4th Step Charts and Graphs

I’m grateful for a Friday morning. I’m grateful for a chilly, grey morning with a fire in the fireplace. I’m grateful for where I am and what I’ve been given. I’m grateful for the lessons I’ve learned. I’m grateful to be sober today.

song of the week:

Sometimes there is a backstory and sometimes there isn’t. For example, the Mystery ?? Button today might seem like it’s connected to this, but it might actually have more to do with the Dr J dunk about 2/3 of the way in.¹ I heard this song somewhere along the way recently, maybe Spotify recommended it? Anyway, I always liked this song and the fact that the video was from an appearance on Soul Train—well, that closed the deal. If it had featured a Don Cornelius introduction, then we’d be talking about that forever. So, it’s probably a good thing that the potentially best part of the video was left out.

And that brings us back to the Fourth Step, wherein we are conducting a fearless and searching moral inventory of ourselves. I’m going to pause on “searching,” because I think that’s an under-appreciated word in Step Four. As I often complain, I think, too often, Step work becomes a rote exercise in making the same list that someone else made thirty years ago. The point of the steps is not to finish them so that one can claim ascension to the higher reaches of AA-dom. It’s to actually change things in your life. If you can really do a 4th Step in a weekend and just do one pass, that’s very cool. My life required a lot more untangling.

And maybe that’s another way to look at this, it’s about untangling the knot we’ve made of our lives. I’ve done a fair amount of fly-fishing and that means I’ve done a fair amount of knot untangling. The idea of just clipping off one of these huge, tangled monstrosities is hard to bear, it means retying a whole host of knots, the flyline to the tippets, to the various step-down sized tippets, to the size 24 Mr. Rapidan dryfly I enjoyed not catching fish with. I invested a lot of time in untangling knots.

First, you can spend a lot of time trying to understand how these fantastically complicated knots got created on one single (apparently disastorous) backcast. This is the way of madness. I found that the keys to untangling horribly knotted flyline are:

• Be patient

• Focusing on the tiny strands is really important

• Never tighten, always loosen.

I think these same rules may apply to the Fourth Step and I think viewing it as an exercise in untangling is also useful. I hope you had a chance to read what Sean wrote this week about the Fourth Step:

Finding Myself in Step 4

I’m going to summarize the approach Sean and I took when working the Fourth Step and I’m going to put copies of the spreadsheets we came up with in the Sober Library.

As we conduct the Fourth Step inventory and begin to identify items for the list ominously entitled “The Exact Nature of Our Wrongs,” it’s helpful to begin analyzing those events and begin to understand why we did the things we did. Steps Four through Seven are about identifying the behavioral and thinking patterns implicated in our addiction. While self-knowledge is not sufficient for sobriety, it is certainly necessary.

So, here’s where the “searching'“ part comes in, there are a lot of lists to make, and they seem kind of repetitive. It’s because they are. As we worked the Fourth Step, we realized that looking at the same events and issues, but with different filters or angles they revealed additional information. So, here’s what we did:

Made a list of 25 words to describe the way people see us and another list of 25 words about how we see ourselves. From this list, we extract more general themes, or call them tags if you’d like. There might be 5 items on the 25-word list that boil down to fear, or dishonesty. So the idea here is to boil down the 25-word list to a shorter list of more central character defects, or negative thinking patterns, as I like to call them. It might look like this:

Note: We made these things up. When you do this, it should be mostly true.

Now, as we proceed to the second-phase of list-making, the important thing to remember is that we are trying to look at the events of our lives from as many perspectives as we can. Think of these lists as flashlights, differences in the direction of the beam can be very revealing. We can use this version of the inventory to talk about the process from here:

Again, we made up some entries, but the basic idea here is what happened and to whom. This may seem a little 5th-Steppy, but the point is to use the events of our lives as ways to examine the thinking patterns that were at work in those events. The last two columns are the really important part. “What were you thinking?” Not intended derisively, it’s meant as an exploration of your thinking patterns back at the time, for me, looking at those revealed the negative thinking patterns that were at the bottom of my addiction. The fearless part comes into play here, listing these things out can be really, really hard, but it’s where the benefit is.

From here, I like to explore things from different perspectives. So we might use this, with the fancy scoring system:

On this one, instead of listing things by person, we can list them by thinking patterns. Above are latin examples of a resentment and fear inventory. This helped me see, for example, how afraid I was of the people I loved, separate and apart from any events that might get captured in a “by person” inventory. You can substitute any topic you’d like. I do like ranking things, and putting a score next to your fear inventory can be interesting compared to the other thinking pattern-based inventories.

From there, it’s lather, rinse and repeat. The point is to keep at it, looking at oneself from a lot of different angles, searching for the patterns and being fearless about where we look and for how long. This is a life-changing step, and one that will be revisited over and over and over. Why? Because this is the kind of exercise that helps form the vaunted AA way of life. Hint: it doesn’t always involve folding chairs and bad coffee. It involves continuous self-assessment, a rigorous commitment to self-honesty in the process and a willingness to finally take a good, long, hard look in the mirror,

and to not have to turn away.

Happy Friday

1. Depending on how many wishes I was granted, being able to dunk like Dr. J would definitely be on the upper part of the list. Also, not everyone knows that one of your first wishes needs to be for more wishes. What?