Steps Four etc. and assets

Sometimes people suggest that, in Step Four, we are to spend as much time listing assets as defects. It's a lovely idea, but so is baking a cake or taking a dog for a walk. Being nice doesn't make it part of a Step.

Let's look at the context:

4. Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.

5. Admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.

6. Were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character.

7. Humbly asked Him to remove our shortcomings.

8. Made a list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all.

9. Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.

10. Continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong promptly admitted it.

Note that, in Step Five, we're conveying the exact nature of our wrongs (not our rights). Steps Six and Seven are concerned, respectively, with defects of character and shortcomings, not with virtues. Steps Eight and Nine are about harms to others and amends for those harms, not good deeds. Even when we get to Step Ten, we're to admit when we're wrong, not when we're right.

It's clear that writing about assets in Step Four serves no purpose within the scope of the Steps.

People might feel a bit bad about their defects. This is quite right. The conscience causes pain on apprehension of wrongdoing (whether in thought, word, or deed, thought being the most important, because it forms the only basis there is for word and deed). The pain prompts the person to do something about it. There's no need to take the pain away artificially by relativising the wrongs. Instead, seek to change the beliefs, thinking, and behaviour that are the root cause, with God's help.