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the first thing i COULD can trust was the words of other members sharing in meetings. as i progress in recovery, i am discovering that oftentimes, my intuition about who to trust is exactly 180 degrees out of whack, as terrible and hopeless as that sounds, it is a fact. after all, i should be able to trust a fellow member with over thirty years clean, and yet again and again, i find myself getting burned doing so. i should be leery of a m=member with less than thirty days clean, and yet over and over again i am surprised about how consistent and trustworthy they are with me. this topsy-turvy world does not extend as a general rule, but the incidences of these occurrence happen enough, that i am no longer using clean time as a criterion for trustworthiness. judging whether or not to trust someone based on clean time, has always been problematic for me, as i was of the opinion that if the achieved that much time, that they were inherently trustworthy, based upon the changes that have been manifest withing me as a result of working a program. the problem is that without a doubt clean time does not equal recovery, and what i am discovering is that some members with decades clean, started self-sponsoring and stopped any work on the steps a long time ago, they can say all the right words but their actions demonstrate that those words are as hollow as their supposed program of recovery. i used to be in awe of such members because i could not see past the number of years of their purported recovery. just as i was leery of trusting someone new in recovery, just because they lack any significant number of days in a row clean.
what has this created? well i could fall back on my old credo -- never trust anyone, anytime, anywhere. that manner of living will certainly keep me free of the pain of betrayal and deceit. or as i have chosen to learn to do -- evaluate a person’s trustworthiness based on their actions and words, trust them if what they say, matches what they do, and do not trust them if it does not. leave the number of clean days out of the calculation and give everyone the benefit of the doubt. it has been the case after all, that some of the greatest support i have received in my darkest hours have come from addicts whose clean time was far less than mine. based on that experience alone, i can see that learning who to trust is as valuable of a lesson as learning to trust in the first place. as such i do believe i will move into the rest of this day, looking for who i can trust and allowing myself to be just a bit more trustworthy than i was yesterday. it is after all i good day to take a lesson from the past, place those events in their proper perspective and move forward. people are who they are, imperious or whatever, it is up to me to adjust my expectations to fit reality, not for reality to somehow be morphed into fitting my expectations, so off to the streets i go, so i can have an active life, at least one more day.

∞ DT ∞