Overview of Alcoholics Anonymous 4th Step
Alcoholics Anonymous’ 4th step is:
The 4th step in Alcoholics Anonymous asks you to make a life inventory - admitting things to yourself and others.
“Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.”
According to Alcoholics Anonymous’ website, www.aa.org, “Step four is our vigorous and painstaking effort to discover what these liabilities in each of us have been, and are.”
The fourth step in the 12 step program for Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) is a crucial and hard step for many people to take, but it is necessary to accomplish in order to continue with the other eight steps.
What a Person Must Do to Complete the Fourth Step
In step four, a person must complete a written inventory about their life. In order to do this a person will have to admit to and reveal personal information that may cause a rise of emotions to occur.
The fourth step inventory worksheet may vary between different AA groups. According to www.sober.org, Step 4 is considered to be the big written inventory step and there are many different ways in which it is recommended to be taken. For example, a variant in the 12&12 uses the seven deadly sins as its basis whereas an early member of AA used a list of 20 defects of character as his outline.
No matter how the inventory worksheet is provided for a person, the goal is to have the person learn in depth knowledge about themself and deal with the problems that have caused them to resort to drinking.
Taking the fourth step will require a person to be completely honest and forthcoming of their sins and secrets that they hold on to. It will also require that they name all of the people that have caused any type of conflict in their life and admit to the resentment that they have for these people.
This step is difficult for many recovering alcoholics to take because they fear that their deepest darkest secrets may be exposed or they fear having to relive the pain from memories.
According to www.sober.org, many recovering alcoholics have one or more significant experiences in their past that they are highly reluctant to put on paper, either because the incident is one about which they feel great shame (the horror of which we dare not speak, the big one we plan to take to our grave untold) or because its revelation might cause severe personal or legal injury to ourselves or others.
To avoid this, a person may opt to keep their inventory hidden in a safe and secure location where nobody can find, or they can write their experience in a way that is not telling the secret to anybody who reads it, but is known to the author of what the experience really is, like an undercover message.
Alcoholics Anonymous 4th step may be one of the hardest steps to overcome but it can be made private to the author of the inventory and is the most honest step a person will make through the program that will help them better understand themself.
