Step Four: “Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.”
At treatment, I signed up for the chores no one else wanted. Otherwise, you had to rotate jobs and I preferred just to know what I was supposed to do. I emptied the trash in the communal kitchen and I got up before everyone else to make the first of two pots of coffee that were all we got for the day. (Couldn’t have us addicts unfettered access to caffeine, now could they?) I loved that job because it meant I got at least one cup of joe.
I also enjoyed the relative quiet of the morning, before it was broken by sixteen barely-sober basketcases elbowing each other out of the way for access to showers and cereal. I’d take my mug and journal and sit on the top of the rickety wooden stairs in the back of the dorm to watch the sun rise. I was at treatment in rural Pennsylvania in late spring and early summer; the mornings were cool and damp, the wood stairs cold under my legs.
I worked on my Fourth Step inventory there.
In the Big Book of AA, Step Four comes with detailed instructions: It’s a worksheet. You get to draw lines and make headings and there’s a kind of multiple-choice aspect to it as well. It is one of the few steps that feels like it has clear right and wrong answers. It is the Step that feels the closest to a test. I wanted to ace it.
Write out your resentments, it says. Then find your part. Resentment is when you feel wrong but, ah-ha, says the Big Book: Find where you wronged the other person.
No problem. Everything was my fault. I resented people but knew I was wrong to resent them. It was me who lied, who stole, who slept with the wrong person, or failed to keep a promise. If I didn’t get a job, it was because I hadn’t deserved it. If I lost a friend, it was because I didn’t deserve that friendship.
Sipping my coffee, believing myself ready to show this masterpiece of self-flagellation to my counselor, I realized I was proud of recounting of what a piece of shit I was. I thought of something we heard from the counselors a lot: “Pay attention to what you’re resisting. Pay attention to the places you’re just doing what you’ve always done.”
I had listed my faults with terrible ease. Writing my Fourth Step hadn’t scared me. It had not required me to be searching and fearless. The answers had been at the ready. Obsessing over all the pain I’d caused and the stupid acts I’d performed is what had propelled that bottle of Xanax over my lips a few weeks before.
What terrified me was to look closely enough at all those situations to pick out where I’d acted out of ignorance, perhaps, or blind optimism. Or how some of the shameful behavior was rooted in how I’d learned to get my needs met from growing up in an alcoholic home. I did not want to separate my genuinely selfish impulses from those times when I had just done the only thing I knew how to do, whether that was to drink too much or make out with someone or stay in bed instead of meeting a deadline.
That level of examination would require me to really remember what happened – if I could – and recognize my particular choices; it was so much easier to blow past all of that and land on “I’m just a piece of shit.”
Hating myself came naturally. What filled me with fear was to love the person who’d made those mistakes. What I needed to search for was the grace to forgive her.
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