One of the goals of counseling is to help a person become authentic. One of the goals is to help others see where they are being inauthentic in their lives, in one or more domains of their life. The work of becoming authentic helps a person to get unblocked thereby allowing them to move forward with the things that they want to create. Being authentic requires a person to give up the pretense of life and to let that which has been hidden to be revealed to others and in some cases, to the world.
For a person in recovery the process will be the same. Many individuals in recovery live inside a way of being that uses pretending as one of the defense mechanisms. Putting forth the image or perspective that things and themselves are a certain way, and hiding what is true from others, is how a person in active addiction moves through life. Create pretense and repress the truth. The counselor’s role here is to help a person shave that which has been hidden and to take full ownership of it. It is only from this admission that the possibility for change and transformation can take place.
