Therefore, we started upon a personal inventory. This was Step Four.” – Alcoholics Anonymous, 3rd Edition, Ch. 5 (“How It Works”), pp 64-5.
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A word of caution but profound truth to the alcoholic man and woman wanting to recover more than just drying out: “You cannot solve a problem on the same level of mind that created it.” – Albert Einstein.
Translation: The problems we created for ourselves and others when we were drinking probably won’t be solved if we seek solutions from the same mental perspective of the alcohol-soaked brain that created those problems. For the alcoholic in 12-step recovery, then, it might be a good idea to have some significant dry time before embarking on the step that may be the most intimidating if not most feared of all the steps: “Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.” – Step Four.
” …(W)e launched out on a course of vigorous action, the first step of which is a personal housecleaning, which many of us had never attempted. Though our decision was a vital and crucial step, it could have little permanent effect unless at once followed by a strenuous effort to face, and to be rid of, the things in ourselves which had been blocking us. Our liquor was but a symptom. So we had to get down to causes and conditions.”
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If we agree that “liquor was but a symptom” of our drinking problem, we should be able to also agree that alcoholism is a three-tiered disease of the body, brain and moral character – thus, the reason for the “personal housecleaning” of the Fourth Step, the one in which we see ourselves as we are and not as we want to see ourselves and how we want others to see us.
Yet in the end, if this inventory of our “character defects” and also of the good that remains has been taken with absolute honesty and thoroughness, one of the truest measures of a man’s integrity may be his strength to accept himself as he is and then mustering the courage to exorcise the sickness from his very soul with the Fifth Step – “Admitted to God, to ourselves, and in another human being, the exact nature of our wrongs.”
The importance of the Fourth Step in our journey to recovery cannot be underestimated. The moral inventory that produces only the immoral or which “blames” other people for our drinking its resulting fallout is guaranteed to lead to a full alcoholic relapse at worst or being little more than a dried-out drunk on a permanent “dry drunk” at best. While there is no “best” way to take Step Four and compose its moral inventory, there is an absolute necessity before we begin – our “unconditional surrender” to the previous three steps:
“Admitted we were powerless over alcohol – that our lives had become unmanageable.” – Step One
“Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.” – Step Two
“Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him.” – Step Three
Step One knocks us to our knees and emasculates our false or displaced sense of pride that a “real” man doesn’t need help. Step Two asks us to the find and believe in a “force” stronger than ourselves – the “higher power” and spiritual compass in 12-step philosophy – and to which we hand ourselves over in Step Three. Admitting we need help and we’re not as “tough” as we might want to think and entrusting our very lives to an unseen power on blind faith – a surrender which some find as giving up too much but later suffer the agony of the reality that “half measures availed us nothing.”
A Fourth Step inventory is not always a one-time undertaking and is frequently redone as the alcoholic and his life in recovery grows, evolves and changes. For some, their moral inventory is “updated” in Step 10, which can be called the maintenance step of the Fourth: “Continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong promptly admitted it.”
With the completion of the Fourth Step to the extent it can be completed – the character, mental and spiritual defects of the alcoholic recovery are ready to be expunged in subsequent steps.
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For the virgin facing his first moral inventory, however, there are some suggestions that few veterans to the program dispute. The first-timer may want to take his inventory with a program sponsor, someone with substantial sober time – at least a year -and who can be trusted completely with the disclosures of the alcoholic just beginning recovery. Second, he may want to adapt the method suggested in the recovery program’s “Big Book.” That method employs three inventories, the first of past and present resentments. The second inventory identifies fears and other emotions that evoke nervousness, anxiety and uncertainty. And the last inventory is an honest appraisal of our sexual conduct then and now.
In each inventory, we are also advised to name people we resent, justified and not, and whom we have hurt in the form of retaliation against those we resent and by way of our sexual conduct – more, more likely, sexual misconduct.
The inventories of resentments and sexual conduct need to be totally honest, absolute and thorough. We are warned in recovery that resentments we will not or cannot give up is the main reason we suffer so-called slips or full relapses back into drinking. Neglecting to clean up our sexual affairs is another reason for a return to the bottle.
And there is nothing uplifting in again mounting the courage and honesty to make a self-appraisal that hopefully is more honest than a failed first one.
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With the completion of the Fourth Step to the extent it can be completed – the character, mental and spiritual defects of the alcoholic recovery are ready to be expunged in subsequent steps. A valid question is why we should even make a character self-appraisal. The answer is likely to be a mosaic of differing answers from those who have done and re-done their Fourth Steps.
A general answer is one that might have widespread agreement: the therapeutic value in facing our faults and innermost demons rests in confronting them with faith, honesty and guts and, more importantly, by laying the basis of getting rid of them – hopefully once and for all. But those who fall back in the bottle but might have another recovery in them are guaranteed to redo their Fourth Step all over – perhaps their entire recovery program. And there is nothing uplifting in again mounting the courage and honesty to make a self-appraisal that hopefully is more honest than a failed first one.
With faith and hope, though, getting rid of our mental and character failings – and the fears, resentments, shame and disgust they brought with them and which likely fueled our decent into alcoholism – significantly improves the prognosis of a recovery whose quality is higher than that of being a dry drunk.
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Can we start off PLEASE by STOP calling this the HARDEST STEP and making this become the self-fullfilling prophecy. THE BOOK says “… at once followed by strenous effort …” Followed – it is just another step. My experience is that it took effort. Because it was thourough it was strenous. For myself I found it more liberating than tenancious. And it took me a grand total of 4 days.T hen I did step 5 with my sponsor. A year for all 12. I always say JUST READ THE BLACK LINES. It is a program of action & a program… Read more »
Thanks for this. I have been kind of fidgeting on the threshold of the 12 Steps in another program (Al-Anon) for a long time, and “feared moral inventory” perfectly expresses why I have hung back. Steps 4 and 5 fill me with dread.