Lack of self-honesty is my biggest barrier to recovery.
Here is my journey of getting to be honest with myself.

When I was at uni, I discovered a thing called 'secondary gain'. I saw myself instantly.
I used my past for justifications to get drunk (poor me, pour me a drink), to gain sympathy, avoid responsibility for my recovery, justify blaming others for my apathy or inability to change, etc.
Self-honesty revealed these things about myself. Once my truth was out I knew too much truth to deny it any longer.
A huge shift in psychological recovery started from this.

The most important discover was, I was afraid to change. Afraid of being responsible for my self-honesty. Afraid to lose my secondary gains.
In other words, it was my fears that was more problematic than anything else to my recovery.
I had to find what was the real cause for all my fears. After a long search, self-honesty won out again. My fears came from within me.
I was afraid of myself. I was actually scaring myself. How absurd!

It was my ego that was afraid, but from what?
I discovered that my ego was afraid of its truth, that it is just a fabricated story of self, so my mind can make sense of itself.
That is, my ego is not valid, that is why it is always seeking validation (listen to me, look what I know, I need attention, love, etc).
My ego always tries to avoid this truth. It threatens my self-esteem. That is why self-honesty can be so difficult to achieve.
Ego deflation (lowered self-esteem / ego-energy) is a humbling experience my ego desperately tries to avoid.
But if I want to be honest, so the truth will set me free, I have to be okay with humbling myself through self-honesty.

Back to art therapy.
To get a better grasp of all this, I needed to imagine what my ego might look like. I decided upon imagining a ghost in the machine scenario.


Symbolizing ego-vanity.

A different version of loving of self was required of me to regain self-esteem. I suffered deep depression (low self-esteem) when I started recovery.
Therapy and self-help groups gave me tasks to regain enough self-esteem to start looking deeper at other truths about myself (which my ego tried to sabotage me from doing).

To be continued..