Finding the Trail
The Real Point of the Fourth Step
I’m grateful for another gorgeous morning (sorry to repeat myself, but it is). I’m grateful for coming to believe I’m enough. I’m grateful for changes in attitude. I’m grateful for seeing that things don’t have to be the same. I’m grateful to be sober today.
song of the week:
I frequently have these ideas about things to write about, and I take these long meandering walks to nowhere (as opposed to “now here”) and kind of write in my head. So, when I was wandering around Copenhagen and Stockholm—(an insane almost one year ago!), I had two songs going in my head a lot. One I wrote about last October and one I thought about until just now.1 I know I say this every week, I love this song.
Now, many of you are more familiar with the more famous Chaka Khan version. I like that version, too. I do go back and forth on the Melle Mel intro, and that is Stevie Wonder playing the harmonica, so I like it enough to put it up.
But I ask you to be fearless and thorough from the very start. Listen to the Prince version. Doesn’t it make so much more sense? Also, he wrote it as a teenager and I think played all of the instruments on the version above.2 I love the line,
I wouldn’t lie to you, Baby, It’s mainly a physical thing.
Because just a little later, Prince announces the progression of approximately every alcoholic relationship:
I feel for you. I think it's love.
This comes during the best part of the song, about 2:15 in, and then the keyboard going up half-steps makes so much more sense than the Chaka Khan over-amplified, too staccato version. Prince builds that keyboard progression slowly all the way to the top of the scale and then….I saw Prince and The Time and Vanity Six in 1983 in Milwaukee and still think it’s the greatest show I’ve ever seen—and that includes seeing U2 open for the Ramones in 1981 at a club in Madison, WI.
That’s plenty for today on that subject. So, in writing about the 4th and 5th Step this week, the thing I wanted to talk about is how useful the 4th Step is for spotting the patterns behind the addictions and how that helps illuminate the trail back. When I was in early sobriety, I could tick off all of the reasons I was compelled to drink and I think roughly all of them would fall into the categories of “things that happen to me.”3 I drank because I was lonely, because my boss didn’t appropriately value me, my kids were upset because I kept lying to them, my ex-wife was, well, my ex-wife, and so on.
Of course the problem with that formulation is that I lacked the power to make any of that better. What the 4th Step forces is an examination of me, from the inside out, not the outside-in. When I put those names down and started listing out my resentments towards them, when I started remembering the conflicts and the way I used alcohol as a smoke-screen to shield my retreat from the world around me, I saw the same pattern again and again. I saw that I managed every relationship to exactly the same place:
They don’t really know me. They don’t really value me.
Once I saw that pattern and began tracing it back, I could see it was in every relationship going way back before I had started drinking. It was how I felt as a kid. This unlocked some really significant realizations:
It was these feelings that created the void that drinking filled so perfectly, when we first met in the 1970’s.
It wasn’t my fault.
Therapists will tell you that addictions and compulsive behaviors can be thought of as just unhealthy, misdirected adaptations to very real situations. The bad news is that those maladaptive behaviors and thinking patterns work. You can actually keep an alcoholic boat afloat for quite a long while with a little ingenuity. I didn’t particularly like the taste of my first or second or 5th drinks—but I loved how I felt. Whole. Complete. Cool.
When I started seeing the patterns in my interactions with the real world, the world that “is” as opposed to the one I constructed, I finally saw what the problem was:
It was me trying to superimpose my distorted, inaccurate, self-centered worldview on the world that actually was.
That conflict was fought entirely in my own head on a daily basis and it was a war I could never logically win. That’s what the Third Step really accomplishes, by the way.
What I finally saw, in doing the 4th Step, was that I kept forcing the same script on every person in my life, every situation in my life. The problem: No one else knew there even was a script. So, me telling them over and over how they had f***ed up didn’t really produce any results. Nor did the drinking that inevitably followed.
The Big Book passages around the 4th Step are kind of comical, Bill hypothetically resents someone for telling his wife of an affair. But every alcoholic and addict who has done a 4th Step knows how ridiculous some of them look on paper in the cold, sober light of day. That’s how you see exactly how far alcohol took you from the person you were meant to be and the life you were meant to lead.
Once you see that, you start to see a trail back, it’s marked so that just about any Scout could follow it. There are also some scuffed up pennies along the way that can help.
The other one was about a Stevie Wonder Song
Like Stevie Wonder.
There’s an “Alcoholic Jeopardy” category.
❤️