I hope everyone enjoyed the Fourth Step-apalooza we had going here last week. If I didn’t already mention this like six times, I think the Fourth Step is pretty pivotal and my own guess is that people who have been sober, but remain unhappy might want to consider taking a fresh look at it. I see very often the thinking patterns of addiction, which often translate to behaviors, even after “sobriety” has occurred. If the central symptom and resentment-producer of alcoholics is the oversized and very under-appreciated ego, i can find plenty of examples where people display that exact mindset, the one that was deployed in service of the drinking, is now deployed in the service of “sobriety.” You may not be drinking or using, and that’s great, but are you happy? I think that’s actually the point of this whole exercise.
One piece of advice a sponsor gave me once, was to really examine my motives for thinking and doing things, hopefully, in advance of doing them. I realized, much to my horror, that most everything I did was kind of manipulative, meaning it was designed to provoke a certain response. Not necessarily in a bad way. Sometimes I wanted you to think I was clever or smart or insightful, so I’d say something nice or funny, not because I was looking to brighten your day, it was in the hopes of getting the response I was after.
This gets to the “what was I thinking” aspect of the Fourth Step, because understanding the thinking pattern that accompanied the actions and behaviors is what let me change. Seeing my thinking as it pertained to text messages was pretty revealing, this is the Fourth Step in a microcosm—examining ourselves, our thinking and the behavior that is driven by that thinking.
This works for maladies other than uncontrolled alcoholism. A side note: During the decade I was trying to stop drinking, the drinking was not my only problem. I noticed this coming out of rehab, that while I hadn’t been drinking for the last 27 or 28 days, none of my problems had de-materialized. I think this begins to happen during the Fourth Step, and I think that’s part of the reason the success rates are so low coming out of rehab—the drinking may have been arrested, but the really important work has not even really begun.
If you are sensing that this is another long screed about the importance of the Fourth Step, you may be right. I’d prefer another word besides “screed,” however. Anyway, the list-making and gentle self-evaluating that goes on in the Fourth Step is like lighting a candle in a cave. The light gets brighter with more honest self-examination, and the whole place is completely lit—like an over-decorated house at Christmas—when the final self-judgment rolls in. When the results of the Fourth Step (and maybe the Fifth, too) are tabulated and an appropriate sentence is handed down. J’accuse, and that will be a lifetime of sobriety for you!
No, that’s not at all how it works. There is no self-judgment, the thing that takes the scary hair off the clown is the opposite: Self-Acceptance. The famous passage about acceptance on page 417 of the Big Book applies not just to pesky intrusions by those completely maddening “people,” but most importantly, to ourselves. Without accepting ourselves, without understanding the foibles that drove so much chaos in life, there is no way to say, “I understand why we did that, but let’s not anymore.” I think a Fourth Step that is accompanied by grunted phrases and grim determination, “must get better,” just doesn’t work in the long run. Self-kindness and acceptance are a better bet.
People often talk at meetings about the “hole” they always felt and how they drank or used to try and fill it. The Fourth Step, when done with a healthy dose of love and self-kindness, turns that “hole” into a “whole.”1 We all have flaws and have all done or not done things that we wished we didn’t or did. It’s not the catharsis of listing everything that happened and all of the self-criticisms that helps drive sobriety, it’s the understanding of the forces that were acting on us, developing new responses to those forces and, most importantly, seeing ourselves as whole and healthy and even potentially happy people.
This doesn’t mean that everything is hunky-dory and the rose-coloration is so strong that I don’t even need the special glasses anymore, it means that I know whatever comes, I’m enough. It means acknowledging that I’m sufficient for everything that life has in store for me and it means walking through the world with self-love, not self-criticism, in my heart.
I’m not perfect and not advocating becoming a perky, done-no-wrong cheerleader for myself. Part of the reason I got sober was I finally just decided to cut myself a break, live from moment to moment and start to see that maybe I was not a horribly, maybe irreparably damaged person, I was just someone who had the lost the way and needed some help finding my way back.
I don’t mean to suggest that the Fourth Step, or getting sober generally, or dealing with whatever you have to, is a happy, snappy, always breezy affair. It’s not, life isn’t like that. But it’s very different walking through life happy and ready for the surprise waiting in the next moment. I don’t need to drink to manage that life. That’s what the Fourth Step gave me, the ability to fully accept myself, the ability to be happy, even when it’s just me. That’s what’s actually in the treasure chest of sobriety: A gleaming pile of self-acceptance, self-belief and self-love. Don’t listen to the pirates who tell you otherwise, this one is telling you that you already have the key to the chest, go ahead and try it.
Sorry.