Step Five, Part Two---Sober Speech

Sober speech is mindful speech--embodying both truth and usefulness and expressed in a way and at a time that it can be heard. This last point necessarily involves whether to speak, as well as when and how. In many instances, wise speech/sober speech requires no speech at all. When our words would be untrue or frivolous or harmful, we are better not to speak.
Laura S., 12 Steps on Buddha's Path

After doing my Fifth Step with my sponsor, I shared what I had written with S. Since nearly all of my inventory applied to the years before I met S, when I was still drinking and using, it was a useful thing to do for our relationship. It gave S a clear picture of the person I had been before recovery and it strengthened the intimate connection between us. Although there were parts of my inventory that she hadn't known before, none of those parts related to our relationship.

Several years later, S and I were invited to conduct a weekend workshop for recovering professionals and their partners. Some of them had less than six months recovery, while others had been clean and sober for 20 years or more. S and I decided to talk about how couples could use the 12 Steps as a way of helping their recovery as a couple.

When we came to the Fifth Step, I related my story about sharing my Fourth Step inventory with S. A distinct chill enveloped the room, and we could almost hear a collective gasp when we suggested to these couples that they might do something like that. Clearly that was a very frightening prospect, particularly for the people in the room who had less than a year of recovery.

We realized at that moment that it was one thing for me to share the fruits of my inventory with S because virtually none of it pertained to our years together, but it was a much different story for couples who had been together during all the years of active alcoholism and addiction. For those couples, there were bound to be things they had done that were detrimental to the relationship which they had kept secret from their partners. Confiding the results of a searching and fearless individual moral inventory could easily blow the relationship out of the water.

And yet, as indicated in my previous post, keeping secrets seriously interferes with trust and intimacy in the relationship. As long as we refrain from telling our partner all the harmful, unskilled things we did before recovery, we are left with that fear of discovery and the weight of self-hatred Kevin Griffin mentioned. We are unlikely to allow ourselves to be fully open and vulnerable in the relationship. Our partners will be unable to trust us completely.

So what to do? Laura S in the quote at the beginning of this post provides some guidelines for Fifth Step work with a partner. First, painful information should be shared in a way that it can be heard. This means taking full responsibility for our behavior without justifying it or blaming it on someone or something else. It also means telling it in a clear and succinct manner---there is no need for elaborate stories or explanations.

Second, timing is all. Until both partners have established a solid foundation of recovery, talking about behavior harmful to the partner and/or the relationship is usually going to make things worse. Good timing also applies to finding a time when there are no serious distractions and there is as much time available as necessary.

Finally, there is the issue of harm. Certainly revealing something completely unsuspected by your partner is likely to be harmful both to your partner and to the relationship. But this is a tricky one because we alcoholics and addicts have repeatedly found that others have known or suspected things we have done which we believed were entirely secret. We need to examine whether our unwillingness to be forthright because of the "harm" it might cause our partner is really just an excuse to avoid our partner's anger and unhappiness with our behavior.

Nonetheless, we must pay attention to traumatizing or re-traumatizing our partner by our revelations. Hearing about infidelity is almost always traumatic for a partner. This is true even when a partner knows the infidelity has happened. It is important to keep in mind that hearing intimate details about the where, when, and what of sexual acting out are particularly upsetting; so unless a partner is adamant that she or he needs to know such information in order to "deal with it", there is no need to go into such detail during a Fifth Step with a partner.

Based on my personal and professional experience, relationships are more frequently harmed by secrecy than by revelations. Probably the most useful thing to do in deciding whether admitting something will truly be harmful to a partner and/or the relationship is to consult with someone in the program who seems to have a healthy, satisfying relationship in recovery.

Last of all, I suggested in an earlier post that it is helpful for couples to do an inventory of their relationship as well as individual inventories. It's hard to imagine there could be anything in such an inventory that is unknown and potentially harmful to one of the partners. So sober speech in this kind of inventory means avoiding the use of words that are untrue or frivolous.