Let's talk about step four of Alcoholics Anonymous today, which is "made a searching and fearless moral inventory," here with me, an alcoholic, Jerry Banfield. I have worked with sponsees on step four, and this is often where people bog down and have the biggest opportunity to actually get through the rest of the steps and have a successful life. To me, the key thing you need to do in step four, based on what I've done, is to get into the things you've done that you feel make you a bad person. For me, this was the key of what I needed to get into in order to then start getting help from someone else. Once I started remembering the things I had done while drinking and even sober, then I started to feel like an awful person, and that's where often the desire to drink kicks in really strong.
How I Did My Fourth Step
For me, when I started working on step four, I initially did it by just writing a really long, like 50,000-word, honest story of my life. I wrote the details at a level I'd never shared before, and I originally published that on my website, but then I took it down after seeing the F word in it 130-something times. Then I started to remember these other things that I had blocked and suppressed. I would remember them in meetings while people were sharing. One day, I remembered something I had done, a crime that I'd never told anyone about. Thankfully, no one was hurt as a result of it, and yet I felt that the fact I had almost committed a bad crime made it something I was unforgivable for. I felt that I could never get past that, and I had never told a soul about it before. That's when I started needing to do the fifth step with my sponsor, because I realized I was either going to talk about that or keep it secret and go drink.
I had several more experiences like this just after I did the initial written inventory. Just writing an honest story of my life meant including the details that I usually would leave out, like times I hadn't wanted to live anymore, and I actually went and put those in. Then I kept remembering so many things that I needed to take to my fifth step. It seems that where sponsees have gone wrong with this is not doing it deep enough and not immediately calling or talking to someone when these things come up.
Getting to the Stories We've Kept Secret
It also seems to me that people in AA consistently get off on a tangent of working it in the big book, of writing down all these fears and writing down all these resentments at other people. The resentments and the fears can be helpful if they get back to something I've done. To me, step four is all about getting to know myself and my life. While, yes, it helps with the fears, usually, in my experience, there are very specific stories that I've kept secret that I feel make me a bad person. I need to get those stories out. For example, I heard a lady speak recently. The thing she needed to get out was that she was having an affair on her husband. Once she surfaced that in step four, it was like, wow, this is something I'm doing. She felt that she really had to talk about this with some other women who would understand. That helped her a lot to work the program further.
The idea with step four is that we surface these things about ourselves that we've been keeping secret. We also get to know some of the other good parts of ourselves as well. I am grateful I did this by writing my life story out, because I saw it. I saw a lot of good things about myself too. Some of us have really low self-esteem, and we think that we're not worth anything and we're no good. Yet we are. Step four can help us see that, and see that we're not just totally worthless and useless, but that we have a lot of good qualities as well. We need help with getting rid of the things that are bad about ourselves, all these chains we've burdened ourselves with, these stories that we've carried around and defined ourselves with. That's what's worked for me with step four.
Why Our Minds Race and How This Step Frees Us
The key with step four is to surface things that need to get to step five. If you're not surfacing things that make you feel really uncomfortable or confused, that's an opportunity to just keep doing it. Keep looking. Get into those reasons that you're drinking. Get into the reasons that you're thinking constantly. Ultimately, we get rid of these stories by taking some of those things we're thinking about constantly to someone else we trust in step five to work through with us. We get freed from the need to constantly think. A lot of us like to drink because it would reduce the thinking problem. A lot of us have so many of these racing thoughts because our minds are trying to keep us safe from these things we don't want to look at about ourselves. When we get these things out, our mind won't keep racing all the time.
I am grateful that it's unusual for my mind to get to racing now. In fact, when it does, that encourages me to slow down and get back to step four and be like, whoa, what's going on? What are my thoughts trying to distract me from? Why am I going so fast right now? What do I need to look at? What do I need to share with someone else? What story am I telling that I'm uncomfortable with, that my thoughts are trying to protect me from, that I need to get to the next step, talk about it with someone else, and then be freed from it?
When we do step four thoroughly, we often really need someone's help. When we talk with someone else about all of the things we've discovered about ourselves, we then get this willingness like, wow, I want to be the best I can be. I want to get into steps six and seven and say, I'm willing to be free from all these defects of character. God, please remove these from me. Then we are ready to go from there into step eight and say, I need to list and start getting ready to make amends to people for these stories that I've carried around and all that I've done. Thus, step four is pivotal. We know we've done step three thoroughly when we really dig into step four, when we write that story about our lives that's incredibly honest.
Be Careful with What You Write Down
I recommend that if you write things down you've done that you'd rather not have shared, burn it, tear it up, get rid of it, or just maybe have whoever you're doing the fifth step with look at it. Don't leave that stuff just laying around for anybody to find. I've heard stories of people not being very discreet with their fourth and fifth steps, and even eighth and ninth steps, and ending up in prison as a result of it. Thus, the idea is not to cause more unnecessary pain and suffering, although I guess someone might need to go to prison to work through something. The idea is not to cause a bunch more pain and suffering and burden the crosses of others by just throwing out everything from our inventory all over the place on top of everyone until we've really processed it and worked through it ourselves.
Thus, with step four, we don't need anyone else to do it. You don't need a sponsor. In fact, all the first four steps you can do completely by yourself. But step five is where you really need some help, and you'll know you've done step four when you are really ready, and maybe even, like I did, feel the urgent need to complete step five lest we relapse.
Thank you very much for going through all of step four with me and looking at what I've learned on step four and what might be useful for you. I'll be getting into step five in the future, and you can find more of my videos about Alcoholics Anonymous and my recovery in my Life playlist. Thank you very much. I love you. You're awesome, and I wish you a beautiful, happy, sober life.