This post is strictly for experienced 12-step people. Most others will not understand it.

   After taking the first three steps, beginning steps 4-9, the "clean house" steps, is not a matter of choice if you are at all committed to recovery. It is just not possible to stretch to a higher level of consciousness if you are burdened beneath a half of a lifetime of shortcomings.

   The fourth step inventory presents a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to pause in your daily life of coping with the tyranny of the urgent to pause and peer carefully back at every situation that caused you to evolve into the person you have become. Few people ever have the chance to take responsibility for what they have done or not done with their life in the middle of it!

   Responsibility is the exact opposite of blame. Responsibility looks forward to eventual betterment of the self, blame looks backward, searching for anyone who can be blamed for every negative outcome.

   Taking the fourth and fifth steps, writing out a searching and fearless moral inventory of yourself, and then admitting your shortcomings to yourself, to God, and to another human being is not easy! It requires a huge reservoir of trust and faith, and it feels like the first time you jumped off of the twenty-five foot platform at the pool. It is scary, exciting, and at the same time freeing. As Al-Anons who have enjoyed the "cover" of an alcoholic whose behavior was so obviously bad for years, we find it especially difficult to take that plunge and take full responsibility for our own stuff. A low performer will blame a poor life outcome on anything other than themselves, and alcoholics make the handiest scapegoats.

   But here is the irony. There is a direct relationship between the level of responsibility you are able to accept for your own life outcome and how much real control you have of your life in the future. In every area of your life where you take full responsibility, be it responsibility for your finances, your relationships, your physical and mental health, your moment to moment happiness, or your spiritual connection, that area will become more free. Peace of mind comes only when that past is acknowledged, accepted, and eventually corrected in areas where you fall far short of what Your Creator had in mind when you were made.

   You were not made with negative behaviors and emotions. You had to learn them, and anything that can be learned can be unlearned. We love children for their innocence, for their spontaneity, and for their whole-hearted joy in just being alive. We were all that way once, and we can be that way again.

"...you are to become as little children."

   By taking an honest and open fourth step inventory, you tease out your own responses to the situations life gave you, not focusing on the situations, but your reactions to them. You are forced to locate those tough areas from your past where you have always hung tenaciously to innocence...where there is absolutely no way you are going to accept any credit for what happened.

   In other words, you have to find the areas where your attitude has always been something like this; "...but who wouldn't react that way. Look at what she did to me! Look at the way she ruined my life. If I hadn't had to marry her, I could have...", or "...I was the victim here...It wasn't my fault, or "...but my Dad abused me, we were poor, we were the wrong race, or religion, or political party."

   All judging of another person will eventually lead to isolation and loneliness. A judged person has a strange power over us. If we have judged them they own us! We have chosen to be offended. We have used what the psychologists call "identification." We have attached ourselves to that person with a smelly attachment cord, and their garbage has been pumped into us. That is why so many Al-Anon meetings are led on the topic of "detachment." Detachment is the deliberate severing of that dirty cord. With personal strength, we don't need to take in their negativity. If they have been rude or hurt us in any way, then that is their stimulus. We still have ultimate control over our response. Everything is dependent upon your response to a situation, not to the situation itself!

   For an elegant description of how powerful this kind of control is, read Dr. Viktor E. Frankl's classic Man's Search For Meaning in which he describes how people in Nazi concentration camps were sometimes able to find a measure of personal freedom even under the most appalling of circumstances. Dr Frankl's logotherapy, which is the heart of his theory, states that human beings are searching, not so much for pleasure in life, as for meaning.

   So, to summarize, it is in those areas where you cannot or will not accept responsibility for your part in what lead to the poor outcome that are precisely the areas blocking you from finding the meaning in life for you. Identifying them, first, and then actively working to dig them out like weeds and eliminate them is an exercise allowing personal growth to restart in a stagnant life. It is only after you have identified these things during your fourth step, admitted them in your fifth, become willing to have God correct them in your sixth, asked God to remove them in your seventh, listed those harmed in your eighth, and then resolved to go forward during the remainder of your life actively making direct amends to those people that will you be freed from their poison.

   It ain't easy, but it's worth it!

Ken P.