“Those who do not recover are people who cannot or will not completely give themselves to this simple program, usually men and women who are constitutionally incapable of being honest with themselves. There are such unfortunates.” (Chapter 5, Big Book)
This rightly gives the impression that gross self-deception, deception of others, secretiveness (or at least the failure to disclose material facts to at least one other person), dirty dealing, and other manifest forms of dishonesty will spell failure.
But behind every failure one will not necessarily find an undisclosed secret or an instance of duplicity.
Behind every failure, however, there appears to be a self-reliance: one has trusted one’s own perception, followed one’s own counsel, yielded to one’s own impulses, instead of trusting the experience, reason, and authority of those who have gone before, even if one’s reason cannot grasp the sense of such a path.
The essential honesty is this pair of realisations:
- My way hasn’t worked
- The programme will.