I heard a speaker recently who was very good, had clearly worked the programme, and had taken the trouble to come a long way to share his story with us, which effort I recognise as a wonderful demonstration of the programme.
But, as is often the case, it's the differences that are so revealing. You only realise where the edge of the table is in the dark when you push and something falls off it.
He referred to recovery as a journey into self. And he talked about his own dislike of the term character defects, preferring character defences, i.e. defences that once worked but no longer did.
Now, let's address only briefly the notion of 'character defences that once worked': worry, meddling, malice, sloth, greed, contempt, indifference, and arrogance never did work. They never benefitted me, and they benefitted neither man nor beast. There is no situation where a virtue will not be more advantageously deployed than its corresponding defect. If, in a particular situation, a 'defect' were to be advantageously deployed, it would not, in that case, be a defect. It is axiomatically impossible for a defect to be beneficial. Traits can be either helpful or unhelpful. Candour mis-deployed is indiscretion. Discretion mis-deployed is dishonesty. Candour and discretion are virtues. Indiscretion and dishonesty are defects. Let's not muddle them.
The real issue, here, is the fact that Step Four is unavoidably a moral inventory.
We were sick, but there is a moral problem, which the Step Four is there to address. That's why it's a moral inventory not a medical inventory.
We were mentally crooked, but the inventory is still a moral inventory. Individuals who don't see things straight need the crooked thinking bent back into shape as part of the process (and you could legitimately call this psychological), but that's really a foundational element to get the individual to the same starting block as everyone else. It's in service of the inventory not the inventory itself.
In Step Three we have decided to extirpate self and place ourselves unreservedly in the hands of God, to serve Him and only Him.
This process of extirpation requires as its first move an inventory of where self has been manifest in our lives. The question of who I put first, me or the totality of things (God and humanity, with myself as an element of the latter), is essentially a moral question.
Step Four, therefore, is not about tracing my maladjustment back to those in my childhood who, as a therapist might assert, are the culprits; it's not about weasel language to avoid any sense of wrongdoing (for instance the virtuous-sounding 'people-pleasing', which is really dereliction of divine duty, vanity, and manipulation, or the equally virtuous-sounding 'perfectionism', which manifests either as avoidance, lack of perspective, triviality, inefficiency, materialism, martinet-ism, or outright bullying); this is not about the assertion of the so-called needs and wants of self, the reassertion of a pitiful, self-pitying, self-abasing downtrodden ego.
It's about defects of belief, thinking, and behaviour.
We're not beating ourselves up. We're beating up the devil in whose thrall we have been trapped.
Only in this way will we wriggle free into the arms of God.