Transformation begins with confession. The need to confess has customarily been associated with wrong-doing. But that association is incomplete. Confession is good for more than the soul. Confession is one of the most life-affirming actions a human being can take, and it can lead to the formation of a new and often quite different personality.

For confession to make a real difference, you only need to share what you can, when you're able. But hang in here. You may become more willing to open up, and to share, as you uncover and discard some of your clutter.

We all have buried, or not-so-buried, matter that we might benefit from communicating to someone safe. We humans have picked up clutter in the process of living, but the clutter doesn't represent who we are, though we often cling to it as if it did. This activity is only the stuff of being human. We have gripes that hold us hostage, and we don't know what to do with them. We can't identify how or to whom to communicate those resentments in a way that makes a difference. Or, perhaps, we can't see any value at all in communicating some aspects of what we perceive as ourselves, for example, our fears, doubts and possible misunderstandings. Or we're reluctant to communicate lest a situation backfire, producing still worse results.

What's advocated here is something we might call a complete confessiona life-altering soul searchinga stock-taking of the internal and external goods called our life: the past, the present and even our projected future. Identifying the unconscious and unexamined beliefs that may continue to sap our aliveness and damage our effectiveness in the world. Many people have practiced this type of confession before making dramatic changes in their lives.

Leo Tolstoy took stock of his life at its peak. In his fifties, after having written War and Peace and Anna Karenina, Tolstoy reflected on his life and came up with the astounding judgment that it had been 'meaningless and a regrettable failure.' He then wrote A Confession prior to changing his ideas and actions. What? you might protest. Big deal. He never had that great success with his writing again. Yes, that's true. He never regained the literary success that he enjoyed with his earlier works, but he had success at another level: not in money or acclaim in the world, which for Tolstoy came up empty and meaningless, but in a very real satisfaction in life on an internal levelin being true to himself. Without that satisfaction, the money and acclaim were nothing to him.

Recovering alcoholics also employ confession to make healthy and wholesale changes in their lives. They take a 'personal inventory,' the results of which are later admitted to the God of their own choosing and to another human being, to ensure their commitment to a lasting sobriety. The 'Big Book' of Alcoholics Anonymous uses the following metaphor: 'Taking a commercial inventory is a fact-finding and fact-facing process. It is an effort to discover the truth about the stock-in-trade. One object is to disclose damaged or unsalable goods, to get rid of them promptly and without regret.' Alcoholics, therefore, identify the clutter they have collected in their lives that may impede their recovery. When they cast away the clutter they have discovered and make the attendant changes, including amends to those they have wronged, they live freer lives and look forward to a future with new and different possibilities.
In our criminal justice system the confession and forced repentance of criminals most often lacks the power to transform because it is tied to punishment and reward and we reap the results with recidivism. There have been rare instances, however, of huge awakenings by imprisoned persons who take stock of their lives in the solitude provided by incarceration and go on to live crime free.
Excepted from Confession is Good for More than the Soul
By Leslie Reynolds-Benns, PhD
www.confessionisgood.com