One aspect of the inventory process that is not often discussed is reality-checking. Sure, there are lots of moral and spiritual adjustments that need to be made to get rid of resentment. But wouldn’t it be a shame to be upset because I see something that is not there, fail to see something that is there, or misapprehend what is there? Not only does that generate unnecessary upset, but it forms a poor basis for decision-making in my life. If I can’t apprehend things as they are, I can’t make rational decisions, because my actions will interact with the reality that is, not the reality that I falsely construe.
These misapprehensions of reality can occur in all sorts of areas and ways: scepticism about the credible and credulousness of the incredible, belief in conspiracy theories and pseudoscience, ideology-driven thinking, paranoia, belief I can discern others’ thoughts and motivations based on scant evidence, cherry-picking what supports my beliefs and disregarding what does not, exaggerating threat, constructing and scapegoating bogeymen (and ‘bogey-groups’), superstition, moralisation, magical thinking, religious doctrine-driven thinking, projection of my own denied psychological traits onto others or the world, out-picturing fears, phobias, and complexes as projected external threats, emotional reasoning, recasting internal psychological conflicts as conflicts between me and the world, hubristically donning the mantle of expert in fields in which I am not trained, believing that, as an amateur in a domain, I can second-guess, outwit, and outmanoeuvre genuine experts, black-and-white thinking, trusting my own reasoning alone when it is flawed with formal and informal logical fallacies, cognitive biases, and cognitive distortions, preferring to hold unreasoning prejudices rather than educate myself systematically and properly in a particular area, and feeding on political or ideological polemic or polemic presented as news, information, or research.
This is just the start of the list.
I wasn’t ready to examine any of this until I was ready. Why did I become ready? Pain. I was sick and tired of being sick and tired. When I’ve been down rabbit-holes (or, to confuse the metaphor, down multiple rabbit-holes), I have had to want to come back up to the surface of my own volition. Carrots don’t work. The equation has to flip, and it has to become more painful to remain down the rabbit-hole than to back-track.
‘Hey, buddy, there’s a carrot in your ear!’
‘What?’
‘I said, there’s a carrot in your ear!’
‘What?’
‘I said, there’s a carrot in your ear!’
‘I can’t hear you. There’s a carrot in my ear.’
Humility has to be wanted for its own sake.
From Step Five in ‘Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions’:
‘Another great dividend we may expect from confiding our defects to another human being is humility—a word often misunderstood. To those who have made progress in A.A., it amounts to a clear recognition of what and who we really are, followed by a sincere attempt to become what we could be. Therefore, our first practical move toward humility must consist of recognizing our deficiencies. No defect can be corrected unless we clearly see what it is. But we shall have to do more than see. The objective look at ourselves we achieved in Step Four was, after all, only a look. ...More realism and therefore more honesty about ourselves are the great gains we make under the influence of Step Five. As we took inventory, we began to suspect how much trouble self-delusion had been causing us. This had brought a disturbing reflection. If all our lives we had more or less fooled ourselves, how could we now be so sure that we weren’t still self-deceived? How could we be certain that we had made a true catalogue of our defects and had really admitted them, even to ourselves? Because we were still bothered by fear, self-pity, and hurt feelings, it was probable we couldn’t appraise ourselves fairly at all.’
Firstly, I had to want to change; secondly, I had to submit myself to a process of change, which involved becoming teachable. And teachable by teachers, not by hand-picked whisperers whose content reflects, compounds, and amplifies my feverish fears and hang-ups.
To sum up: the journey back to reality involves admitting there is a problem, then taking concrete action to systematically change my processes for gathering, assembling, and assessing information about reality.