What Step Five Asks of Us
Are you ready to look at step five in Alcoholics Anonymous with me, Jerry Banfield, an alcoholic? Step five reads just like this: admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs. What does this mean, how do we do it, and what are the benefits we get out of it?
The key with this step is confession. Confession means we share the worst of ourselves with another human being. This is a time-honored tradition in some religions and in many cultural practices because it helps cleanse us of the shame, guilt, and remorse we feel, and it empowers us to start using the mistakes we've made as opportunities to teach and help others through those same mistakes. This is the magic of step five.
It says in the step that we admitted to God and to ourselves. This we can easily do in step four. In step five, we take ownership that, wow, yes, these things I did — I have awareness of them and I'm consciously accepting that I did them. For many of us, it's kind of easy once we start having some kind of faith in a higher power to say, well, I already know about this, and of course God or whoever knows about it already because they're all-powerful. The challenge tends to be when we actually open up to another person. Our rational mind will kick in and say there's no point in talking about this with somebody else, or I'll just get in trouble if I talk to somebody else about it, or somebody else will judge me and I won't be able to come to AA anymore, or they'll tell my whoever — my partner, my family, my friends. Yes, with step five, these are things we do want to consider, and yet if we trust our intuition, we will usually, at least in my experience, be guided to work with the right people. We don't just immediately want to put our step five out to everyone. We want to go to the exact right person with step five.
Finding the Right Person to Hear My Fifth Step
Here's how I did my step five. I listened to what people shared in Alcoholics Anonymous meetings. I heard the amazing stories people would share. They'd share right out in an open meeting things that I wouldn't have ever told anyone, and people were sharing them right out in a meeting — undetected crimes they'd done, things they had done parenting or as a child, or the worst shameful behaviors, shared right out in the open. What I learned is that if someone's willing to put that kind of information out there to people openly and they've got the good sobriety that I'm looking for, then this is the kind of person I can probably trust to share my worst inner secrets with — things that I think make me a bad person, that I've concealed from everyone else, and now these are the things that I'm drinking over. These are the things I'm drinking to forget. These are the things my mind is thinking so many other thoughts to try and distract me from going into these dark places.
What I did is went through my step four. I wrote out an honest story of my life, and then I was ready to do step five. I had a sponsor, and one day in the meeting something someone shared triggered me off, and I suddenly remembered an undetected crime I'd done where thankfully nobody was hurt, and yet I felt ashamed about it. I felt like this proved I was a disgusting person who didn't belong. What I realized, after all that I'd heard and read, is that this is when you do step five. I had the realization that I was either going to tell my sponsor about this or I was going to get drunk — there was no middle ground. I didn't get to keep it secret any longer and stay sober. I had to work step five right then and there or face the consequences, which for me might have been an alcoholic death, and that's what it looked like. Thus, only with that threat over my head was I willing to open up and say, this is what I did.
Thankfully, I felt safe telling my sponsor this thing because I had been guided specifically to my sponsor. I was crazy at about 90 days sober. I hadn't got a sponsor. My mind was just nuts. I was stressed. I took a suggestion from one of the ladies that had been sober 25 years: I went and got a massage, and when my whole body and mind finally relaxed, it felt like I was told exactly what I was going to do. I was told exactly who to get as my sponsor, and it didn't rationally make sense either. My first sponsor had the side of his head caved in after he'd fallen from three stories in a construction accident. You might think of him as mentally disabled, and thankfully, I felt safe starting my fifth step with him because I thought, well, I can tell him, and if he tells anybody else, no one's going to believe him anyway. It was perfect for me. I was a police officer before, and I was overly paranoid about my step five being shared with someone, and having a mentally disabled sponsor was perfect for me because I felt safe telling him what I felt was the shameful secret that nobody had ever heard before — that somehow I'd made it through the police polygraph without it coming up. And I told him, knowing that he either wasn't going to tell anybody else or it didn't matter if he did.
The Miracle of Another Person's Perspective
Once I told him, I felt so much better about it. I go into full detail in my book Speaker Meeting 2017 and my book Officer Banfield. I go into full detail about all my stories in these books if you want to get a much better idea of exactly what my step five did look like. However, for putting this up in a family-friendly context for anyone to see on YouTube and on my blog, I put it this way: after I told my sponsor that first thing, I felt immediate relief, because all he said was, "It's okay, God loves you." That's exactly what I needed, because I was one crazy, complicated person when I came into Alcoholics Anonymous — overly rational, overly argumentative, overly thinking I knew it all — and all I needed to hear was the same simple message over and over again: God loves you.
My first sponsor didn't seem to think what I had done was a big deal. That's the miracle of step five — we get another person's perspective on what we've done. Usually, if we've gone to the right person, whatever we've shared that we think is so bad often doesn't look like that to someone else. Often, we are way overly critical and judgmental on ourselves about the things we've done. That's why we need to share them with someone else: because someone else will give us a more helpful point of view. That's exactly what happened with me. I went from "oh my God, I need to drink or talk about this" to feeling "oh man, this really works." Now I felt better about that. Suddenly, my mind stopped spinning and I felt peaceful, and I went home and I felt like, wow, this thing really works that I'm doing. This is awesome.
Going All the Way with My Grand Sponsor
Now, fortunately, I didn't think about what else I would need to do in step five, or I would have been horrified, because I thought, well, okay, that wasn't too bad. I'm ready to work on all my defects of character and humbly remove my shortcomings, and cool, I can do this. What happened to me was, after I did that first tiny little venture into step five, I was sitting at another meeting at the same meeting place but on a different day, a little while later, and my grand sponsor — the sponsor of my sponsor — said something that was really inappropriate, and I was the only one who laughed at it really loud. All of a sudden, I got a barrage of the kinds of things that my mind would think about really hard to help me avoid looking at. I got an absolute upwelling of a bunch of different things I needed to talk about for step five — things I hadn't even remembered in my step four inventory, things going back to elementary school and childhood that I had suppressed for over 20 years or so at that point. All of a sudden, I realized, oh my God, again, I need to talk about all of this stuff for the first time or I'm going to get drunk.
Thankfully, I knew my grand sponsor who'd made the inappropriate joke that triggered me to laugh really hard was the one I needed to talk to about it, because he would understand and he would be able to share his experience and help me. He was dying of cancer at the time, and that day he was having a rough day with his cancer. I walked up to him right after the Lord's Prayer and said, "Hey, I need to talk to you." He said, "No, I'm fine." He thought I wanted to try and talk him through how he was feeling. I said, "No, I don't want to talk about you. I want to do a fifth step right now." Immediately his whole demeanor switched, and he said, "Oh, okay, yes, look, let's go outside and talk right now."
Man, the beginning I had made with my sponsor — I went all the way with my grand sponsor, and I absolutely laid out on him all the worst things I had done in my whole life, including talking about the undetected crime I had shared with my sponsor, and I laid out everything else. Back to elementary school, I laid out all my shameful sex conduct. I laid out all my undetected crimes, and I laid out everything I could possibly think of — stuff I hadn't even remembered in step four. Where I was surprised is that he then shared some of his fifth step with me, and wow, I couldn't even believe some of the stuff he shared was possible. It took me days to process his fifth step, thinking this is a horrible world where that could happen to someone, that someone could go through that. He shared it with me to help me understand where he had come from and to give me perspective on my life.
After this, it was an absolutely miraculous transformation experience. All of this — all of the things that my mind said were reasons I was not a worthwhile human being, the reasons that I was a terrible person and didn't deserve to be loved — after I shared all of these with my grand sponsor, I no longer had all of that driving my thinking. My entire thinking process slowed down, because all of a sudden my thinking didn't need to protect me from looking at these things. I felt a huge, huge sense of a weight lifted off me — that the truth about me is that I am a worthwhile, good person. I am not horrible. In fact, the experiences I've been through have helped me to be in a position to help others.
Turning My Worst Into Tools to Help Others
I can now understand others who've gone through the same or worse than me, who've done the same or worse than me, and I can now support other people. I am now able to do fifth steps well with other people because of this. Thank God for my grand sponsor. He helped me out absolutely immensely. He passed away a few years ago, and that was a big loss. I cried about that a whole lot, and I miss him frequently. It's amazing the help you can give someone when you're on the receiving end of a fifth step. Thus, the fifth step is a huge opportunity to convert from a person who feels awful about themselves to a person who's able to help others. That's where the magic happens. All of a sudden, all these things that I thought were horrible about me — now these are my tools to help others.
I've written in very clear detail about all the things I've been general about here in my book Speaker Meeting 2017 and my book Officer Banfield, because I think it's important to be very clear and detailed about these things as much as possible. Now, several years after doing my fifth step, I've had the courage to actually put everything in place. I've put everything out in books, because I know hearing things like that in meetings is what gave me the courage to share my things. I'm so grateful after that.
A Third Fifth Step With the Rector
After doing that fifth step with my grand sponsor, my first sponsor passed away. He got hit by a car while he was riding his bike. I got another sponsor who had the same grand sponsor as my first sponsor. My new sponsor suggested I go to the rector — which is like a priest, except it's an Episcopal church. I did another fifth step with the rector at the Episcopal church. We got even farther back into my past, and we saw that the core of step five is really forgiving ourselves.
The reason we do confession is so that we can forgive ourselves, because, of course, God doesn't even need to forgive us. God helped make us the way we are today. Therefore, there's no need to even forgive, because we're like a painting God's made. Thus, God doesn't need to forgive us. God completely understands and loves us and accepts us as we are. As my first sponsor kept saying, God loves you. He said that to me almost every day. God loves you. Once you really internalize that, you see that you don't have any beef or issue with God. You're not trying to please God. God loves you as you are. The key is seeing that other people actually feel better about us than we do most of the time. We don't usually need other people's forgiveness that bad either. What we really need is our own forgiveness.
Can You Forgive Yourself?
The third iteration of my fifth step — the first one I did with my first sponsor, the second one I did with my grand sponsor, the third fifth step I did with the rector at the Episcopal church where my meeting was — we really got into the core of what I needed to do with my fifth step. That's forgive myself. I remember I broke down and cried after going through all of the things with him. He said, God forgives you. You know I forgive you. Can you forgive yourself? Wow, that's when I really broke down, because for so many years, I had used all these things in my fifth step — some of which had come up in my fourth step, but a lot of them hadn't — I'd used all these things to mentally whip myself. I literally have scars on my back related to the guilt and the shame that I experienced from feeling and whipping myself for all the things I've done. That's what has to stop. That's the idea of the fifth step. You get help with other people to stop whipping yourself for all these things — all these perceived wrongs that you've done. Thank God, because man, in my experience life is a lot better without going around carrying these chains and mentally beating myself all the time.
Now, the thing is, you'll know when you've forgiven yourself, because your thoughts of yourself start getting nicer. When you screw something new up, you don't immediately go into, well, of course, I'm an awful person. You just say, whoops. It's okay. You can see that you've forgiven yourself there. Now, I am so much better at making mistakes. Sure, I get a little upset sometimes, but I don't snowball and pick it up and say, yes, obviously, this is how horrible I am. I'm so grateful to have this to share with you today. I couldn't have imagined this when I started my fifth step. That excites me, because imagine what you can do through your fifth step. Imagine. Imagine all the good and help you can give to others.
From Step Five Into Step Six
Thank you very much for going through my complete talk on step five here. When we look at all of these things in step five, it really jets us into step six, where we see there are a lot more things with us that have gone on than just our drinking. This is where we become willing to have God remove all of our defects of character. Not just our drinking problem, but our thinking problem, and our behavior problem, and our eating problems, our smoking problems, our whatever, how we wake up in the morning problems — whatever it is. When we look at all this stuff with another person, we are ready to say, God, I am willing to be free — to have you remove all these defects of character. That's how we know we've really gotten step five done. It's never something we finish. We always get to go back and do it, especially as we sponsor people. The most consistent place my sponsees have fallen off is doing step five again. I've seen some sponsees do a good job with making a start, like I did with my first sponsor. From my experience, it takes a start, and then a big effort, and then another one. It's like going to the bathroom. Really clean every single thing out in step five. Then you're free.
I'm Jerry Banfield. I'm a full-time YouTuber now, and I appreciate you making it to the end of this. All my Alcoholics Anonymous videos are together in my Life playlist on YouTube. I make three videos a day about whatever I can think of that'll help you the most, and AA's step five was on my mind today. I love you. You're awesome.