Hello everyone, Rosco here and I just need some advice about Step 4. I have set it up in BB format but, if I may say so I really don't know at what point do I stop? My Sponsor just tells me to do my best. I put down the things that bother me the most. I am also ready to forgive and move on. My sobriety is so very important to me. I just want to make sure that I am on the right path. After doing Step 4 I am feeling kind of surreal. Is this a "normal" feeling after doing this particular step or is it just me?
I'd say surreal is an apt description for what I have felt in the past.
Also, every one of the sponsors I have had over the years have had me include a list of assets, or positives, if you will, in my 4th step. Let me tell you, that has been hard for me because it's easy to look at my defects, but not acknowledge the good!
I am glad that they have. A business owner who takes stock of his good includes what he wants to keep as well as get rid of!
You might want to discuss it further with your sponsor :)
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"There is a principle which is a bar against all information, which is proof against all arguements and which cannot fail to keep a man in everlasting ignorance-that principle is contempt prior to investigation."
~Herbert Spencer
Congratulations on doing your step 4. And, surreal is exactly how I felt when I had done mine.
For me, I don't think it matters what format we use as long as we get it all out and share it with someone else. My sponsor also suggested that I wrote out some good points about myself and not just concentrate on all of my bad points. Also, I know that as more 'stuff' happens or as I remember more I can always go back and do another step 4 whenever I want or need to.
As long as you have done your best you just can't do more than that.
Take care,
Carol
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Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don't matter and those who matter don't mind. ~Dr. Seuss
I never did a 4th in the BB format I thought it to be a bit brief. Have you read the 4th step in the 12&12? That book was writen later than the BB and has quite a bit more to the step. Mine was more of the laundry list of stuff that I had done. I used a composition book and allowed a page (several for the drinking years) for every year that I remember being alive. It was probably too long, but I never doubted if I'd been thorough enough. I did my 5th step with a Priest (who was in the program) and then my sponsor. The purpose on the 4th and 5th steps are to indentify patterns of behavior and the charactor defects behind them. And later to help you make your 8th step list of people who you have harmed. Congrats btw for getting after this step. A lot people never make it that far.
If you feel "surreal" then I would say you are definitely on the right path.
I had to do the 4th Step three times, consider yourself lucky!
1st Time - It took me about 5 hours. My sponsor told me; "Great you got all the planes out of the hanger!" (We were in the Air Force). "In other words, you put down everything everyone else can see in you. Go do it again!"
Angry, I put it away for a while, until he asked me how it was going. "Not bad," I said. "Haven't started the second one huh!", and walked away.
That did it, he wasn't going to get the best of me. Took me a week this time. I took it to his house.
2nd Time - "Hey, not bad! Now you have all the furniture out of the offices in the hanger. Now read the 4th Step with a dictionary in hand and look up the words even if you "think" you know what they mean, write down the definitions and bring it to me."
Puzzled I went home and did what he said. I came up with something like this: (his underlining)
4. Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.
Searching Exploring thoroughly; scrutinizing; penetrating; trying; as, a searching discourse; a searching eye.
Moral Relating to duty or obligation; pertaining to those intentions and actions of which right and wrong, virtue and vice, are predicated, or to the rules by which such intentions and actions ought to be directed; relating to the practice, manners, or conduct of men as social beings in relation to each other, as respects right and wrong, so far as they are properly subject to rules.
Inventory To make an inventory of; to make a list, catalogue, or schedule of; to insert or register in an account of goods; as, a merchant inventories his stock.
Then he said notice that word: moral, it doesn't say immoral, here, look it up and he handed me his dictionary.
Hmmmm.... "Now go home and sweep the hanger and office floors, then dust it out."
OUCH!
3rd Time - It took me for or five months. He told me when I was doing the bad stuff and it really started to hurt, switch to the good stuff for a while, it'll put things in perspective. Then continue bad stuff, good stuff, bad stuff, good stuff until you KNOW who you are and KNOW you have it all.
I never cried so much in all my life as I did in that time. To see myself, and who I had become.
When I gave it to my sponsor he asked me to repeat the Lord's Prayer with him. Then he took his time reading it, it was a mini book. In the end he pointed out that it was a very nice job of dusting out the hanger and that the good stuff was "almost" as long as the bad.
Almost? It wasn't half of the list.
"Ahhhh, but the bad stuff was repetitive with different people." he said. OK, that felt good.
"We prayed, that's God, you shared this with me, another human being, and your writing all this down was the "ourselves" part. Congratulations on doing Step 5!"
Now that felt good!
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Until I know what I'm doing, I'll ask questions from someone who has what I want. If I don't like the answer, it's probably the one I need!
