“After making our review we ask God’s forgiveness and inquire what corrective measures should be taken.” (Page 86, Big Book)
The word ‘forgiveness’ is interesting here. It means that what I’m looking for in the review is the ‘sins’ (if you will) against God, as it will be God who will be providing the forgiveness. Mere errors might be spotted, too, as part of the process, but since these are excusable no forgiveness is required. Forgiveness is required for the inexcusable. If everything were excusable, forgiveness would not be a necessary practice.
This means that, with resentment and fear in particular, we’re not remotely interested in the content. What matters is the fact of permitting hostile, condemnatory thinking towards others, a refusal to accept God’s reality, and God’s will, and—with fear—the refusal to accept God’s providence or guidance and the insistence on trying to fathom the future as though we’re dependent only on ourselves and our meagre resources rather than God’s infinite strength.
In other words, these are moral not psychological questions.
This simplifies matters.
It also suggests that the answer to both is not psychological or even practical, necessarily, but spiritual: reminding ourselves of the surrender to God that has already taken place and realigning ourselves with that decision.
Note that that decision cannot be easily undone except by months or years of deliberate, wilful neglect and rebellion; the notion of surrendering in the morning and taking back one’s will a hundred times a day is like talking about getting married in the morning and divorcing many times a day; one says to God, ‘Here’s my life, take it!’ And He does. He is not easily opposed. One can burn oneself alive by trying to oppose Him, believing one has sincerely ‘taken back one’s will’, but one’s actually in the palm of God’s hand, hurting oneself with illusions and wasting time. The decision has not been reversed. We don’t have that much power, and God is not so easily thwarted.
In any case, the problem here is moral not psychological: everything always boils down to the single authority question; who is in charge, Him or me?