I’m grateful for a long weekend. I’m grateful for working from home. I’m grateful for another long walk on a cold day. I’m grateful for getting some sleep and grateful for a chance to get after things. I’m grateful to be sober today.
Somehow it seems very appropriate that we would begin this mini-tour of the Fourth Step on the Tuesday after the last three-day weekend for many, many months. I’m hoping to change your mind about the 4th Step. I think because of the way it precedes Step Five, people assume that it has a relationship similar to the one between Steps Eight and Nine. There are definitely similarities, but I think the use of the phrase “moral inventory,” has people take a much more confessorial view of Steps Four and Five. Step Four says:
Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.
I, personally, have found the Big Book examples of Fourth Step work to be of limited value and a little difficult to understand. So, in the sober laboratory, the Sponsees and I did some tinkering and came up with our own take on the process. I have come to view Step Four’s command of moral inventory-taking to be more of a scouting mission; I think we drink or use to change or escape the person we are, and it works. Too well. The “bottom” comes on the day when you look around and see how lost you are; how far from where you thought you would ever be. The way back, the way out, is not obvious.
I think the Fourth Step is about searching for that way back. A sponsor of mine told me the Fourth Step was about “pattern recognition,” and that makes a lot of sense. When you list out your resentments against different people or situations, it’s impossible to ignore the patterns that start to emerge. Tracing those patterns helped me see some of the core beliefs that I had about myself and my life were not exactly accurate. The Big Book refers to these patterns as “character defects,” meaning that the things we did were traceable to flaws in ourselves and the way we lived and looked at the world.
In my own case, I started to see these negative thinking patterns emerge, some common themes in the narrative, if you like to think of it that way. Being of a semi-creative bent, instead of sticking with the old-fashioned “character defects,” I went with “Negative Thinking Pattern,” negative meaning only that it took me to a negative place, as opposed to the bright, sunny, happy places.
I’ve done the Fourth Step a couple of different times and a couple of different ways. The first time was in very early semi-sobriety, in 2011 in a monastery outside of Dubuque, Iowa.
That version was very helpful, but was more of a Fourth and Fifth Step combo, with the emphasis being on the guided Fifth Step. I think I see the Fourth Step as a bit more stand-alone these days, focusing more on trying to understand the straight-forward question,
“Who am I?”
Me and the Sponsees started by listing out words that we thought described ourselves. Actually, we made two lists. One was headed, “Things I Think About Myself,” and the second was called, “Things Other People Think About Me.” The assignment was to write down about 20 things on each list. Once we did that, we began by looking at the differences between the two lists.
One of the primary “symptoms” of alcoholism and addiction is self-dishonesty. In my case, the lies I told myself were the engines of my addiction. Hint: This exercise is designed to expose self-dishonesty—but in a nice way and by showing us how we got here. Looking at those two lists will start to illuminate some of the self-dishonesty; the theme that emerged for me was that if people knew the truth about me, they couldn’t love me. I don’t think my experience here is terribly unique.
The next project is, of course, to write about the differences between the way we see ourselves and the way we think the world sees us. It’s this gulf of perception that drove my drinking. The feelings of shame that accompanied the charade I was performing were washed away by metronomic drinking. The point of the Fourth and Fifth Steps is not to establish that we were huge d*cks while drinking, we were, the point is to start to expose the lie that was our worldview, and the same lie that was our self-view. The real point of the Fourth and Fifth Step is acceptance. In the world of 50-minute hours, that concept is called “integration.”
Recovery is finding the way back to ourselves, the person we were meant to be, the life we were meant to lead. Steps One, Two and Three helped us see that we were quite lost. Step Four is the start of the trail back. Comparing those lists of how I saw myself and how the world saw me were like trail markers, showing me where I needed to look and where I needed to go.
Next, we begin the process of creating the worksheets…
See you Friday,