Taking Inventory

Step four: "We made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves"

For several years after I was forced to quit smoking marijuana -- I thought I had done this step. I kept an inventory of myself in my head. I thought that might be good enough at the time.... I thought I knew myself "well enough." That was NOT good enough. I really needed to sort out my part of things from others.

But now I know that this step needs to be written down and reviewed from time to time. Writing things out helps me, in particular, sort things out in my head. "The purpose of a searching and fearless moral inventory is to sort thorugh the confusion and contadiction of our lives, so that we can find out who we really are." "How It Works" Basic Text Since I did my first inventory in 2007, I immediately found some things that I could change. It has to do with being able to sort out "my stuff" from "your stuff." If I know myself well, I won't own "your stuff." I used to take the blame for lots of things that weren't my fault, you see, and now I can avoid taking blame for things that aren't in my inventory or that I know aren't true for me.

"Most of us will find that we were neither as terrible, nor as wonderful, as we supposed." "How It Works" Basic Text. I figured out that I wasn't the anti-christ or the whore of Babylon like I had thought for a while when I was psychotic and using. Before I did my inventory, I was blaming myself for my physical reactions during sexual assault. For a long time I blamed those reactions for all the sexual assault I tolerated. I found out that perhaps, I was too tolerant of others. I was projecting my own pain and helplessness on these monsters that took advantage of me. I was blaming myself for delaying reporting the assaults. Sure, I've done things wrong, but nowadays I can give back the crap that belongs to others. I don't have to take it on. I know what my own crap is, and I don't want yours. That's what the fourth step helped me do.

It seems to me that some people use the tenth step, or the fourth step for that matter, to beat themselves up. It's my humble opinion that doing these steps needs to be done with love and forgiveness. An inventory is not complete without good qualities.

It's hard to feel good about ourselves if we are just sitting around and beating ourselves up. That's why there's a twelfth step. A person should not just sit around contemplating their navel. There's a time for searching ourselves for the answers and there's a time to just accept that we know all we need to for now. Action is important too. We can improve our inventories if we have good deeds to put in there.

Looking back, I can forgive myself for not writing my inventory until I was almost five years in recovery. Who would I have shown it to? I can't think of anyone that I knew back then that I would've trusted with my inventory. It says "We write our inventory without considering the fifth step. We work step four as if there were no step five," "How It Works," Basic Text. We do want to work each of the steps without worrying about the long distance we have to travel through all the steps.