Amber Hollingsworth explains why integrity matters in recovery: addiction creates habits of lying and sneaking that fuel shame and relapse. She shares a Joe & Charlie story about returning incorrect change, then offers concrete strategies like avoiding pressure situations, building assertiveness, and clarifying your values to reduce shame-driven behavior.
Chapters
Today we're actually talking about living with integrity or other ways that I like to say it is like living in the light or living above board. Now, of course, we all like to think that we have good integrity, but if you've been struggling with an addiction, your integrity has probably been compromised. Okay, yeah, I know all of our integrity gets compromised, and we're going to talk about how to maybe minimize the chances of that happening in a second. But when you have an addiction, your integrity gets really, really, really compromised. In fact, it gets compromised in such a way you probably develop some habits along the way that are actually kind of hard to break, even if you quit using the substance. You know, habits that are necessary to keep an addiction alive, like sneaking and lying and being kind of selfish and not always doing the right thing and like not doing what you said you were gonna do, stuff like that. Now, I'm not bringing all that up to make you feel bad. In fact, what I'm trying to do is the opposite of that. All of those things are behaviors and things that you had to do in order to keep your addiction going. And you know what it leads to? It leads to a lot of shame and bad self esteem and low self worth and not liking yourself and bad relationships, which then again fuels your need to continue the addiction. And it's my goal to help you get out of that really crappy, crummy cycle. Learning to live above board is an absolute, necessary recovery skill because if you don't, you're going to find yourself secret keeping, lying, hiding, feeling bad about yourself, which will ultimately lead you back to relapse. And we all want to avoid that. But the best reason to do this is because you want to be your best self and you want to live your best life. So let's take a look at integrity. It means doing what you say you're going to do. It means living in congruence with. With your values. If you say family is your top value, then you actually build your life around family first. Not just say it or not just feel it in your heart, but actually live that way. Now, the topic of integrity actually brings to mind a story that Joe and Charlie tell. Now, if you don't know who Joe and Charlie are, they're these two old dudes who got kind of well known for teaching the 12 steps back in the day. I don't even know if they're alive, but I love Joe and Charlie. If you want to hear from them, you can actually search them up on YouTube. They talk about the history of the 12 steps and they give you like really practical, simple way of understanding the steps. Anyways, I don't even know whether it was Joe or Charlie, but one of them tell this story in one of the videos about how they were in early recovery. They go to the grocery store, the cashier accidentally gives them like $10 too much back. They noticed it, but they don't say anything. And then they walk out and as they're walking to their car in the parking lot, they he's thinking like, wow, like $10, like is that really like worth my soul? You know, is that really worth my self confidence? Is that really enough money to buy me out? Am I that cheap? And he turns around and he goes back in and he brings that money back to the cashier and he says, you know what, I'm working a program of honesty and you gave me $10 too much and I wanted to give it back to you. And then guess what, when he walked back out that door, he felt like a million bucks. He felt proud of himself, he felt good about who he is. As opposed to if you slink away with the $10, which really is a super small amount of money for your whole sense of self worth, you feel you got $10, but you feel crappy, you don't like yourself, you feel kind of guilty, and again you find yourself back in that like shame cycle. Now in some ways integrity is a super simple subject, right? It means live in congruence, do the right thing. But it's not as to pull off as it sounds. Here are some other techniques and strategies that might help you to live a life of integrity. Or you know, like live in the light or above board. First and foremost, try not to put yourself around people or situations that are likely to challenge your integrity. You know what types of situations that you can put yourself in that aren't so great. You know what types of people you have in your life that influence you in the not so great ways. If you'll stay away from those people and situations, it sure is going to make it a whole lot easier to live in in accordance with your values. Don't make it hard on yourself. Now the second thing that's really important when it comes to integrity is actually working on your assertiveness. Because one of the things that can get you in like an integrity issue is if you're a people pleasing type person and you tend to say yes when you didn't really want to say yes or you don't stick up for yourself. Because when that happens, usually what goes down is you say yes to something you don't want to do and you either drag your feet or you don't end up doing it. And you let someone else down and then they're mad at you and then you build a resentment against them because they have to have an expectation. And then you feel guilty because you didn't do it. Here we go. You see this whole shame spiral thing we got going on, you want to avoid that. So I know it's hard sometimes to say no. It's hard sometimes to let people down, but you would do better to do that up front in a kind and assertive way than to say yes and agree to things that you really can't hold up your end of the bargain on or that you're going to end up building a resentment about later. Because even if you do the thing but you didn't want to do it, it could come out like all passive aggressively. It could leak out as toxicity, which then again is going to negatively impact your relationships. Which, spoiler alert here is going to be talked about in part three of living your best life. But you can see how just those little things can get you into kind of a bind when it comes to integrity. And another thing that's going to help you live with more integrity is just to understand yourself lot better, your values a lot better, which is what we talked about in part one. It's about self awareness. And part of that means understanding what your own needs are so that you can do a better, more strategic job of getting your needs met more effectively and productively. Because when we don't get our needs met in an effective manner, they get met one way or the other and it starts seeping out. And a lot of times we get those needs met in some not so great ways, again, ultimately leading us to feel bad about ourselves. Now, if you stop and think about it, I bet you can come up with like an example, maybe even a recent example of something that challenged your integrity. Was it something that, like, you agreed to, you didn't want to, or was it something you said you do but then you couldn't? Were you challenged where, like, maybe someone gave you 10 bucks too much money at the grocery store, but you didn't take it back? What are those things that challenge you? Once you can be aware of those, it's going to be really helpful not to fall in that same hole. Now, up next is part three, and we're going to focus on relationships. Building the kind of relationships that you love and you're happy with.
