“It is plain that a life which includes deep resentment leads only to futility and unhappiness. To the precise extent that we permit these, do we squander the hours that might have been worth while.” (Page 66, Big Book)
The first time through the Steps, one can be entirely excused for having a plethora of resentments, because, after all, one has never been shown how not to have them.
Sometimes a couple of goes through the Steps are necessary to really learn the lessons.
The programme proper starts on page 63. By page 67, a universal, comprehensive, and effective solution to resentment has been provided. In Steps Ten and Eleven, resentment is then prevented from gaining a foothold.
A reminder of the solution—accept everything as it is, treat others with pity, patience, and tolerance, and seek only to do God’s will. Not complicated. No exceptions.
A similar story can be told with fear: once we’ve got the method on page 68 of eliminating fear, the job is simply to implement that and keep it up.
It’s quite right that one does inventory over time, but it should be recalled that the getting-rid-of-resentment bit of Step Four is not actually part of the moral inventory: resentment is the defensive shield that must be eliminated before the inventory proper can be done.
My inventories therefore focus almost entirely on attitude and behaviour and do not involve endless elaborate lists of resentments. The moral inventory might note that I have been resentful and fearful, but the ‘mental content’ of such resentments and fears is irrelevant, except to note the area of my life in which I have not been trusting God and have developed a dependence on something material. Resentment and fear, of course, are but two of scores of defects, no more important in themselves than fawning, competitiveness, or prodigality, to name but three at random. The only point in going through resentments and fears systematically the first few times through the Steps is to learn the lessons of their absurdity, futility, and vanity—in both senses of the latter word.
When, on approaching a quarterly or periodic inventory, I have discovered significant resentment and fear, something must have gone very badly wrong. I had not learned the lessons properly in the first place or there had been a deliberate rejection of the programme and its ideas in one or more areas of my life. Rather than endless writing—or in fact any writing beyond the single words ‘resentment’ and ‘fear’—the advice received was quite rightly to proceed immediately to the God-based solutions on pages 67 and 68 to resentment and fear, respectively (surrender, forgiveness, and trust) and systematically banish such thinking, starting right then and there. Immediately, the resentment and fear started to lift.
For a while, until I got the hang of this, year after year, I would brandish great lists of resentments, bragging of quite how many I had discovered. I was proud of myself, thinking I was being a Very Good Boy and doing a Very Good Job. In fact, I was making something of an exhibition of myself.
The drinker, coming too, might find himself surrounded by milk bottles full of cigarette butts and worse, but if someone five years sober finds such items in his rooms, he has perhaps been living like a drunk. Just so with resentment and fear. I was living like a drunk at fifteen years, from an emotional point of view.
Such childish pursuits had to be gotten rid of and then kept at bay, not gradually stored up for each round of lavish and self-indulgent self-examination.
I’ve learned to pull myself up short at the firstly inkling of resentment and fear and God-squash them. Termites. Cockroaches. Step on them. And to have the grace to look very slightly ashamed if I’m caught indulging them.