Rigorous Honesty: From False Pride to Authentic Self-Respect

Thursday, March 18th, 2010 | Best of MeadowLark | No Comments

Note: This article was originally published in the Spring 2004 edition of MeadowLark, the magazine for alumni of The Meadows.

Rigorous Honesty: From False Pride to Authentic Self-Respect
By Kingsley Gallup

While in our disease, we may have prided ourselves on many things — perhaps even our “honesty.” In recovery, however, we come to see the truth about ourselves — namely, that when we pride ourselves on something, it is likely something for which we wish we could take credit, something we wish we could claim as our own … but something that is not truly us. We discover in our lives the toxic presence of false pride. In our adapted ego state (the modified ego state in which our addictions flourish), we prided ourselves on being everything to everyone … all the time. This was our badge of honor. We were chameleons, forever flexible. At all times adaptable. And we believed it is precisely this malleability that makes us good people — people who deserve to be proud.

In recovery, we discover just the opposite to be true. While in our addictions, we had been indubitably dishonest. Our malleability had been intrinsically deceitful. (Would it seem logical to pride ourselves on that?)

We now find that our pride had been nothing but a mask… a false front. It was simply another brand of denial. It was a facade of self respect. Pride was our pretense. It hid our shame.

Now, this is not to say we were in no ways honest while in our disease. But let’s face it: When it came to the critical points, the truly consequential details of our lives — like who we were and what we wanted and needed — the inherent dishonesty of our disease reared its head. And we paid the dearest price. Simply stated:

• Every time we said “yes” when we meant “no” … we were being dishonest
• Every time we failed to assert a boundary … we were being dishonest
• Every time we opted to continue in an unhealthy relationship, a relationship with no prospect of a healthy future … we were being dishonest
• Every time we stood by as unkindnesses were being perpetrated, saying nothing in disagreement so as not to rock the boat … we were being dishonest
• Every time we allowed another person to direct our actions … we were being dishonest
• Every time we permitted resentments to fester in our hearts, rather than risk speaking up and stating our truth … we were being dishonest
• Every time we said we were okay — to ourselves or to others — when in reality we were anything but … we were being dishonest.

The deceitfulness of our codependence — and our resulting addictions — may indeed bring us embarrassment and shame. Even so, we must not allow ourselves to remain stuck in this place of indignity and dishonor. (We have been there far too long!) In order to heal, let us instead find in this shame a motivation to change.

As we learn in recovery, much of the shame we have been carrying around is not our own shame. It belongs to others. At the same time, however, we learn that some shame is healthy shame. It is our conscience speaking, motivating us to grow and to change. Responding to this personal shame, while at the same time releasing the carried shame that has been nothing but an albatross around our necks, is the hallmark of the functional adult. It is about taking responsibility for our choices. It is about owning our dishonesty. It is about getting honest with ourselves and others — and choosing to do things differently as we move forward.

Rigorous honesty is nothing short of hard work. It takes courage, after all, to speak our truth. It takes strength to be vulnerable, readily admit wrongs, stay current with the people in our lives and acknowledge the truth of who we are. Disciplining ourselves to share our realities and to attend to what we want and need — when we want and need it — is the liberating work of our recovery.

Interestingly, maintaining our dishonesty had been hard work as well. After all, keeping up appearances was exhausting! Keeping all those balls in the air all the time was arduous and draining. The feeling of wanting desperately to flee (and from a situation, no less, that we perpetuated through our deceitfulness), and yet remaining amid all the craziness, certainly felt like hard work. But doesn’t hard work usually pay? Were there any payoffs from our dishonesty? Or were there simply trade-offs?

Our disease has robbed us of our integrity for long enough. No longer must we live in that proverbial “pressure-cooker” of codependency — namely, that adapted condition in which the pressure of external demands and the pain of our own dishonesty inhibit our ability to truly thrive. In recovery, we learn to consistently release “steam” from that pressure-cooker by speaking our truth. No longer must we operate in crisis mode. No longer must we seek simply to survive in an environment from which we want to run. We come to embrace life, rather than flee from it! Getting honest involves acceptance and vindication. We acknowledge that our addictions served a purpose in our lives. They helped us to survive in less-than-nurturing environments. Next, we accept where our addictions took us by confronting the dishonest patterns of our disease. The addicted life, after all, is inherently dishonest. (This by no means implies that addiction is a moral issue, but maintaining the addicted life demands a degree of deception.)

One of the greatest — if not the greatest — fruits of recovery is intimacy, the path to which is self-knowledge. To achieve true intimacy in our lives, we must challenge each and every message that has led us astray, that has taken us away from ourselves. In doing so, we come to know ourselves … perhaps for the very first time.

We need no longer cling to false pride. Rather, we now love ourselves justifiably as we nobly strive for rigorous honesty. We learn to love ourselves, if only for the effort we make, as true valor is found in progress, not perfection. We love ourselves for being honest about our fallibility and our weaknesses. We love ourselves as we walk down the perfectly imperfect path of recovery … two steps forward, one back … two steps forward, one back….

Honesty is nothing short of an act of love — for ourselves, for others and for our higher power. It is in this place of honesty that we truly connect. It is here that we genuinely feel a part of the human family. It is here that we not only survive, but thrive. Simply stated, the language of recovery is truth. May we speak it now with honor, dignity and love.

Whores & Madonnas

Thursday, March 4th, 2010 | Best of MeadowLark | No Comments

Note: This article was first published in the Winter 2003/04 issue of MeadowLark, the magazine for alumni of The Meadows.

Whores & Madonnas
By Maureen Canning-Fulton, MA

A friend of mine, who knows about the therapy I do with female patients in the area of sexual dysfunction, had sent me a movie review. He wanted to know how I would react to it. The review was of The Magdalene Sisters, a film by Scottish director Peter Mullin that had debuted in London in February 2003 and opened in New York in August. The review by Mary Gordon, a distinguished essayist and novelist, ran under the headline, “How Ireland Hid Its Own Dirty Laundry.”

The film follows three young Irish girls who, in 1964, are sent to one of the Magdalene Asylums, institutions founded in the 19th century, primarily in Ireland, and run by nuns. They housed girls who got pregnant outside of marriage or who were considered too sexual, too flirtatious or even too active. With the legal consent of their fathers, they were incarcerated in these asylums, which doubled as laundries.

The kind of outrageous injustice that sent the women there is shown in the opening scene at a raucous Irish wedding. A young woman named Margaret is lured away from the party by a cousin who rapes her upstairs. He returns to the festivities and continues to drink with the other men.

When Margaret comes down, she is flushed and disheveled and so clearly upset that a girlfriend shows concern. We see their lips moving as Margaret tells her what happened. The friend accosts the young man, shouting at him, and then goes to an older man for help.

Margaret just sits there, her eyes darting as the gossip makes its way around the room. It becomes increasingly obvious that Margaret, rather than the young man, is being singled out as the problem. She’s the one who will be punished, not the rapist. The next day, Margaret is packed up and shipped off to one of the Magdalene laundries.

Always exploited and, in many cases, sexually abused, Margaret and the other victims work, unpaid, seven days a week, 364 days a year, with only Christmas off. Most of the laundries had closed by the 1970s, but the very last did not close until 1996; 30,000 women had passed through their doors.

In her review of The Magdalene Sisters, Gordon writes, “Didn’t any of the women who escaped or left legitimately (any adult male relative could rescue them) tell anyone — a family member, a friend, a sympathetic confessor — what they had endured? The answer seems to be no, and the explanation lies in the particular flavor of Irish shamed silence. The moral horror of the Magdalene laundries is that the abuses perpetrated were not the outgrowth of simple sadism or even of unmindfulness, but of the belief that they were intended for the victims’ own good.”

The grotesque and terrible injustices suffered by these women, while all different, reveal that they were victims not so much of deep, unflinching religious beliefs, but of a deep-seated contempt for — and fear of — female sexuality.

When I read this article, I was personally touched. It reminded me of my own Irish Catholic heritage, and how my mother was so ashamed of her sexuality. On another level, I was reminded of the widespread malaise in our country that makes women either whores or Madonnas; it is one of the poisonous results of America’s shaming of female sexuality.

I remember when we were growing up in the ´70s, all of the girls were getting bikinis, wearing halter tops and baring their midriffs. I really wanted to be part of that scene and to be part of my peer culture. My mother absolutely refused. I had to beg her to get a two-piece swimming suit, because, for my mother, bad girls do those kinds of things — good girls don’t.

Speaking to my mother’s history and culture, the review of The Magdalene Sisters addresses the Irish belief that women’s sexuality is shameful, and the fact that men control the issues of women’s sexuality. They control it to the exclusion of a woman’s own humanity.

In America today, women’s sexuality is afflicted by what I call the “Madonna-Whore Split.” There are good girls and bad girls; and sinful girls should be shunned. The Madonnas are the childbearing wives and daughters. We put them on a pedestal, and we can’t think of them as being sexual and “sexy,” because we need them be pure and virginal like the Madonna herself. Then we have the whores: the girls “we can play with.” These girls are promiscuous and sexual, and we think of them as wrong and bad. And by calling them wrong and bad, we make them scapegoats and transfer our sexual shame to them. We think they are kinky curiosities, seducers and nymphos. These labels dehumanize them. Our contact with them is physical only or based in pornographic imagining — there is no intimacy. We think they are beneath us, while it is we who have paid the price of grandiosity by denying their humanity and our own lust. We cannot have them in our everyday lives. In our everyday lives, we want Madonna, and our women have learned to be Madonnas — all at a terrible cost.

In other words, we have J-Lo and Britney Spears acting that out for us, becoming sexual caricatures. In our culture, they become icons, but we do not let the sexuality that they imply, and which we affirm with their celebrity, take place in our own bedrooms. That would be shameful.

In our culture, the burden of sexual shame is most brutal to the women whose Madonna-hood has been forced upon them by the male dominance of sexual mores, as so vividly portrayed in The Magdalene Sisters.

I see this all the time in my practice; women come in who have the “Madonna-Whore Syndrome.” I ask them if they have ever had an orgasm, and they tell me they never have. I ask why. They tell me they don’t enjoy sex. I ask if they have ever masturbated, and they tell me no. They don’t know how to masturbate, and the idea sounds dirty and shameful. They tell me they are afraid to try.

Some women who come in are the other extreme: women who have acted out and are the bad girls. They feel shamed and dirty. Often they are depressed because of this shame, because of their inability to embrace the human reality of their sexuality and to know how they have been abused.

We have been conditioned to deny the human totality of our sexuality. This is no less a delusion than denying our reason, compassion, hunger or need for friendship and intimacy. So sex becomes this horrible split between the pure and the sinful. Why is it that many women cannot have fun with their sexuality? Why is it they cannot freely orgasm? Why is it they cannot feel good about their bodies? It is because of the shame. Because good girls don’t do that.

We Americans are not really looking at this cultural shame; we are not really addressing what goes on in women’s bodies, minds and souls, and what they want sexually. Because most women don’t know. They have been shamed out of their sexual gift, and this shaming away of female sexuality is epidemic.

Certainly the women I treat are not getting a sexual education rooted in the fullness of their perfect-imperfection — that acceptance of the truth about their humanity that enables self-esteeming sexual vitality. I don’t think we are aware of how we have scapegoated women and how we have not allowed them to be the full sexual human beings they were created. The Magdalene Sisters will powerfully compel us to such necessary reflections.