men’s groups had never been my thing, but I tried it out. It turned out the men weren’t necessarily sober in life, but they agree to be completely sober for the meeting. I went to my first meeting, outside in a calm forested waterside setting.

As part of my introduction, I told them how I’d gone from nine meetings to four to one, and somehow that led to a discussion about why, and I talked about the old-timer God bullies and how I just didn’t feel comfortable with that bullying. I was shocked when they asked if I wanted to “work a process” to address this. It was my first meeting and I had no idea what they meant. They said I didn’t have to understand it, or do it; that everything is always optional, but it might help me.

It did. A couple of men stood in for the two religious bullies, Steve from ACA and a guy named Bill from AlAnon, and I was encouraged to talk TO them. (Not with them; they would’t say anything back, they would just stand there!) I told them what I wanted them to hear, and they stood there and listened. The group then asked me questions and got me to see that it was all my dad stuff: both the bullies looked like my dad had looked, they belittled me as he had, they were absolutely certain about their beliefs as he had been, and they felt called to mold me as he had tried to do. I had given my power, and my resentments, to them. Then one of the process facilitators asked, “Do other people in these step groups like these men?” That stopped me cold. I had always known they were admired and respected. They had hundreds of sponsees and active followers on social media. But my relationship with them had been personal and I ignored what others saw. The “process” got me to see that these men were wrong FOR ME, and perhaps dangerous for some people who don’t need to be patronized and bullied, but that didn’t mean they were bad people. In fact, more people in program liked them than disliked them. I wasn’t smarter than everyone else. I was allowed to make decisions for myself, without having to make anyone else wrong.

I felt free. Free from the years of trying to fit in where I didn’t belong, and free from hating and blaming these religious bullies. I didn’t quite feel free from my dad’s influence, and still don’t, but I now know that when I react to authority or feel “less-than”, it’s usually my dad’s voice reminding me that I have no right to my feelings or opinions, that he knows best, that I’ll never live up to his expectations.

This all started with Steve calling me a liar. I knew I hadn’t lied, that I’d never pretended to be following him or seeking out God, so I didn’t think his insult mattered. But it has led me to something new: a sense of freedom and self-empowerment, my eyes open, and a firm conviction that I don’t need to pretend that I’m inadequate, that I can’t do anything for myself by myself.

John O’Donahue wrote, “There is a place in you where you have never been wounded, where there’s still a sureness in you, where there’s a seamlessness in you, and where there is a confidence and tranquility in you.” I find joy in this quote. I’m not useless. I’m not defective. There is a beauty inside me. It’s been covered up for years, by others and also by me. It’s been hidden by trauma and false shame. It’s been belittled through years of abuse, and even my step work constantly reminding me that I need a higher power to fix me. But it’s still there. It’s an amazing thing to know about myself, and it all started with that one small moment: being called a liar when I knew it wasn’t true.