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Step Five: Admitted to God, to ourselves, and to
another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.
More realism and therefore more honesty about ourselves
are the great gains we make under the influence of Step
Five. As we took inventory, we began to suspect how much
trouble self-delusion had been causing us. This had brought
a disturbing reflection. If all our lives we had more or less
fooled ourselves, how could we now be so sure that we
weren't still self-deceived? How could we be certain that
we had made a true catalog of our defects and had really
admitted them, even to ourselves? Because we were still
bothered by fear, self-pity, and hurt feelings, it was probable
we couldn't appraise ourselves fairly at all. Too much guilt
and remorse might cause us to dramatize and exaggerate
our shortcomings. Or anger and hurt pride might be the smoke
screen under which we were hiding some of our defects while
we blamed others for them. Possibly, too, we were still
handicapped by many liabilities, great and small, we never
knew we had.
Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions, pages 58-59
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It was good to have another person's perspective because the person I had the most difficulty with being honest with was myself. I tended to look at myself with rose coloured glasses and tell myself it wasn't so bad. I remember sharing with a friend and she said, "Don't compare, what happened to you, was traumatic to you and your pain isn't to be compared with what someone else went through." I put a lot of issues aside because I didn't have the trauma she had and looked at myself as a whoose for complaining and even bringing them up. She had been sexual abused as well as physically and mentally abused as a child, as a teen and as an adult. I was only raped four times and one of those times was by my first husband so it didn't count.
Looking at the pain I cause others was difficult not wanting to recognize that the abused often becomes the abuser.