I just came back from an open AA meeting. I’m not an alcoholic, but I do sometimes go to open AA meetings when there isn’t an available SA meeting. These meetings are usually difficult for me in a way that SA meetings are not, because I don’t share. Instead, I have to sit quietly through the entire hour of the meeting. And when I’m quiet like that, my emotions start to come to the surface.

Today, on the way back from the meeting, I realized I was angry. I was able to trace it to fear, and when I got home I started crying. It was old pain—the frustration that I’ve tried so hard to manage my life, all to no avail. I’ve experienced this pain before, but it seems that my road to emotional sobriety is like the proverbial onion, where I have to experience successively deeper layers of something before being free of its influence.

It has never been difficult for me to be “cash register” honest. This was a concept introduced to me by my second sponsor, and it refers to being scrupulously honest to the point where, if a cashier gives me too much change, I give back the extra amount. Neither did I ever lie about my sexual acting out.

But during my Step Four resentment inventory, I learned that I had been a very dishonest person when it came to my relationship with my (now) ex-wife. I was telling her the truth as I believed it, but I was being dishonest to myself about what I was thinking and feeling. During the two years of my marriage, I tried to brainwash myself into being the person I thought my wife wanted me to be. If an emotion was unacceptable, I stuffed it. If I thought or believed something that was contrary to what my wife thought, I would somehow convince myself to believe otherwise. The net effect of all this was that I got angry, and it became more and more difficult to control that anger. At times it broke out, with the final outburst being the event that separated us and led to our divorce. I was arrested for domestic violence assault.

So for me, rigorous honesty means being truthful about what I’m thinking and feeling. I was very good at suppressing and controlling my emotions, except those times during my marriage. My Step Four resentment inventory was sheer hell. By dipping into my psyche and listing the resentments, I opened the floodgate of all those suppressed emotions.

At times I was subjected to multiple, strong, and conflicting emotions all at once. I used to call them “typhoons,” and since they were typically centered on a person, I would give them names, such as typhoon Mary or typhoon Kathy. It was all I could do to endure them. Partly because of this, I took a year to do my resentment inventory. But at the end, it was very complete. And I had made it past a major mountain in my recovery journey. Actually, of all the things I’ve experienced in recovery, that was the most difficult. I don’t say it anymore, but I used to share in meetings that I wouldn’t have attempted that inventory if I had known how hard it was going to be. Instead I’d have just killed myself or something.

One of the benefits of my acting out was that it kept me from having to feel. As a sexaholic, I tend to sexualize my emotions. But suppressed feelings clutter up my connection to God. I don’t know why that’s the case, but the God of my understanding insists that I be emotionally healthy in order to receive my daily reprieve. And this requires me to be honest about what I’m thinking and feeling.

I hate having to feel feelings. I’m going through a difficult time right now in regards to employment. It’s the culmination of about ten years of recovery work, and it’s bringing up unpleasant stuff. I’m tired of having to try so hard just to do what billions of normal people do every day: work an eight-hour day. In fact, I have proven to myself that I am incapable of doing that. So now I am experiencing the pain of trying so hard for so long, the self-condemnation of being defective, and the fear related to finances. I just tell myself that God is much better at running my life than I am, and I repeat the prayer, “Thy will, not mine, be done.” I cling to the hope that someday I will be at that place of “happy, joyous, and free” that’s promised in Alcoholics Anonymous. Certainly I am much better at handling life events than I was five years ago when I got sober.

I’ve heard AA speakers dismiss their first five years of sobriety, listing subsequent years as being more significant in terms of life changes. Maybe I’m one of those people. My sponsor likes to remind me that it keeps getting better. So I just keep plugging along. I guess that’s why they call it “trudging.”