Using Steps 1, 2 and 3, Working Steps 4 and 5.
So I have taken steps 1, 2 and 3, now, how do I use them in my everyday life? At the end of step 3 in the 12x12 is the serenity prayer.
“God Grant me the Serenity to accept the things I cannot change; the Strength to change the things I can; and the Wisdom to know the difference.”
How do I tie all this together? The Big Book talks about a spiritual tool kit to be used. Well it only makes sense then, that as I go along in the steps that I will be picking up knowledge on how to use these tools and will be able to use them to alleviate some of the daily build up of garbage that use to plague my life and daily living.
One of the first things I had to do when I first got sober was to quit fighting everything and everyone. I had to take a step back, take a deep breath, relax, and seriously realize that I was not the boss; that I did not really know what was best for everyone; that others did not have to live up to my expectations of them. (God Grant me the Serenity to accept the things I cannot change) Secondly I had to realize that I need to change my thinking, of both me and the world around me. That it could not be done by my thinking but by my actions. The only thing I could work on was me and not the universe around me. I was going to have to start taking actions to retrain my brain, my way of thinking, to see what I needed to do, and not waste the time or energy on trying to change the world to fit me. (Strength to change the things I can) Lastly, I needed to remember I knew right from wrong. I needed to listen to the voice inside me (my conscience) and start to take action on my life instead of reacting to the situations I found myself in. I had always believed in God; but now it was time to start taking actions on those beliefs and as I took action, I found my belief and trust deepened. (Wisdom to know the difference)
Now the actions I took where quiet simple (and they still are), things like: consistently be on time, to work, meetings, appointments, whatever.
Be prepared for what was at hand: work, meetings, whatever.
Say please, thank you, hello or goodbye.
Living up to my promises, doing what I say I am going to do, when I say I will do it.
Staying on my side of the street, keeping it clean, doing the next right thing, and trusting God that no one will swerve into it.
Now these are all pretty simple things, but they are things I never did with consistency. With me it was hit or miss, will I or won’t I? I had to start disciplining myself from within before I was disciplined from without. A classic example is: if the speed limit is 30 mph, and I am driving, then I need to keep my speed to 30 or less, (discipline from within), if not the cops pull me over and I get a speeding ticket (disciple from without). The benefit of all this when I first got sober, (and still to this day), is that I had a lot less fear or anxiety in my daily life. I was beginning to start to realize that I was only human, faults and all, and I was starting to establish some boundaries for myself on what was and was not acceptable behavior.
So now….. Big bad Step 4: all my dirty little secrets…… all my he-he-he- he they didn’t catch me and now you want me to blab this to someone? I garnered a lot of fear of this step by sitting in meetings listening to people who had not taken a fourth step, tell why they did not need to, and why in their judgment it wasn’t necessary. Bullshit… that kept me from not doing one for almost 18 months, allowing myself to justify my stupidity and stay sick when in reality; it is rather simple, fulfilling and a great tool I have used on a couple of occasions when the crap has built up in my life.
A couple of things I was taught and learned. First is the fourth step is not, and again I remind myself, is not, a fifth step. Second it is a moral inventory, it is not a listing of all the crap I pulled or times I jaywalked or ran a stop sign or drove drunk. It is most definitely not a listing of all the harms others have done me. I am looking at me; all of me, the good and the bad. The Big Book writes about how a store that does not take inventory will soon go broke. When I was managing a 7/11 I use to do a daily inventory of the store, checking for items that had expired or were past their use by date. Nobody wants to buy old milk, lol. The good items I left on the shelf and the expired items got pulled. I approach the fourth step in much the same manner. Lastly, everyone I knew in A.A. that had what I wanted, that sense of inner peace and that belief in a God of their own understanding had done a fourth step and only talked about the benefits of doing one.
Now I am not going to go through the process of doing a fourth step. I did mine the way it is written in the Big Book of A.A. What I am going to write is not new information. It is in my memory; I just need to put it into an orderly fashion on paper so I can look at it. A couple of lessoned learned from this. The Big Book writes “Instincts on rampage bulk at investigation” and mine surely did. I had to make the decision to make the decision. My mind is a dark place sometimes. I had to make the decision to do a fourth step and then make a decision to actually sit down with pencil and paper and actually write it out. Next, I had to define some things in my brain. First there was no grading of my work, it is a self examination. It does not have to be perfect. Next, what was the definition of resentment? Thanks go to a very good friend who told this to me. “If, when I was 5, I had a little red wagon, and it broke, and I got mad, that is a memory…. If I am still mad that wagon broke, that is a resentment”. Any memory, person, event or institution that brings up an emotional response, needs to be looked at. I started from today and worked my way back in time to my childhood. Then I looked at what had happened or I perceive as having happened.
Next I look at what this affected in my life. After I had started writing this became quiet fascinating, I could start to see how “A” + “B”= pushing my buttons on “C”. Up to this point though, I am not looking at me, just what others have done and how I let it affect me. So the next thing I look at is what my part in it all was. This is where I had to honestly look at me. How others affected me was as far as I ever got in life, it never occurred to me that my action might have precipitated some of it. (well actually after looking at it, most of it…) This is where I had to admit that a lot of what I had done was wrong, and it had caused pain, suffering and negative consequences. It made me feel like I had been a little shit most of my life.
After having written all of this down, I had to look at my fears. My fear as I discover has been my primary motivation in life. Fear of not getting what’s mine, fear of losing what’s mine, fear of someone else getting more than me, all of that motivated me in a weird, convoluting way. Be they rational or irrational fears I need to list them all and look at them. I can no longer afford to live on a fear based mentality, not if I plan on staying sober.
The last part of my inventory deals with my sex life. I had to be common sensed when I looked at this. I like sex, but it caused me many problems, so I needed to come to an understanding of myself and not be maudlin or guilt ridden when looking at it. Many, many times in my drinking life, I would find myself, literally with my pants down around my knees in situations I should not have been in, and would not have even considered if I had been sober. It would have been a lot easier to just write it off as “boys being boys” or “just one of those drunken things, stupid me, not going to do that again” but it happened too often to be able to just shrug it off. It caused me too much shame, remorse and led to a lot of forgetting “drinking”. A big part of it was in the “if you feel I am ok and having sex meant you did, and then no matter what I know, I must be ok”. Not a rational, sensible, responsible way of living, but when I drank, I could not claim to be that. So I had to put aside the guilt, remorse and shame I felt to look at my sex life, remembering I was building a future and not living or reliving the past. I need to look over my past relationships, see what they actually were not my dream version of them. I do not need to relive the past but I need to learn from my mistakes and establish a ground zero on which to build a future.
Having written all this down, I was amazed by it. I never realized how much power I had given the people in my life, over me. I was like a silly little puppet, pull this string, and watch me react this way. I had not been taking actions on my life but spend a life reacting to the situations around me. Mostly those reactions involved drinking and hoping it would change on its own. In reading it over, I felt a couple of things rather strongly. I felt guilty and ashamed of a lot of the actions I had taken. I, also, felt extremely stupid. There is nothing like writing out my drunken stupidity to make me feel stupid.
Through the course of writing my first fourth step, some things became clear. I am human and made lots of mistakes in my life. I am not a bad person; rather I am sick person suffering from the disease of alcoholism. That even though I am sick, that is not an excuse for inexcusable behavior or actions. When I was a child, it was ok to be a child, but as an adult, I need to grow up both mentally and emotionally. I need to learn to take a course of action on my life, not react to my surroundings and also, I needed to take responsibilities for my past actions if I wanted to be free to live a happy productive life today and tomorrow.
Now I did not just wake up one morning and decide to do a fourth step. I looked around at my life at 18 months of sobriety and realized it was pretty shitty. My girlfriend (or honestly, the lady I wanted to be my girlfriend) who had been in the fellowship had gone back to drinking. The car I had finagled into getting was being repossessed. I learned it helps to make payments on time. I was living in a trailer, in a trailer park, and my kitty cat had just died, having run over it by accident with the car that was about to be repossessed. So my life was not a shining example of rocketing to the top of sobriety. I was in a lot of emotional pain, confused, and unsure as to what to do just as when I got sober, but by this time I knew there was a better way, and that the only one able to do it was me. It was a little sickening knowing I had no one to blame but myself. So that was the driving forces behind me taking and doing a fourth step, pain and fear.
Those were also the motivating forces behind me taking the fifth step. I had never in the beginning of my sobriety done any step without the motivation of pain. Be it emotional or mental, pain and fear had been the key motivational forces in my recovery. I had to feel the flame on my ass (sorry, graphic, but true) in order to take some sort of action. I have not been one to joyous leap into the thought of change. Change is painful, so the pain of not changing had to be greater. I gave fair warning; my mind is a dark place sometimes, quirky that way.
So now it is time to do Step Five! Ouch…. 5.”Admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.” There is nothing I can say about, it scared me. I had been raised to be a man, self sufficient, me onto myself and the thought of blabbing my inner self to someone was just: it gave me the willies. My sponsor at that time was a very pragmatic man and we met every Tuesday at 7:00 p.m. for one hour, and went page by page through the first 164 pages of the Big Book. After sitting on my backside not doing a fourth, once it was done, I wanted to get the fifth step out of the way.
For up to this point, all I had done was, 1. Admit I had a problem, 2. Admit I needed help. 3. Pray to this God, that I know very little about, that He will help. 4. Look at myself and realize that. “Hey guess what? I am a mess”. All of this I had admitted to myself, but no real action had been taken. So, why do a fifth step? Why not just work on what I found in the fourth step by myself? I’m a pretty smart guy, couldn’t be too hard, not like I am trying to do this drunk or anything. I’m sober and my life is just wonderful. Right! See my mind will try to talk me into all sorts of stupid, irrational or just downright dumb ideas. There is a line in the Big Book, in writing about the Fifth Step, which goes “The best reason first: If we skip this vital step, we may not overcome drinking”. No second reason is given, and I really don’t think any other reason is necessary. Now here I want to add something important to me. I never feared drinking, not when I was and not when I got sober. I do not fear it today. What scared me then were the consequences of my drinking. The lack of control when I took the first drink, the guilt, shame, remorse and fear that came with the drinking. That is why I needed to overcome drinking, because I knew that if left to my own, I would drink. (this is still the case, I am granted a daily reprieve contingent on my spiritual condition.)
So first I had to admit to God these things I had done, and in doing so I came to realize I was admitting them to myself. This is who I really am, not the person I thought or hope or wanted to be, but who I really, underneath all the B.S., was.
On that Tuesday at 7.p.m., I was sitting in my car, hands clutching the steering wheel, every irrational fear I could think of and some new ones to boot, coursing through my body, trying to figure a way out of having to do this. Sometimes will power is all I have, and I had to make myself get out of the car and go in to see my sponsor. Now my sponsor is a nice guy, and I respected him, trusted him, and knew in my head that this was the right thing to do, but try and get through to my emotions? Fat chance. So why am I doing this with my sponsor? Well the Big Book gives me plenty of alternatives to a sponsor. My reasoning was this: if I went to a doctor or psychologist I would get a medical view, if I went to a priest, I would get a religious view, if I went to a stranger, I most likely get the cops called or a really weird look. All of those are valid, but I needed someone who knew sobriety, who could look over and tell me what I needed, or if I was getting off course, steer me in the right direction. Like God either is or He is not, so it is with trust. I either trust my sponsor or I do not.
Well I trusted my sponsor. So I sat down across from his desk, and he had me start to read what I had written. Now I learned something valuable that I still use today, he told me only to read what I had written, not add anything like “well let me explain this or here is how etc.”, just what was written. That is what I did, read what I had written, and as I went along, he would add stories or memories from his own experience. Now after an hour, he stopped me. He said he would see me again next Tuesday to finish it. I was like… but .. but .. but.. I am not done…still it was just another meeting with my sponsor. The next Tuesday I went through the same emotional turmoil in the car before I decided to go in and finish. When I went in it was the same, just read what I had written, with him adding along to it from his own experience. I learned a valuable lesson in that. That was, the fifth step is no more important than the fourth or third or sixth or seventh. There are twelve steps and I need them all and they are of equal value in sobriety. When we got done with my fifth step, we talked a little about it, and he gave instructions to follow reference to the sixth step, but that was really it.
This whole emotional build up I had, had, was just that, in my head. Nothing earth shattering, did not get arrested, no one looked at me strange or said they saw a spiritual glow or anything. I had taken the action I should have, someone knew me for who I really was and the sun came out on Wednesday just like normal. It was the next day or the day after I came to realize a couple of things about this whole experience. One was I felt I had now earned my seat at the A.A. table, and that felt good. That someone knew me for who I actually was and had not been revolted, and that felt good. I started to feel that there was hope for me, and yes that felt really good. So nothing about the fifth step had any bad results, it all led me to feeling better about who I was and my situation in life.
As I end this up about the fifth step I want to add one thing. It has been my privilege in A.A. to sponsor people, both men and women. As such I basically take them through the Big Book like my sponsor did with me. When it comes to the fifth step, I listen to their whole fifth step at one sitting. I have comes to realize the importance of getting it all out, for the person involved. The Big Book does not say anything about stopping, yes or no, it just says “We pocket our pride and go to it”. Next I realized after hearing my first fifth step from someone I sponsored, just how boring it was and how self absorbed it is. Sitting in the other chair, listening and adding my experience when needed, I can see the transformation of the person doing the step.
After listening to my 1st Fifth step, I remember calling my sponsor, and asking him; “Was mine really that boring? And his answer, was classic, yep, I don’t remember anything you read me”. I have listening to many fifth steps and can honestly say I do not remember one single incident from any of them. Lastly, after my fifth step, when I got home, I realized I had left out the whole relationship with my girlfriend. It was not intentional, I had just purely forgotten. When I called and told my sponsor this, he was not surprised, he just said, well inventory it, like you do in the fourth, and we will go over it, like in the fifth, next time we meet. Once the first large chunk has been gone through, I was not surprised those small pieces came up to the surface or that I remembered things from the past. The difference being is that now I have a tool to use and I know how to use it.
