Chapter 5
HOW IT WORKS
Rarely have we seen a person fail who has thoroughly followed our path.
I’ve never seen anyone fail who has thoroughly followed this path.
The book hedges to avoid controversy.
But there is no need to fear falling into the gap left between ‘rarely’ and ‘never’.
What is the path? The steps.
Note that they do not need to be done well; they need to be done thoroughly. These are overlapping but distinct parameters.
What is failing? Drinking again.
Don P would say, “If you’re an alcoholic, you never need to drink again.”
Those who do not recover are people who cannot or will not completely give themselves to this simple program, usually men and women who are constitutionally incapable of being honest with themselves.
Giving myself to the programme means believing what it says and doing what it says.
Doing what it says even if I do not believe what it says will eventually result in me believing what it says as long as I’m willing to be shown how I’m wrong and the programme is right.
The only way not to give oneself to this programme is really to continue to think one’s own thoughts, have one’s own beliefs, persist with one’s attitudes, even though the net result of these thoughts, beliefs, and attitudes is misery.
The honesty required is not so-called cash-register honesty or candour with others but self-honesty.
The very particular self-honesty required is the honesty to recognise that (a) when it comes to drink, I am not to be trusted and (b) when it comes to everything else, self-will is not to be trusted.
The thing stopping me from completely giving myself to this simple programme is the ongoing practice of the programme that landed me on the rocks in the first place: my way.
There are such unfortunates. They are not at fault; they seem to have been born that way. They are naturally incapable of grasping and developing a manner of living which demands rigorous honesty. Their chances are less than average.
Of course, there are other forms of honesty. I have to write an honest Step Four. I have to share this candidly in Step Five. I have to write an honest Step Eight. I have to share this candidly in Step Nine as I make amends. I have to be honest with myself about where I am deviating from God’s will in Step Ten.
And I have to be sincere—which is a form of honesty—in my earnest seeking of God’s will in Step Eleven and in my prioritisation of carrying the message, followed by practising the principles in all my affairs. Once I’m done practising the principles in all my affairs, there’s nothing else, as all of my affairs are covered by this.
There are those, too, who suffer from grave emotional and mental disorders, but many of them do recover if they have the capacity to be honest.
I was not well when I got sober, in many respects other than alcoholism.
What does recover mean?
Not drink again.
Well, I have not drunk again, since July 1993, so I can safely say I have recovered, with the usual disclaimers.
The honesty under discussion is self-honesty.
This means seeing myself as I am, and the two chief truths were these:
- I had a problem
- I did not have a solution.
This opened the door to accepting the attitudes and actions of AA without resistance.
Whilst I do not recognise I have a problem or think I have a solution, I will resist the attitudes and actions of AA, and recovery is impossible.
The recovery on offer in this sentence is recovery from alcoholism, but I can happily report that the treatment for alcoholism—like a broad-spectrum antibiotic—also resolved the other disorders.
Our stories disclose in a general way what we used to be like, what happened, and what we are like now.
This is frequently misquoted. People say that we share in a general way, which, to be fair, we might well do, but there is the idea that this is what the Big Book is instructing.
Note that ‘general’ modifies the disclosure, i.e. what the stories show, rather than the stories themselves.
The stories in AA, both in the Big Book and in meetings, are often vivid, detailed, even lurid, and sometimes eye-watering or uncomfortable to read or listen to. At least the good ones. The boring ones are often the ones where people share in a general way, daisy-chaining quotations from the Book but not actually going into detail. I don’t really learn very much from those stories. It’s the vivid ones that really produce disclosures. A dozen different characterful stories can disclose the same vivid truth about the pre-recovery condition, the process of recovery, and the post-recovery condition. It is thus the disclosures that are general, not the stories.
The other misquotation is where people say that they are going to share what ‘it’ was like and what ‘it’ is like now.
From ‘Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland’:
“I proceed [said the Mouse]. ‘Edwin and Morcar, the earls of Mercia and Northumbria, declared for him; and even Stigand, the patriotic archbishop of Canterbury, found it advisable—’ “ “Found what?” said the Duck. “Found it,” the Mouse replied rather crossly: “of course you know what ‘it’ means.” “I know what ‘it’ means well enough, when I find a thing,” said the Duck: “it’s generally a frog, or a worm. The question is, what did the archbishop find?”
When people describe what ‘it’ was like, you can sometimes get something of a catalogue of events, without any narrative, or any explicit points being made.
What’s more interesting than the circumstances and events—which might need to be disclosed to produce the architecture of the share—is the person and their thoughts, feelings, and experience, hence what ‘we’ were like and what ‘we’ are like now.
The middle clause, ‘what happened’ is interesting: I recover not just because of actions I take but because of the whole shooting match; in fact, recovery seems to be something that happens to me, even though I have to activate it with actions of my own.
If you have decided you want what we have and are willing to go to any length to get it—then you are ready to take certain steps.
PART I
“If you have decided”
A decision is a commitment to a course of action, following a rejection of all other possible courses of action, and entails the pursuit of that course of action without hesitation or deviation, and without constant qualms, second-guessing, and revisiting.
If the back door is left open on the decision, i.e. the possibility of reneging on or reversing the decision or substituting a different decision is perpetually in the wings, then the decision is doomed. All it takes is for the devil to win just one of the continual arguments about whether the decision is right for the decision to be scuppered. This lands me back at square one.
So a decision is not like a January resolution destined to falter and collapse by mid February but a solemn undertaking to follow through on a course of action, come what may. It is a commitment to action in the realisation that opposing forces will constantly try to undermine it: after all, this decision is a decision to exterminate, hobble, or at least deactivate the ego, and the ego will not go quietly into the night. One must expect a counterrevolution, and one must expect its tactics to be unfair and bloody. Decisions must therefore involve considerable resolve.
Readiness is not a condition in itself but a function of the combination of wanting and willing, packaged into a decision. Readiness is thus not a feeling but an objective condition. If the components of wanting + willing + decision are there, one is ready, regardless of whether one feels ready.
What are those certain Steps? The Steps.
What are the Steps? The ideas, attitudes, and actions suggested from the front page of the Book through to the end of page 164, summarised on page 59.
If you have decided you want what we have and are willing to go to any length to get it—then you are ready to take certain steps.
PART II
“you want what we have”
Who is ‘we’? The people that wrote the Book, not the people in the room where this is read out.
What do they have? An effective relationship with God, which forms the basis for their life. A relationship of trust (which eliminates fear) and reliance (which eliminates self-reference in decision-making): it is a relationship of seeking to do God’s will and only to do God’s will, regardless of the personal consequences.
What does wanting mean?
Well, first of all it’s emotional, and second of all it’s necessarily single-minded. If I want a working relationship with God, as described above, and I also want to call the shots, I can have neither. I’m afraid this is all-or-nothing. The deal on the table is an absolute deal.
To want this means to have decided I do not want anything else anymore. Even if I feel the pull, I now know it is a sickly pull and have no real desire.
This really is about wanting to gamble everything on the God idea.
If you have decided you want what we have and are willing to go to any length to get it—then you are ready to take certain steps.
PART III
“and are willing to go to any length to get it”
Willingness means being prepared to take actions despite:
- Effort
- Pain
- Uncertainty
- Sacrifice (of the alternatives)
One must be clear about this in advance, or one will be ambushed by them. In other words, they have to be accounted for and accepted. The process will definitely involve these at times, and so, when they crop up, they will not be taken as signs that anything has gone wrong or reasons for slowing or halting the process.
If you have decided you want what we have and are willing to go to any length to get it—then you are ready to take certain steps.
PART IV
“then you are ready to take certain steps.*”
This means that readiness is not discerned directly but is concluded as a function of the combination of decision + want + willing.
If one does not ‘feel’ ready, one must see where the problem lies: decision, want, or willing.
If one has decided, one wants, and one is willing, then one is ready, regardless of whether one ‘feels’ ready.
To be ready to do something does not mean feeling confident, bullish, relaxed, or cheerful.
It is a technical condition, not an emotional condition.
If one is equipped, one is ready.
What are the certain Steps? The Twelve Steps, which summarise the programme, and the programme is the contents of the Book up to page 164.
At some of these we balked. We thought we could find an easier, softer way. But we could not.
This is often read as meaning, ‘the programme is hard’. Read properly, it suggests that the easiest, softest thing to do is to write the inventory, make the amend, sponsor the person.
The ways that are not easier or softer: self-reliance, materialism, drugging myself, distracting myself, trying to solve all eight areas of my life (the mental, physical, practical, social, philosophical, religious, moral, and spiritual) by talking about my feelings and what I think about my feelings (to a paid or unpaid listener).
With all the earnestness at our command, we beg of you to be fearless and thorough from the very start.
So much for ‘suggestions’. That’s a politeness at one point. At other points, they care so much about the reader that they beg us to take the Steps. Here, although they’ll go back on, the gloves are off for a moment.
The requirements are fearlessness and thoroughness, not skill or attainment. The programme works because of what I put in, not whether the results match some standard.
Fearlessness and thoroughness are down to me, so success is down to me.
Fearlessness is not—counterintuitively—lack of the emotion of fear, but fearlessness of action, in other words acting right even though I’m frightened. Ironically, fearlessness is required only in those situations where I am feeling fear.
What is fearlessness of action?
Do everything asked of me, promptly.
What is thoroughness of action?
Do everything asked of me properly, as instructed, with the full scope indicated.
Some of us have tried to hold on to our old ideas and the result was nil until we let go absolutely.
I have to let go absolutely because, although not all old ideas are wrong, I apparently can’t tell the difference between the right ones and the wrong ones, or I would have got rid of the wrong ones, which means that, to me, wrong ideas seem right, so I’m not in a position to judge.
So one must set aside all of them.
How does one live?
Ask God and get on with what one believes to be God’s will.
Anything that is true will be saved for me to retrieve at such time as I am fit to receive it back.
The result is nil until I let go absolutely because just one idea can keep me stuck in a particular attitude, thinking pattern, behaviour pattern, relationship, or situation, and that one attitude, pattern, relationship, or situation can block me from God and block me from happiness.
You only need one broken bone to be incapacitated, even though there are 206 bones in the body.
Remember that we deal with alcohol—cunning, baffling, powerful!
Metonymy: it’s really alcoholism that is such things.
What is alcoholism? The mechanical subroutine in the brain that fires up, hijacks the system to take a drink, then yields to a second automated system that keeps the system held hostage, drinking drink after drink until the system conks out.
How could a mechanical subroutine be such things?
These are metaphors.
The least metaphorical is ‘powerful’.
When activated with sufficient force, it performs a system-override, and drinking cannot be opposed.
Why cunning? Because, to ensure its own survival, it covers its tracks, supplying a cover story so the individual does not realise they are acting under compulsion. A clever ruse!
Why baffling? Because the cover story, when coldly analysed the next days, seems ridiculous, but in the heat of the moment seems compelling. It’s baffling only until it’s explained. Then it’s boring.
Without help it is too much for us. But there is One who has all power—that One is God. May you find Him now!
God can block the impulse to drink from becoming action.
God has all power, being the Creator.
That does not mean we have no power, because God delegates us power.
If He did not, we would be entirely inert, like rocks, yet we have both will and vigour: these are delegated powers.
Those delegated powers are insufficient, which means we have to go back to the source.
Half measures availed us nothing. We stood at the turning point. We asked His protection and care with complete abandon.
Stopping half the holes in the bucket does make the bucket sound.
Removing half of the necrotic tissue does not stop the gangrene.
Clearing half the landmines does not make the terrain safe.
When half measures are taken, failure is not always immediate.
What is ‘nothing’?
Drunk.
If the engines of the plane cut out, the passengers do not immediately die. It takes a while to crash. Only a foolish passenger would think themselves safe under such circumstances.
The crowning folly of half measures: jumping out of a window and, half-way down, remarking that nothing bad has happened, so nothing bad will.
Here are the steps we took, which are suggested as a program of recovery:
If you want what we have (a relationship with God), do what we did.
‘Suggested’ merely means politely offered, because the writers are not in a position to command. Further than ‘suggested’ they cannot go.
They are not saying that those who take some of the Steps or none of the Steps can achieve the same result as those who do take the Steps and take all of them.
We know that half measures avail us nothing.
We know that delay is potentially fatal.
We know of no other solution.
Essentially: you are free to take the Steps or not take the Steps, but if you do not take them promptly, properly, and fully, you could relapse at any point, and, if you do, you might never stop and might die a nasty death. The choice is entirely yours. What will you choose? Keep us posted.
The fact the Steps are suggested is merely an indication of the politeness and lack of direct authority of the authors. It is not really the generous extension of a range of options, with the reader luxuriating in the embarrassment of opportunities, like someone with a freshly opened box of chocolates.
The suggestion is really the offering of Hobson’s choice: there is only one valid option available.
This phrase is said to have originated with Thomas Hobson (1544–1631), a livery stable owner in Cambridge, England, who offered customers the choice of either taking the horse in the stall nearest to the door or taking none at all.
So, there’s only one good on offer, but I need not buy it at all.
1. We admitted we were powerless over alcohol—that our lives had become unmanageable.
Powerless = powerless over the first drink (mental obsession) + powerless over the subsequent drinks (physical craving).
Once these two compulsions are operative, I am not in charge of the course of my day and thus my life: the compulsions are.
This is the unmanageability.
It is not a quality of life per se or even my life but a function of my powerlessness.
This is made clear on the next page: we could not manage our own lives.
It has nothing to do with general incompetence, immaturity, upset, or immorality, and it certainly has nothing to do with the particular conditions of my life.
It is purely a function of powerlessness.
Once power is restored, so is the ability to manage my life.
2. Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.
Sanity = not drinking.
Restore us to sanity = restore us to the condition of not drinking, which prevailed before one started to drink.
If I am powerless to achieve something, and that thing is to be achieved, the actuating power must necessary be a power greater than myself.
More than that, it must be divine, hence the capitalisation.
Believe: to assent intellectually to the idea.
Came to believe: arrived at that assent over time, in stages, through a process.
3. Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him.
A decision is to take one prong of a fork in the road. Once proceeding down that prong of the fork, I cannot cut across to the other prong of the fork: I can either proceed forwards or go all the way back to the fork and take the other prong.
There is no such thing as undoing the decision moment by moment, ‘taking my will back’.
If I go down a prong of the fork, and, several miles later, rebel, I might walk back a few paces, get stuck in a thicket by the side of the road, or jump up and down on the spot screaming, but I have not reversed the decision, I have not taken my will back: I’m still miles down that prong of the fork. I’m merely resisting in the moment.
I would have to unwind the decision all the way back to the decision, and that is the work of the same period it took since I made the decision in the first place.
Our will: the moment-by-moment decisions as to what to believe, think, and do.
Our lives: the gradual manifestation of those decisions in my circumstances.
Care of God: God is wholly powerful and wholly good, which means all affairs will be thoroughly looked after.
As we understood Him: my conception of God does not change God or change what will happen if I turn my will and life over to Him. The train is going where it’s going, not where the passenger thinks it’s going or wants it to go.
4. Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.
This means we do an inventory of ourselves. Why start with resentment against others? Well, resentment is like the burglar alarm protecting all the other defects. It needs to be deactivated, and, to deactivate it, we need to understand it, and, to understand it, we need to take some examples, which is where detailing others’ wrongs comes in. Listing others’ wrong is not Step Four. It’s a small element in the preparation for taking Step Four.
Step Four is also a moral inventory. Not an inventory of what works and doesn’t work. Not an inventory of ‘survival mechanisms’ or ‘defence mechanisms that no longer serve me’. To psychologise the inventory is to de-moralise it and dodge the moral question entirely. There’s no point in getting upset that one has moral defects: if the sense of offence at implied accusation, overweening shame at have such defects, or outrage (ironically moral in nature) that anyone should even talk in moral terms is the block, this had better be gotten over, pronto. Morality exists, and we either operate in accordance with it or we don’t, whether or not we recognise it. The sooner the basic facts of the universe are accepted head-on, the better.
The tension is between us and God: Who is to be in charge of the universe? Who is to be in charge of me? Have you ever seen people suggest to the world, say on social media, how they think others should behave? They have decided that they are in charge of the universe. I’ve done that. My focus might have been on others, but my premise was about me, my claim to the throne.
The morality of the programme is twofold: firstly there’s the morality of putting self ahead of God; secondly there’s the morality of putting self ahead of others.
It’s not a selfish programme. It’s a moral programme, designed to rid me of selfishness, which is what is blocking me from God.
The inventory must be searching: I answer the questions with regard to all aspects of my life.
It is fearless in the sense of courageous: doing it even though it’s uncomfortable. Fearlessness is not about the absence of fear but the refusal to act based on fear, in fact acting despite it. Fear is kicked off the bridge of the ship. The bridge is what is fearless.
A moral inventory could be construed as being a list of assets as well as defects. That’s a reasonable interpretation, but that’s not what the Book will go on to suggest, so we can discard that idea. It is extraneous to AA. It’s in any case a poor balm for those who mistakenly believe that their value as a person is somehow an index of assets and defects. That’s such a grotesque philosophy—holding as it does that humans have different ultimate values from each other—it’s best to scotch that monstrous notion, hold that people simply are valuable, then treat defects as poor performance that needs to be corrected. Then there is no need to list assets.
5. Admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.
This is performed in a single act. We will discover that the admission to another human being represents the admission to God and to ourselves.
Essentially this is a confession. We do not read out the whole of the Step Four, or, rather, we need not. Just a summary of the findings in the form of character defects and wrongful action.
6. Were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character.
This describes a condition. Not ‘became entirely ready’. ‘Were’. It is a statement of fact.
If one isn’t entirely ready, either give up or go back to the earlier Steps, because something has been missed.
If one has properly catalogued all of one’s errors in belief, thinking, and behaviour and does not want to do everything to eliminate the findings, one has to be particularly dense or particularly insincere in the conduct of the inventory and the practice of the previous Steps.
If there were 147 things wrong with your car, you would want them removed. If you had 147 tumours in your lymph nodes, you would want them all removed. If you had 147 missing sheep, you would want them returned. If you had 147 forged bank notes, you would want them replaced.
God does the removal, sure, by giving direction as to the rightful beliefs, thinking, and behaviour to substitute for the wrongful ones. One must ask and then put into practice what God directs.
God moves the mountain but we’re taking the shovel (given by God) and literally doing all the digging, carrying, and depositing.
7. Humbly asked Him to remove our shortcomings.
Humbly—on the basis that we need God’s direction for what to believe, think, and do instead and we certainly need God’s strength to do it.
All we need to do is ask, and trust that it is done. To keep saying it implies that the prayer did not work. Say it once and once only within a sequence of the Steps. You sign an employment contact one. You sign divorce papers once. You sign an informed consent form once. Once suffices. God heard you. Any further effort one feels one needs to make can be directed at Steps Eight through Twelve.
8. Made a list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all.
Harm can be physical, practical, reputational, or emotional. If we have harmed them, we make amends. That’s the end of it. ‘All’ occurs twice. A second time in case we missed it the first time.
The willingness might come in stages in terms of individual people on the list, but the principle of making amends is a simple moral principle even a child can understand, though it may rebel. A child understands that a wrong is done when another child takes its play bricks or pulls its pigtail. Wrong must be rectified. We know this.
So, whilst plucking up the courage might take a minute, the principle must be recognised with resistance.
9. Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.
Direct means to the person rather than by generally being a decent fellow.
Direct can be in writing. A letter addressed to someone is a way of communicating directly with them.
Written amends can have more gravity, be more carefully worded, be read and reread, and avoid all ambiguity or rash actions and reactions.
Such people = all people.
The condition is possibility: if it’s possible, it must be done.
To injure others is to cause a harm that is not pre-existing. It does not injure someone to bring up a past harm in order to make amends, and eliciting their emotions about a past harm does not injure them. The get-out clause can be invoked only vanishingly rarely.
10. Continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong promptly admitted it.
This takes three forms: Step Ten proper (pages 84–85), the Step Eleven review (page 86), the pitstop pause (page 87), and that part of Step Twelve that suggests we practise these principles—the principles of the Steps—in all our affairs, in other words when a matter requires a more thorough look by applying the Step Four instructions.
There are three methods, therefore, for ongoing inventory.
Start with the lightest and escalate only when necessary.
‘When’ not ‘if’ we were wrong: expect to get things wrong daily.
The admission is prompt. Trouble comes not from making mistakes but from refusing to admit them.
11. Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God as we understood Him, praying only for knowledge of His will for us and the power to carry that out.
Two methods: prayer and meditation. AA’s prayers are chiefly prayers of petition, and the meditation is concentrated thought concerning one’s affairs in order to determine God’s will—the right attitude and the right action.
‘Conscious’ means in the mind. This is not about getting away from one’s thoughts or shutting them down or relaxing per se, although a relaxed Step Eleven is a better Step Eleven. It is about constructive, directed thinking.
The outcome is knowing what attitudes to adopt, what actions to take, and having the willingness to get on with it.
‘Only’ is important: We are not interested in psychedelic experiences, unlocking the secrets of the universe, or achieving particular emotional states, particularly the ill-defined mare’s nest of ‘emotional sobriety’.
We’re servants of God, intelligent agents, and Step Eleven is about getting our orders for the day.
12. Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to alcoholics, and to practice these principles in all our affairs.
The first Eleven Steps will produce a spiritual awakening. If they don’t, one hasn’t done them properly. This is therefore an explicit premise rather than an action to take.
The two actions are trying to carry the message and trying to practise the principles. Note that the verb ‘tried’ has two complements: ‘to carry’ and ‘to practice’. We are not in the result business but in the effort business.
If I make an effort by devoting the lion’s share of each day to carrying the message and discharging my other duties, I am doing well. My job is to allocate my time well, give each task my full attention, and make an effort. I’m scored on these, not on the results.
Many of us exclaimed, “What an order! I can’t go through with it.” Do not be discouraged. No one among us has been able to maintain anything like perfect adherence to these principles. We are not saints. The point is, that we are willing to grow along spiritual lines. The principles we have set down are guides to progress. We claim spiritual progress rather than spiritual perfection.
It looks a lot, but when it’s broken down into individual days of action, the actions of the day are quite doable. One eats an elephant one bite at a time. One does not clamp one’s lips round the trunk and suck the whole thing down, as one would a noodle.
Failure comes in two forms: insufficient effort and patchy results. Patchy results are fine—that can’t be helped, as long as we’re willing to learn over time in order to feed those learnings back into the methods by which we are discharging our duties. Insufficient effort is regrettable but inevitable. What must not happen is for insufficient effort to be baked into the schedule. In other words, schedule proper, decent effort, and recognise that sometimes one will fall at particular hurdles. It is unwise, when planning the day, to schedule failure by mis-allocating time. Get the plan right, and, most of the time, the effort will indeed be made, and the right results will follow.
Our description of the alcoholic, the chapter to the agnostic, and our personal adventures before and after make clear three pertinent ideas:
(a) That we were alcoholic and could not manage our own lives.
(b) That probably no human power could have relieved our alcoholism.
(c) That God could and would if He were sought.
This means that (a), (b), and (c) are each a single idea. Step One is a single idea. The notions of powerlessness and unmanageability are therefore a single idea, split between two aspects. Powerlessness is my inability, unaided, to resist the compulsion to drink and the secondary compulsion to drink to excess, and, as a result of that, how I live depends directly on whether and when the compulsion arises and overpowers me. It is in charge of my schedule and thus my life.
Reworded: I cannot help me. You cannot help me. God can help me.
One might add: God can help me as long as I play my part in helping myself and let others play their part in helping me, too.
Being convinced, we were at Step Three, which is that we decided to turn our will and our life over to God as we understood Him. Just what do we mean by that, and just what do we do?
The above is one of the turnstiles of the programme. Without being convinced of the abcs, we cannot proceed. Always check that your sponsee is certain.
This line also signals the fact that the presentations and discussions of Steps One and Two have now been concluded and will not be reopened. It also signals the fact that anything that comes after this point, whilst it might recollect a point about Steps One and Two, does not thereby reopen the discussion. The material that thus follows about the failure of life run on self-will or the newly introduced concept of the spiritual malady on page 64 must not be retroactively fed back into the unmanageability concept of Step One. This works against the structural design of the Book.
The presentation of Step Three refers to our will (singular) and our life (singular). Previously it referred to our will (singular) and our lives (plural). It might be tempting to read something into this: namely that there is a single will for all of us and that there is some sort of shift taking place from ‘our lives’ to ‘our life’. I don’t think this is warranted. ‘They turned up their noses’ and ‘they turned up their nose’ both presuppose each person has one nose.
Our topic, here, is understanding the nature of Step Three and then understanding how to implement it.
On that basis we are almost always in collision with something or somebody, even though our motives are good.
If there are multiple wills, and those wills do not align, then one person’s pursuit of their will is necessarily going to collide with another person’s pursuit of their will. If wills are self-centred, they will align only by accident.
By contrast, the wills of those who live by Tradition One, putting common welfare broadly ahead of personal welfare but allowing personal welfare considerable scope for flourishing, have a good chance of aligning or being capable of being aligned, through negotiation, concession, and agreement.
Will does not a priori lead to collision; self-will does.
Moreover, the self-will of an individual almost invariably involves considerable internal contradiction, because each department of self has its own will, and those wills are mutually incompatible. ‘I want to eat cake’ is incompatible with ‘I want to be thin’.
The absolute morality of our motives is neither here nor there.
Note that there is a semantic difference between 1939 and now in the phrase ‘even though’. Now, it presupposes that what follows is true, ‘I will even though I don’t want to’ presupposes I don’t want to. Then, it was synonymous with ‘even if’, as in, ‘Even if it rains, I will continue running’, which leaves open the possibility of whether or not it will rain. Here, the book is not presuming that our motives are good. The line is to be read, ‘… even if our motives are good’, suggesting they may or may not be good.
What would self-willed good motives be? If one wills the welfare of another or wills personal financial success for philanthropic purposes, the morality of the ultimate objective might not be in question, but both wills, if their implementation is sought, may collide with another person’s will, the laws of nature, a confluence of unpropitious circumstances, a single confounding event, or even the direct intervention of God, if God’s will happens to oppose the will in question at least in the form in which it is formulated.
Note the collision might be with a person, a place, an institution, a Higher Force, or brute facts, circumstances, conditions, forces, processes, and laws.
Collision has two consequences: obstruction of the objective, which represents failure of one order, or the causing of negative emotion, which represents failure of a different order.
Most people try to live by self-propulsion. Each person is like an actor who wants to run the whole show; is forever trying to arrange the lights, the ballet, the scenery and the rest of the players in his own way.
Self-propulsion means self-will, but noting that the power behind the action also derives from the ego, as well as the objective or destination. Ego (which is synonymous with ‘self’) thus provides both the destination to be plugged into the satellite navigation system and the fuel in the engine.
Self-will might involve others in one of two ways. The first way is that any self-centred objective will require the cooperation of others, even if it does not directly entail the arrangement of their affairs or the running of their lives. The second way involves the desire to directly arrange others’ affairs or run their lives.
The theatrical analogy is apt. In a theatre, there is a play going on. The play is, as it were, the material world and all of the happenings in it, including the characters. The actors are not those characters; they play those characters. The theatre is a larger entity that accommodates the play and goes beyond its bounds spatially and temporally. It is, as it were, the metaphysical (= spiritual) realm. The theatre is more real than the play, although the play is really going on, and the feelings experienced in it are real. The theatre is there to put on the play, but the play cannot exist without the theatre. The relationship is symbiotic, but the theatre is antecedent to the play and greater than it in all ways.
In this analogy, we are actors who are playing roles. Often the actors will forget they are playing roles and become identified with those roles. In doing so, the emotions of the roles become their emotions. All emotions relating to the material world are thus the emotions of the roles, not the actors. Actors who retain their identity as actors feel all of the feelings but with no danger to themselves and no real distress, even if the feelings are of distress. Actors who lose their identity lose themselves and are subject to both disorientation and an eery sense of non-reality. At some level, they cannot suppress firstly the idea that there is something genuinely unreal about the play, and secondly the idea that there must be something beyond the play. Unless they wake up, cynicism or nihilism are the natural outcomes.
Actors who are identified with the roles and start appropriating the objectives and fears of the roles will, in desperation, seek to alter the plot of the play by arranging everything that is going on. This is an actor who believes he is a character, and that character believes that he can actually alter the plot of the play.
However, other actors are either safely housed in their identity as actors and so are loyal to the director and the script, so will have none of this organisation on the part of the other actor, or are equally trying to run the show themselves. Either way, collision ensues.
If his arrangements would only stay put, if only people would do as he wished, the show would be great. Everybody, including himself, would be pleased. Life would be wonderful.
This presents the delusion of the organiser-general, the reformer-general: not only would the individual’s life be better, but everyone would be better off. The world is full of such organisers, such reformers.
In trying to make these arrangements our actor may sometimes be quite virtuous. He may be kind, considerate, patient, generous; even modest and self-sacrificing. On the other hand, he may be mean, egotistical, selfish and dishonest. But, as with most humans, he is more likely to have varied traits.
The methods may vary: even graciousness, kindness, and diplomacy can mask self-will. One cannot always discern self-will from the method by which will is deployed. Meanness, etc., axiomatically stem from self-will, or from an attempt to do God’s will but in a self-willed manner. But virtuous action could stem either from self-will or from someone seeking to do God’s will.
What usually happens? The show doesn’t come off very well. He begins to think life doesn’t treat him right. He decides to exert himself more. He becomes, on the next occasion, still more demanding or gracious, as the case may be. Still the play does not suit him. Admitting he may be somewhat at fault, he is sure that other people are more to blame. He becomes angry, indignant, self-pitying.
The result, as indicated above, is failure. The individual’s own objectives are confounded, and so are those of others.
The next result is self-pity.
What follows is an escalation of effort, combined with a redoubling of whatever method seems best.
A further feature is the presence—usually overwhelming—of blame. Rather than questioning the fundamental basis of the failure, namely self-will, the individual may reproach themselves for errors in implementation but essentially locates the problem in others’ lack of cooperation or similar brute facts.
Self-pity is then joined by anger and indignance.
What is his basic trouble? Is he not really a self-seeker even when trying to be kind? Is he not a victim of the delusion that he can wrest satisfaction and happiness out of this world if he only manages well?
The underlying problem is not others and their failure to cooperate but the premise on which the project was launched, namely that one’s own good and even the good of all are to be attained by determining objectives and then seeking to implement them.
Behind the premise is a delusion, namely a belief that is wrong but of whose wrongness the believer is unaware.
The delusion is this: that happiness stems from achieving a particular arrangement of external circumstances.
This is not true.
Firstly, that particular arrangement of external circumstances is impossible to achieve.
The difficulty or impossibility of achievement gives rise to fear, which yields to frustration as the truth of its non-achievement heaves into view. This produces unhappiness.
If it is achieved, its price usually outweighs its benefit. This produces unhappiness.
If it is achieved, it often fails to even deliver the happiness promised. This produces unhappiness.
If it is achieved, it will fall prey to the inevitability of mutability: it will refuse to stay put and cannot be maintained. This produces unhappiness.
In other words, the system inevitably produces unhappiness.
The problem is that the direction in which happiness is thought to proceed is wrong. It does not proceed from the outside in but from the inside out.
Happiness, incidentally, achieves from a combination of adjustment to objective reality (so none of the ‘my truth’ nonsense of relativism) and from a sincere effort to do the right thing (aka God’s will) within that reality.
In other words, happiness works from the inside out and is entirely in the lap of the individual, whatever the actual results of the effort. The effort might fail to produce any tangible good, but the effort provides its own reward.
Is it not evident to all the rest of the players that these are the things he wants? And do not his actions make each of them wish to retaliate, snatching all they can get out of the show? Is he not, even in his best moments, a producer of confusion rather than harmony?
The individual cannot see his delusion. He believes that others share—or ought to share—his values and objectives and be keen to work towards them.
Self-will is contagious. Bad behaviour provokes reactions, which, themselves, constitute bad behaviour.
Confounding the contract of jointly working for the common good whilst upholding individual liberties and interests breaks down the basis of cooperation. As one or more people within a system refuse to cooperate, the others are forced also to adopt an ‘every man for himself’ approach, if they are unable to overpower, convince, or restrain the miscreant.
Seeking harmony itself does not always produce harmony. What matters as much as the right objectives is the right way of going about attaining them.
Our actor is self-centered—ego-centric, as people like to call it nowadays.
We can thus take ‘self’ and ‘ego’ to refer to the same phenomenon,.
Being self-centred automatically distorts my perception and my action.
My perception is distorted because the relevance and significance of entities, phenomena, and events depend on their relation and proximity to me. Anything unconnected or distant is blurred or invisible, regardless of its real significance.
Action is distorted, because my aims are considered, and others’ aims are disregarded; the good of all is considered only in as far as it will directly impact on me.
He is like the retired businessman who lolls in the Florida sunshine in the winter complaining of the sad state of the nation; the minister who sighs over the sins of the twentieth century; politicians and reformers who are sure all would be Utopia if the rest of the world would only behave; the outlaw safe cracker who thinks society has wronged him; and the alcoholic who has lost all and is locked up. Whatever our protestations, are not most of us concerned with ourselves, our resentments, or our self-pity?
The mechanism is the same with all of these: my condition, my circumstances, my feelings are someone else’s fault. Others have agency but I do not. I have the role of victim, you have the role of persecutor, and so I adopt the role of rescuer. I rescue myself from you by persecuting you, making you a victim, but a deserving one. You are the sinful persecutor, and I am the righteous avenger, whose persecution of you is really moral correction.
The core of each of these is the starting point of self-concern.
The apparent content of my discourse (the nation, the twentieth century, ‘all’, society) is merely the form; the real content is my self-concern.
When I’m most concerned with myself, that’s when I’m most voluble about people, institutions, and principles (see page 64).
The alcoholic has merely one, particular form of self-centredness. The spiritual malady is not a feature of alcoholism but a common pathology of humanity, consisting in the role of the individual in the world being misplaced or disproportioned. The spiritual malady is thus the human condition when out of balance.
It is relevant to alcoholism not because it is a component of it but because it stands in the way of the solution.
It is not part of the bacterial infection; it is the slippery hands that mean I can’t get the lid off the bottle of antibiotic pills.
Selfishness—self-centeredness! That, we think, is the root of our troubles.
Selfishness: putting myself first.
Self-centredness: (a) seeing things from my point of view and (b) being governed by my own aims.
Situations I find myself in are a function not just of my decisions and behaviour but of many factors, most of which are outside my control (although my decisions and behaviour are indeed decisive in determining the course and condition of my life).
The fact and nature of the challenges I face are a function of being a human being in the world.
Selfishness and self-centredness do not generate challenges per se—although they may generate extra ones of their own and aggravate the inevitable ones.
How can it be true, therefore, that these are the root of my troubles?
Proceeding on the basis that statement are made only if they are true, ‘trouble’ must be defined accordingly.
My troubles are my disturbances at such situations and challenges, not the situations and challenges themselves.
This is not a far-fetched understanding: one regularly meets people who are in situations and who face challenges that would trouble others and would trouble me but who are not themselves troubled.
Driven by a hundred forms of fear, self-delusion, self-seeking, and self-pity, we step on the toes of our fellows and they retaliate.
When I am driven, I am not driving, but I have the illusion of driving.
Self gives me the impression I am self-directed, free, and independent.
But really, it is self, over which I have no control, which is directing my perceptions and goals and thus my actions.
Only because I am identified with the self do I think that its choices are my choices.
But are they really?
If, time and time again, living in accordance with self produces terrible results (the mere fact of unhappiness suffices to prove this), one has to start questioning whether self is a valid mechanism designed to help me fulfil my human potential and live a valuable and worthwhile life or a parasitic creature not bent on my destruction (for it has no will of its own) but designed merely to perpetuate its own role as helmsman of my life.
The sign that self is in charge is precisely the experience of eliciting retaliation from others.
The occasional retaliation in response to a genuinely innocent act is to be expected as one proceeds through life.
But, as they say, if I meet three jerks in a day, I’m the jerk.
Sometimes they hurt us, seemingly without provocation, but we invariably find that at some time in the past we have made decisions based on self which later placed us in a position to be hurt.
The decision based on self which later placed us in a position to be hurt might be an actual action that harmed someone else’s interests and provoked defence or retaliation, or might simply be the decision that my happiness depended on a particular constellation of conditions and circumstances, such that, when that constellation of conditions and circumstances failed to materialise, I was upset.
Furthermore:
Someone once said that a person’s response to me was their defence against my character defects.
Someone else said that, if people in my life were treating me badly, I had to ask why my taste in people was so awful.
Someone asked, when I complained I had been abandoned, what made me so abandonable.
So our troubles, we think, are basically of our own making.
Though other factors might feed into my troubles—my disturbance at my conditions and circumstances—the sine qua non for troubles is my stipulation that the world comply with my wishes.
They arise out of ourselves, and the alcoholic is an extreme example of self-will run riot, though he usually doesn’t think so.
They arise out of ourselves = they arise out of our selves. They arise out of my self, my ego.
It is not others, people, institutions, principles, ideologies, movements, trends that are the problem.
It is my alter ego, the self I have set up in opposition to the person God designed me to be.
Self-will is the will generated by the self: the shopping list of outcomes sought by the self, by the ego, together with the plans and procedures designed to bring about attainment of those outcomes.
Self covers its tracks, with a combination of blindness, denial, and justification.
“It woz you wot made me do it.”
If the self revealed its playbook, if I could look clearly at the self and see its blueprints, methodology, and operations, I would consent to its removal. That’s the purpose of Steps Four through Seven.
The self is thus equipped with a (literal) self-defence mechanism: when I try and look at it, I cannot properly focus, I become distracted, everything gets noisy and overwhelming, everything becomes blurred, and I end up looking away.
It’s a remarkably resilient, highly evolved parasite.
Above everything, we alcoholics must be rid of this selfishness. We must, or it kills us!
There’s no such thing as retaining a selfish life and hoping that God’s going to parachute in and save me when necessary. The nature of the danger is that it arises a couple of steps before the individual is aware of the danger. By the time the individual wants to cry out for help, the duct tape is already across the mouth. I have to be in a permanent state of God-centredness rather than self-centeredness.
Of course, the selfishness is not gone forever, like successfully treated impetigo. There is a combination of the reduction in rpm and the disconnection from the transmission. Self still rumbles away, but more quietly, but, more importantly than that, it is disconnected from the transmission, which means that it is no longer driving the vehicle forward.
Without this, one day, the urge to drink will arise, and when it does, I will resume drinking. And that inevitably leads to premature death.
God makes that possible. And there often seems no way of entirely getting rid of self without His aid. Many of us had moral and philosophical convictions galore, but we could not live up to them even though we would have liked to. Neither could we reduce our self-centeredness much by wishing or trying on our own power. We had to have God’s help.
The elimination of selfishness is not something done to me. It is something I must want and try to do; I must have the moral and philosophical convictions; these are necessary but not sufficient. Imagine self as a centre of gravity. I am pulled towards it. God is a much larger centre of gravity, but is so much further away, to begin with, that the centre of gravity of self wins out. As I approach God and start to fall under the influence of His incalculably greater gravitational field, I start to move in that direction. God is the enabler not the doer of this. I must still do the work.
This is the how and why of it. First of all, we had to quit playing God. It didn’t work. Next, we decided that hereafter in this drama of life, God was going to be our Director. He is the Principal; we are His agents. He is the Father, and we are His children. Most good ideas are simple, and this concept was the keystone of the new and triumphant arch through which we passed to freedom.
If the three parameters are effectiveness, efficiency, and harmony, I have had to agree, based on a survey of my life up to Step Three, that I was unable to discern reasonable goals and achieve them. The goals I had achieved on paper had not brought about the progress, stability, and happiness they had promised.
Playing God = devising my own identity, devising my own objectives, and working towards them, often entailing the arrangement of people, situations, and facts to support this effort.
What is the opposite?
First of all, waking up from the drama:
The actor realises they are an actor, not the rep parts they are playing. A distance is created; the actor’s role is to play the part well, not to be the person represented by the part. The part is trapped inside the lines; an actor with full agency who thinks they are the part will rebel and try to change their own lines and the plot of the whole play. The actor, abstracted to one degree of removal from the part, now has a life that matches their agency: they have the job of bringing everything within them to bear on the task at hand, but no line of the script needs to be changed, and nothing needs to be changed in the play.
God is the Director—and I am the actor.
God is the Principal—and I am the agent.
The business is the business of the Principal—the agent merely transacts on behalf of the Principal and is salaried for their role; they have no direct stake in the business of the principal.
God is the Parent—and I am the child.
God provides what is necessary and protects the child. God also loves the child, if being loved is something you’re interested in (not a given by any stretch of the imagination).
When we sincerely took such a position, all sorts of remarkable things followed.
The sincere adoption of this position involves not just adopting the philosophy but putting it into practice: accepting one’s daily role through the orders coming down the tubes in Step Eleven, and refraining from plotting, scheming, planning, forecasting.
Of course, an altered philosophy of life and a life lived differently on this basis are going to be remarkably different from the previous life.
We had a new Employer.
God is the Employer—I am the employee.
God provides the direction and resources and delegates to me such authority, responsibility, and accountability as are required to intelligently perform His will.
I am an intelligent agent, not an automaton.
How different from the self (the ego, the devil) as boss, where I’m commanded, driven down to the minutest detail by imperious dispositions, drives, impulses, and emotions.
The selfish are bound by their selfishness.
The selfless are free to discharge their divine duties with considerable creativity and autonomy.
Being all powerful, He provided what we needed, if we kept close to Him and performed His work well.
The nature of God is to be both all-good and all-powerful. These are the two characteristics vital to the AA philosophy.
It is important to trust both, because they entail firstly that the best possible outcomes in my life are those brought about my seeking to follow God’s will, and secondly that those outcomes are indeed achievable, because sufficient power will be delegated to enable their achievement.
What is necessary is not just physical and practical but is also intellectual, spiritual, social, philosophical, and moral. All areas are taken care of admirably.
Established on such a footing we became less and less interested in ourselves, our little plans and designs. More and more we became interested in seeing what we could contribute to life.
The process is gradual and progressive (less and less, more and more).
We are moving between two poles: the pole of self and the pole of God.
Or to use a different image, we build on the foundation of God not the foundation of self
The self lacks ambition—its plans and designs are little.
The change is from considering what one is getting out of life—that’s the object of the plans and designs—to what one is putting into it.
I do not subscribe to the notion of emptiness, the ‘hole in the soul’. I recognise the feeling, but the absence is mislocated. The absence is out there. It is the place in the world that one should be taking, it is the contribution one should be making. Instead, the focus on the inner, on the internal, on the structures of victimhood and blame, on the alienation and hostility, is a focus not on an emptiness (which implies a space that is not filled) but on a nothingness thought to be something. The clutter of mental nonsense was filling my consciousness with considerable noise. That’s not emptiness. That’s fullness—being full of rubbish, none of which has any reality or substance. What I have actually experienced is that, when I play the roles I am supposed to play in the world, I have plenty more space internally: there is no rubbish cluttering the mind, and the room feels perfect. Just a couple of necessary pieces of furniture, a couple of decorations. I move towards away from clutter to this relative emptiness, and it is for that reason I can breathe.
As we felt new power flow in, as we enjoyed peace of mind, as we discovered we could face life successfully, as we became conscious of His presence, we began to lose our fear of today, tomorrow or the hereafter. We were reborn.
One commodity: new power.
One external result: facing life successfully.
Three internal results: peace; awareness of the presence of God; fearlessness.
Even the hereafter ceases to be a generator of fear: in awakening to the world of the spirit we are awakening to the fact that death is a ‘fairly major change of address’, not the end, and, since we’re going to be alright in the end anyway, there is nothing to be frightened of between now and then, between here and there.
Reborn: starting afresh, plus a sense that the new way of life is not an alteration but a replacement of the existing way of life.
*We were now at Step Three. Many of us said to our Maker, as we understood Him: “God, I offer myself to Thee—to build with me and to do with me as Thou wilt. Relieve me of the bondage of self, that I may better do Thy will. Take away my difficulties, that victory over them may bear witness to those I would help of Thy Power, Thy Love, and Thy Way of life. May I do Thy will always!” *
The Step is a decision to take certain actions in general (Steps Ten through Twelve) and certain actions in particular (Steps Four through Nine). The decision is ‘signed’ by a prayer. The signing of a contract does not fulfil the contract but is a prerequisite for the contract’s coming into existence and sets things in motion even if one does nothing.
God made us. We did not make ourselves. Our purpose is not our own.
The sentiment is the same regardless of the conception of the addressee: ‘as we understood Him’.
It is all of oneself (and by extension one’s life) that one gives. It not partial, selective, or gradual.
We recognise ourselves as raw material to be used for God’s not our purpose. There is no further place for the phrase, ‘I want’. There is no further place for the word, ‘I’. There is only the me—the done to, no longer the doer.
Self—the worldly identity we give ourselves to supplant our particular path through God’s creation given to us by God—must go. That includes not just my personal identity but any group identities. I might still technically have characteristics or happen to fall within groups, but these do not constitute who I am or exert any influence. These identities are the source of the mischief, hence ‘bondage’: they are an imprisonment; a burden; a restriction of freedom; a punishment. They also get in the way of doing God’s will. Having an agenda means I cannot fully give myself to God’s agenda. You can’t have an identity and do God’s will. You can’t ‘belong’ to groups, to castes, to sexes, to orientations, to any subcategorisation of humanity in any tribal sense without becoming double-minded, because at some point there will come the choice: the group’s interests or doing God’s will. Even the interest in the group is an interest potentially away from what God would have me pay attention to.
My problems are to be solved not just because their solution is desirable but by way of demonstration to others of God’s omnipotence. This is the key element in the chain of message-carrying, the result of which is a universal waking-up.
The prayer’s scope is until the end of our lives: May I do Thy will always.
It is designed for Step Three and should really be said only when taking Step Three. One does not say marriage vows each day, although they may be formally repeated on due occasion. There are different prayers and sentiments for daily use.
We thought well before taking this step making sure we were ready; that we could at last abandon ourselves utterly to Him.
Since the Step involves the adoption of a new way of life, it is best to eliminate reservations now rather than have them arise and scupper the process when one is already facing the challenge of the content. At this point, there is no pressure, so we can review such reservations without risk. Once one is underway, the ego is fighting tooth and claw for its survival, and it is almost impossible to review such reservations dispassionately under such conditions.
Get clear now, get cracking, and don’t look back.
Note the absoluteness: abandonment (which is not partial or gradual); utterly (without exception, carve-out, or mitigation).
We found it very desirable to take this spiritual step with an understanding person, such as our wife, best friend, or spiritual adviser. But it is better to meet God alone than with one who might misunderstand.
If one is unused to praying communally or in small groups, praying with someone can be so embarrassing and generate such self-consciousness that the prayer cannot be said with proper concentration and as such is rendered an awkward and pointless gesture.
Also better to say it right and mean it, which means saying it under conditions that are most propitious.
The wording was, of course, quite optional so long as we expressed the idea, voicing it without reservation. This was only a beginning, though if honestly and humbly made, an effect, sometimes a very great one, was felt at once.
I’ve not heard an improvement of the prayer, so it’s perhaps best to just say it as it is, maybe trivially rewording with contemporary lexis and morphology (‘you’, ‘will’) if the archaic language is distracting. The desire to rewrite usually stems from an objection to the content, and rewritings I’ve seen attempted usually miss the point or water down.
Let’s take an egregious example, from the plain language version of the Big Book:
“God, I offer myself to You—to partner with me and guide me as You think best.”
Compare this to the original:
“God, I offer myself to Thee—to build with me and to do with me as Thou wilt.”
In the original, we are the subject matter, devoid of will, the object of the process.
In the revised version, we are elevated to gods, working in partnership with God as just another partner—one of innumerable possible partners. ‘God’ (in the monotheist tradition) is singular. ‘Partners’ are two-a-penny. We have thus diminished God as well as elevated ourselves. Moreover, we are no longer the object of the process but the movers and shakers. God is not to build with us. Rather, God is to leave us alone, instead doing something called ‘partnering’, which, in a commercial sense, is joint action, mutual back-scratching, not interference or direction. Step Three is reduced to: ‘Noli me tangere!’ (‘Hands off!’). Or an assertion of ‘habeas corpus’: the command to the jailer to release the jailed. No prison of God’s will for us!
There is, in this version, at least the acceptance of guidance, but the guided are not directed, merely advised. And God does not ‘know’ best’; he ‘thinks’ best. If I say, ‘as you think best’, I’m reserving the right to disagree or casting God’s view as a mere opinion, one of potentially many. God is given the human characteristic of thinking rather than the divine characteristic of willing, and thinking, as we know, can be challenged. Will cannot be challenged: only opposed.
The writer of this text was not attempting to simplify. The word ‘build’ is perfectly simple, and ‘partner’ is not a simplification of ‘build’. The writer’s purpose was to dismantle the philosophical and theological structure of the programme and to establish a new one.
It might therefore best to stick to the original prayer.
Next we launched out on a course of vigorous action, the first step of which is a personal housecleaning, which many of us had never attempted. Though our decision was a vital and crucial step, it could have little permanent effect unless at once followed by a strenuous effort to face, and to be rid of, the things in ourselves which had been blocking us. Our liquor was but a symptom. So we had to get down to causes and conditions.
Step Three gives a significant tailwind, which it’s best to capitalise on. If one ‘launches’, one gets through the earlier stages of Step Four, where there is the most resistance, and then one discovers oneself motoring swiftly and without obstruction. This is like a spaceship, which has to get through the atmosphere. Once it’s out into space, it’s plain sailing, as it were. No impeding atmosphere. Most instances of Step Four being abandoned are attributed to a failure to launch. Instead, a ‘gentle’ approach was taken. Don’t do that. Get to it.
The Step Three decision has no meaning without concerted subsequent action. It’s no good buying a ticket; one has to get on the plane.
Why can’t we just get on with Ten through Twelve (which we must surely do, by the way, right from this point onwards; see page 84, plus descriptions of early AA history)?
Because we are blocked by five things:
- We don’t have a good grasp of what beliefs, thinking, and behaviour of ours are getting in the way of effectiveness, efficiency, and harmony; we therefore do not have a good grasp, either, of what our beliefs, thinking, and behaviour should be.
- We are selfish—we have our own plans and designs and cannot do God’s will until these are set aside, and it is only by seeing the full deleterious effect thereof that we will be persuaded to wind up the loss-making venture and give ourselves fully to God’s employment.
- We have resentment, fear, and guilt, which are noise that blocks the discernment of God’s will and drive actions against God’s will.
- We have secrets, which promotes further dishonesty, dissimulation, compensation and over-compensation, evasion, distraction, and escapism.
- We have unmade amends, which warp our relations with others and have similar effects to secrets, in addition to others’ reluctance to trust us.
Steps Four through Nine are therefore necessary.
Liquor is a symptom not because we rationally drink to alleviate negative feelings or to promote good ones or because of psychological maladjustment but because self blocks us from God, and only God can block us from drink.
The causes and conditions consist in self and its manifestations.
Therefore, we started upon a personal inventory. This was Step Four. A business which takes no regular inventory usually goes broke. Taking a commercial inventory is a fact-finding and a fact-facing process. It is an effort to discover the truth about the stock-in-trade. One object is to disclose damaged or unsalable goods, to get rid of them promptly and without regret. If the owner of the business is to be successful, he cannot fool himself about values.
The stock-in-trade is my beliefs, thinking, and behaviour, which are the only things I can change. From these flow the circumstances of my life and the experience of my life.
Unsaleable goods are those that do not further the business’s objective—the doing of God’s will.
To know what can stay and what must go, I must see the effects of the beliefs, thinking, and behaviour playing out.
The review is one-sided. I’m looking only for what has gone wrong. This is valid. Anything that is not producing any resentment, fear, or guilt is unlikely to be problematic. In looking for problems I’m necessarily spotting and overlooking anything that is not problematic. Whatever is not problematic need not be catalogued.
One aspect of beliefs is values: my values will need overhauling.
We did exactly the same thing with our lives. We took stock honestly. First, we searched out the flaws in our make-up which caused our failure. Being convinced that self, manifested in various ways, was what had defeated us, we considered its common manifestations.
If I’m going to serve God, I need to be in good condition.
This involves finding everything that’s wrong and fixing it.
‘Our lives’:
My life is not me: it’s the system I am operating.
If I am a retailer, the stock is the substance of the business.
As a human being, the stock is my beliefs, thinking, and behaviour.
Self defeats me firstly in terms of my life in general: a life thus run does not run effectively, efficiently, and harmoniously.
More than that: since self blocks me from God, and I need God to avoid picking up the first drink, self causes failure in the face of alcoholism.
Resentment is the “number one” offender. It destroys more alcoholics than anything else.
Resentment is a manifestation of self. There are others.
Resentment is the worst.
It causes problems by itself, as do envy, jealousy, sloth, gluttony, etc.
But it also has two other features:
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In holding others responsible, it guards me against self-examination and therefore acts as a shield against identifying and eliminating any other character defects.
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Resentment holds this existential position: I’m in charge, I have a blueprint for my life and, by extension, a blueprint for any circumstance that affects my life. I notice that the world deviates from the blueprint. I want vengeance. Resentment thus assumes the existential position of God, albeit a dark version of God. I am thus God’s competitor for the role of God. This puts me at odds with God, and I cannot serve God and I certainly cannot expect protection from God if I am at war with God. Resentment is war against God.
Resentment thus acts as the chief block to forming a relationship with God, and, without a relationship with God, I will drink and die prematurely or at least horribly of alcoholism.
It also destroys one’s life sober, and can even lead to death by suicide or misadventure, hence the assertion that it kills more alcoholics than anything—even alcohol.
From it stem all forms of spiritual disease, for we have been not only mentally and physically ill, we have been spiritually sick.
It is not all spiritual disease that stems from resentment. If that were the case, it would say, ‘From it stems all spiritual disease’. It’s clear that self has manifestations other than resentment and that these also produce spiritual disease.
Rather, all forms of spiritual disease can stem from resentment, in other words, there is no form of spiritual disease that cannot stem from resentment, but it does not follow that particular instances of spiritual disease cannot stem from other manifestations of self.
What is spiritual disease? In medicine, a process is physiological if it proceeds ‘as nature intended’; a process is pathological if it proceeds otherwise, with some destructive consequence. With spiritual disease, likewise. If I am proceeding as God intended, I am proceeding in a ‘physiological’ way; if not, I am proceeding in a ‘pathological’ way.
The physical sickness: the mechanism that produces the physical craving.
The mental sickness: the mechanism that produces the mental obsession.
The spiritual sickness: the attempt to usurp God, to take His place, and everything that flows from this.
When the spiritual malady is overcome, we straighten out mentally and physically.
When the spiritual malady is overcome, I acquire a protection against the first drink, and survival is enabled.
When the spiritual malady is overcome, I adopt my true position as intelligent servant of God, and everything else starts to work itself out.
The spiritual position is the most important: this dictates how I see things; it constitutes my beliefs.
The mental position flows from the spiritual position: it constitutes my thinking.
The physical position flows from the mental position: my thinking drives my actions and thus my life.
Where are emotions here? They’re simply one of the interfaces. There are other ones too: chiefly physical. Emotions, really, are a physical manifestation. They’re the dashboard in the car.
Sometimes it’s said that ‘it’s an emotional disease’. Leaving aside the definition of the ‘it’, the problem is not the emotions. They’re just a reflection, or a shadow cast, or a trace left.
If there is a wolf padding round the sheep enclosure, it’s the wolf that’s the problem, not its pawprints.
In dealing with resentments, we set them on paper. We listed people, institutions or principles with whom we were angry. We asked ourselves why we were angry. In most cases it was found that our self-esteem, our pocketbooks, our ambitions, our personal relationships (including sex) were hurt or threatened. So we were sore. We were “burned up.” On our grudge list we set opposite each name our injuries. Was it our self-esteem, our security, our ambitions, our personal, or sex relations, which had been interfered with?
Resentment is to be understood as any situation in which I feel resentment proper (grievance) or have a grudge or in which I feel angry, sore, or burned up. In other words, we’re interested in any negative emotions.
Why do I have such feelings? Because some aspect of my life in which I have an emotional investment is hurt, injured, threatened, or interfered with. Anyone will note that there is some aspect of their life that can be affected without generating negative emotions; everyone has the experience of not being upset whilst someone else experiencing the same stimulus is indeed upset. It is not axiomatic that certain events will give rise to certain emotions. The emotional response might be positive, neutral, or negative. We’re just interested in the negative ones.
Resentment is not ‘re-feeling’. ‘Re’ also means ‘in intense response to’, as in ‘rebound’ or ‘react’. We’re not confining our examination to lingering negative emotions, although many negative emotions might indeed linger. The criterion for capture is the negativity of the emotion. Don’t not review a resentment just because you think that it’s ‘natural’ to feel a particular way. Even death is greeted by some people happily or neutrally, and, if that’s the case for death, well, that might be the case for anything. There are people whose lives have been transformed positively by some apparently terrible accident or twist of fate.
The sources are people, institutions (any organisation, private or public), and principles (ideas, or abstract or general rules governing morality or conduct). ‘Institution’ can also mean (and in 1939 did also mean) established social practices, e.g. marriage, mourning.
First of all, write all the names.
On our grudge list we set opposite each name our injuries.
The grudge list contains the name plus the fact giving rise to the grudge.
The fact and the injury are separate entities.
This is the first lesson: there is the person, there is the act, there is the injury, and there is me.
I cannot control the person; I cannot control the act; I cannot control the injury (if you stole my penny, the penny is gone); but I can control the relation between the injury and me.
It was not me that was injured but my financial condition, and so on.
It is this that gives rise to the freedom.
Was it our self-esteem, our security, our ambitions, our personal, or sex relations, which had been interfered with?
The full list of aspects of my life that are affected—noting that it is these that are affected, not me, unless I am identified with these, so the solution is to disidentify (my reputation might be ruined, but I am not my reputation):
Self-esteem: my image of myself
Pride—my notion of the image others have of me
Personal relations—the form and content of my non-sexual relationships with others
Sexual relations—the form and content of my sexual relationships with others
Pocketbooks—my financial affairs
Security—conditions necessary to live
Ambitions—objectives, wishes, desires
We were usually as definite as this example: I’m resentful at:
Mr Brown. The Cause:
His attention to my wife. Affects my: Sex relations. Self-esteem (fear).
Told my wife of my mistress. Sex relations. Self-esteem (fear).
Brown may get my job at the office. Security. Self-esteem (fear).
Mrs Jones. She’s a nut—she snubbed me. She committed her husband for drinking. He’s my friend. She’s a gossip. Personal relationship. Self-esteem (fear).
My employer. Unreasonable—Unjust—Overbearing—Threatens to fire me for drinking and padding my expense account. Self-esteem (fear). Security.
My wife. Misunderstands and nags. Likes Brown. Wants house put in her name. Pride—Personal / sex relations—Security (fear).
As definite but no more definite: a few words will do.
Sometimes something is hurt.
Sometimes something is not yet hurt but is only threatened. Then one can add ‘fear’ in parentheses.
For speed, abbreviate: SE, P, PR, SR, PB, S, A.
No analysis.
We went back through our lives.
This indicates the direction of travel.
Start now and work backwards.
Don’t start with childhood and work forwards.
The remoter the offence, the greater the distortion introduced through the repetitions of memory, like the copied copies of copies of medieval transcribers. Memories of events from childhood are no longer memories but screenplays constructed as apologias for one’s current distress.
The purpose of the inventory is to study the anatomy of resentment, to understand it, in order to better dispose of it.
To this end, the best data are the most recent.
Anything that is currently bothering me is a problem because it is currently bothering me. The timing of the underlying event is irrelevant. It is important therefore to capture all resentments in the Step Four process, but I would make a distinction between analysis and disposal.
A good selection is sufficient for the analysis. Twenty well-analysed situations more than suffices to understand all resentment and, what’s more, to identify the whole of one’s gameplan, which is what is highlighted by the resentment. No more would be learned by writing ten times as much.
The disposal of resentment essentially involves the adoption of a new generalised attitude to all resentment, the issuing of a general amnesty, and the setting forth on a fundamentally different path. When this is done, all resentment is caught, regardless of whether it has been written about.
Nothing counted but thoroughness and honesty.
This applies throughout the Step Four: if one asks the questions indicated, if one asks them comprehensively across all areas of one’s life, and if one then records the results, one scores 100%. It need not be elegant, concise, or even particularly clear. Of course, work for these and other virtues, but the purpose will be well achieved if these two conditions are met.
When we were finished we considered it carefully. The first thing apparent was that this world and its people were often quite wrong. To conclude that others were wrong was as far as most of us ever got. The usual outcome was that people continued to wrong us and we stayed sore. Sometimes it was remorse and then we were sore at ourselves. But the more we fought and tried to have our own way, the worse matters got. As in war, the victor only seemed to win. Our moments of triumph were short-lived.
Sometimes people are eager to skip on to the next piece of writing. Do not. The material between the instructions on writing is really more important than the writing: it is what the writing is preparing us for, namely careful consideration.
Other people certainly get things wrong. The inventory does not deny this. The problem is not that we are wrong and others are right, and the universal answer is not, therefore, to try to construe ourselves to be wrong when we patently aren’t, although, on occasion, we indeed are, which must of course be admitted where true. It is not axiomatic, therefore, that if we have a resentment, our technical analysis of the situation is wrong. It may be dead on. It is axiomatic that we have a spiritual problem, however, which we will come to later.
When the apprehension of a situation gets stuck on the observation that others are wrong—which is the point at which most discourses in the world and in broken-down relationships get stuck—further progress is blocked. One stays unhappy, and that is the end of it.
Remorse (the feeling of guilt) without repentance (the admission of wrong) and resolution (the redirection towards what is right) is similarly useless: remorse is often exploited, paraded, to avoid repentance and resolution. Remorse is hot and wet. Repentance and resolution are dry and cold. The illusion is that remorse somehow pays back the dead and leaves one quits with the world. Au contraire: without the other two elements, it merely keeps us running on the spot.
The problem of all emotional upset is buried in a complementary clause: ‘to have our own way’. The reason I am upset is a combination of the world and my way: the two are colliding. Either change the world (impossible) or change the ‘my way’. ‘My way’ must be replaced with an acceptance of reality as it is, without precluding the alteration of that reality in future through right action.
As in war, the victor only seemed to win: being right, technically, does not get me any further either practically or momentarily.
It is plain that a life which includes deep resentment leads only to futility and unhappiness.
When is resentment deep? When it is more than a trivial annoyance and goes to the core of one’s Personal Project. It is not deep in the sense of obscure or elusive.
To remind ourselves: we are concerned with resentment in all its forms, so including all forms of hurt, upset, grievance, anger, self-pity, and so on. The flavour is irrelevant. If I’m deeply disturbed, there are two chief consequences.
These are external and internal.
My life is going to be pointless: objectively! Not just a ‘feeling’ of futility but actual futility.
I will be failing utterly in my mission.
The internal aspect: unhappiness.
Unhappiness is down to resentment, resentment is down to having a way, unhappiness is down to having a way.
If you meet an unhappy person, recognise that they have a way: they have decided how the universe should be, and the universe is not playing ball.
To the precise extent that we permit these, do we squander the hours that might have been worthwhile.
To the two motivations already mentioned is now added a third: time, as it drips past, is spilled, wasted.
Each moment lost in self is irretrievable.
One cannot make up for lost time except by stealing time from something else.
All of this is permitted.
If I’m unhappy, I am doing it to me, and I am doing it on purpose, because I prefer unhappiness to the price of freedom, which is the abandonment of self.
When I’m unhappy, I’d rather exist but be unhappy than not exist but be.
But with the alcoholic, whose hope is the maintenance and growth of a spiritual experience, this business of resentment is infinitely grave. We found that it is fatal. For when harboring such feelings we shut ourselves off from the sunlight of the Spirit. The insanity of alcohol returns and we drink again. And with us, to drink is to die.
To the three motivations of futility, unhappiness, and time-wasting is added a fourth, namely alcoholic death.
Only God can protect me from the thought of a drink converting into action.
Resentment stems from me ‘having a way’.
That ‘having a way’ is in direct defiance of reality, and thus ‘God’s way’.
I cannot defy and rely on God at the same time.
With the defence down, drinking is only a matter of time.
If I start, I might never stop, and death brought forward by decades is the likely outcome.
If we were to live, we had to be free of anger.
This is not figurative: negative emotion blocks me from God and thus my defence against the first drink.
Note the book is still talking about the general umbrella subject of resentment, but the word ‘anger’ is used here.
It would be a mistake to confine our examination to the sub-category of upset referred to in the language in general as ‘resentment’; one does indeed hear people say that anger’s fine, but resentment’s a problem, or any emotion is fine in the moment, it’s just holding on to the emotion that’s the problem. The text provides no support for this view.
Over time, the internal and external conditions giving rise to anger are systematically identified and altered, where appropriate, and anger arises more rarely. In particular, anger that is untimely, disproportionate, or inappropriate must be eliminated.
Over time, when it arises, one learns to move past it quickly, or, rather, to let it slip past: it ‘sticks’ only if I foster its retention.
When anger is reduced to its ordinary function of one of the many signals of a healthy spectrum of emotions, one can indeed be free of it even if it is present, provided that it does not impel action without thought.
The grouch and the brainstorm were not for us. They may be the dubious luxury of normal men, but for alcoholics these things are poison.
The sense of ‘brainstorm’ here is not coming up with bright ideas but this (per the OED):
“A fit of rage, melancholy, etc.; a sudden change of mood or behaviour; (also) a sudden and severe attack of mental illness; an epileptic seizure. In later use also figurative or hyperbolically: a temporary loss of reason, a serious error of judgement.”
While we’re at it, grouch:
“Grumbling; a complaint or grumble; a grumbling, sulky mood; a fit of ill temper or sulkiness.”
You get the idea: negativity, ranging from the listless to the fierce.
We cannot get away for long with these states. They have to go.
We turned back to the list, for it held the key to the future. We were prepared to look at it from an entirely different angle. We began to see that the world and its people really dominated us. In that state, the wrongdoing of others, fancied or real, had power to actually kill. How could we escape? We saw that these resentments must be mastered, but how? We could not wish them away any more than alcohol.
One need not make anything of the different angle: it’s about to explain exactly what this means.
We start with the observation that, if we have demands of others, our happiness (and our state of mind, and thus our connection to God, and thus our survival) is in others’ hands.
Who wants to be controlled by another, particularly with control inversely proportionate to respect?
We follow this with the observation that escape is desirable but not achieved by wishing.
This was our course: We realized that the people who wronged us were perhaps spiritually sick. Though we did not like their symptoms and the way these disturbed us, they, like ourselves, were sick too.
What does spiritually sick mean?
Self-reliant rather than God-reliant.
Cut off from God, the individual has only their own ego to rely on, as an unreliable guide. The individual is now on battery not mains powers, and batteries eventually run out.
This is thus the case with anyone behaving badly.
It might be noted parenthetically that not everyone who is on one’s resentment list has behaved badly—this is the point at which one realises that one is angry with certain people not because their behaviour is morally wrong, because it breaches etiquette, or because it is strategically foolish; it is perfectly reasonable on all three counts but merely gets in the way of our plans. Such unreasonable resentments can be discarded by seeing sense and pulling oneself up short, before we even get to the spiritual question of forgiveness.
With genuinely bad behaviour, the job is quite different. I must equate myself with the person: when I am self-reliant rather than God-reliant, I behave badly, and what’s true of me is true of them. In recognising my own powerlessness, I’m recognising theirs; in recognising my own drivenness, I’m recognising theirs; in recognising my own rudderlessness, I’m recognising theirs; and so on.
‘Sick’ is thus to be understood not in the common contemporary sense of depraved or contemptible but merely out of sorts, not at one’s best, blinded by one’s own way of thinking, and so on; in profound error due to the upstream error of denying God mastery over one’s life and instead going it alone, which is the ‘excellent foppery of the world’—the universal error of mankind.
We asked God to help us show them the same tolerance, pity, and patience that we would cheerfully grant a sick friend.
Tolerance: leaving them alone, without trying to fix, change, control, regulate, or contain them.
Pity: adopting an attitude of understanding rather than condemnation.
Patience: resolving to face difficulty or disagreeable circumstances with courage and good humour, making such adjustments and adaptations as are within our remit and power to make.
The person is to be treated as a friend, and a friend who is in trouble. This approach is to be adopted even with people one believes oneself to be indifferent or even antagonistic towards.
We are to ask God to help us do all of the above. In other words, we must do the above, and God does helping (as usual with direction and strength). God does not do this for us or instead of us, and certainly not against our will. This means that this change of attitude is fundamentally within our power, though we need, as it were, a ‘leg up’.
When a person offended we said to ourselves, “This is a sick man. How can I be helpful to him? God save me from being angry. Thy will be done.”
There is no such thing as an offensive word or action. It is really a distortion to refer to ‘causing offence’. Offence is not caused by the offending act, which is entirely neutral; the causing of offence is a separate operation, with offence a construct created in the mind of the apprehender of the word or action.
‘I find that offensive’ says nothing about the word or action. It says a great deal about the offended. We learn what the offended’s values are, what the offended believes the word or action implies or betrays, and also of the offended’s desire that others fall in line with their values. I would do well to be a good deal more embarrassed when I am offended. I’m showing myself up.
The solution to resentment lies with us. God has a role to play, but we must activate the process, and we do this by talking to ourselves—reframing, talking back to the ego (Evagrius of Pontus’s Ἀντιρρητικός, or Antirrhetikos), and redirecting our thinking, followed by addressing God.
Four parts:
This is a sick man—or this person is ‘up against it’, ‘having a rough time’, ‘unable to see their own error’, etc.
How can I be helpful? Usually by staying out of their way and leaving well alone, but as important as the help is the attitude of constructive assistance in the place of destructive condemnation.
God save me from being angry—because I’m the one in trouble. They may be in trouble, too, but that’s between them and God.
Thy will be done—that resets me back at the square one of harmony with God’s will (i.e. reality), by neutralising my insistence that I have my own way.
This prayer, applied persistently, never fails.
We avoid retaliation or argument.
This means not just retaliation or argument in person or writing, in all its forms, but mental: no more mental arguments, with people who are not in the room; no more case-building.
We wouldn’t treat sick people that way. If we do, we destroy our chance of being helpful. We cannot be helpful to all people, but at least God will show us how to take a kindly and tolerant view of each and every one.
There are two basic approaches to others: attack and assistance (or at least neutrality). Each approach cancels out its opposite.
The basic philosophy of life in the AA programme is to make a constructive contribution, in whatever way God decides.
The last line provides an extra prayer, if one needs one: “Show me how to take a kindly and tolerant view of each and every one.” As with the previous prayer, this one never fails. It is really the same as the previous prayer, just worded differently, and sometimes one wording works more quickly than another.
These exercises must be completed for everyone on the resentment list. We should in principle forgive everyone before proceeding, or at least be on the way to doing so. In most cases forgiveness essentially involves:
- Withdrawing the demands as unreasonable or unrealistic or both
- Withdrawing the condemnation and replacing it with a constructive desire to help
- Unwinding the anger and replacing it with good will or at least neutrality
- Unwinding the plans and replacing them with placid acceptance of God’s will.
Referring to our list again. Putting out of our minds the wrongs others had done, we resolutely looked for our own mistakes.
We have gotten rid of resentment by now, which means we can get going on examining ourselves. The resentment blocked this: every time one tried to point the finger at oneself, resentment turned it back around and pointed it at others.
These questions are to be applied (a) to the people one resents (b) each other major person in one’s life (c) each category of person not otherwise or already covered (d) each other area of life (including food, money, health, etc.)
With mistakes, a preliminary exercise can help:
Where, precisely, is the thinking wrong in relation to the resentments (all of them)?
This can be written as (a) a general list applicable of many resentments—this might capture hostility, entitlement, the self-centred belief that one is the prime cause for or ground of others’ behaviour, etc.) and (b) a specific list of errors in relation to the particular resentment at hand.
Then one can look at one’s mistakes in other areas:
Mistaken attitudes
Mistaken actions (things I should have done plus egregious errors of omission)
Where had we been selfish, dishonest, self-seeking and frightened?
Selfish—putting myself ahead of others when I shouldn’t—this is an action question.
Dishonest—deception or dissimulation where honesty and candour are required; self-deception; scheming.
Self-seeking—what was I after? This is a motivation question.
Frightened—what was I frightened of? This is also a motivation question.
These last two work together: the overall picture of self-seeking is the picture of all the things I want(ed); the overall picture of fear is the picture of all the things I do (did) not want. Together they produce the blueprint of self-will. The ego’s utopia and dystopia.
Though a situation had not been entirely our fault, we tried to disregard the other person involved entirely. Where were we to blame? The inventory was ours, not the other man’s. When we saw our faults we listed them. We placed them before us in black and white. We admitted our wrongs honestly and were willing to set these matters straight.
We are reminded that we must disregard others. If they did bad things or worse things to us, that does not affect our inventory or justify the actions we took. If the actions we took were morally wrong, that’s the end of it.
Where was I to blame?
This could be:
- Where I set the ball rolling
- Where I added fuel to the fire
Faults: character defects. This is the seventh question in this paragraph and prepares us for Step Seven. This is a coincidence.
Here’s a list to pick from:
Arrogance; avarice; contempt; cowardice; cruelty; disobedience; distrust; domination; envy; gluttony; impenitence; indifference; jealousy; lack of discipline; lust; malice; over-ambition; over-sensitiveness; presumption; pride; prudery; pugnacity; retaliation; sentimentality; shame (hurt pride); sloth; snobbery; timidity; vanity; violation of confidence; wastefulness.
Wrongs: harms done to others I’ll be needing to make amends for. This is the eighth question in this paragraph and prepares us for Step Eight. This is a further coincidence.
Notice that the word “fear” is bracketed alongside the difficulties with Mr. Brown, Mrs. Jones, the employer, and the wife.
Out of sight, below the surface, hidden, but one is aware of it constantly.
Difficulties = having plans for others and the world + others and the world not playing ball.
Plans come from desire.
Desire creates tyranny.
The fear of not getting.
The fear of losing.
Getting is no better than getting.
Every time you think you’ve checkmated desire, its universally extending root system sends up another shoot elsewhere.
This short word somehow touches about every aspect of our lives.
Fear stems from desire.
Desire is ubiquitous.
For each circumstance, there is the ideal and the counter-ideal.
One desires the ideal and has a counter-desire for the counter-ideal.
Fear: the fear of the non-fulfilment of the desire or the fulfilment of the counter-desire.
This cannot be escaped horizontally: move situation and merely change the ideals and counter-ideals.
The only escape is vertical.
The third dimension releases from the constraints of the two.
The fourth, from the three.
It was an evil and corroding thread; the fabric of our existence was shot through with it.
Without the thread, no fabric.
An unavoidable feature of existence.
Existence is just taking up space and time.
Live is a vivacity contingent on existence but not conditioned by it.
The way to escape the fabric is to rise from life to existence.
Existence is the words. Life is the gag.
It set in motion trains of circumstances which brought us misfortune we felt we didn’t deserve. But did not we, ourselves, set the ball rolling? Sometimes we think fear ought to be classed with stealing. It seems to cause more trouble.
One tends not to take fear lying down. The two responses are attack or evade. Both can be legitimate, if justified: one can alter the conditions; one can take evasive action. But one has a tendency to take action when the action is not justified, and this is what brings misfortune. Of course, one is right to say one did not deserve the misfortune, because no one deserves misfortune per se; the error, rather, is to believe that the misfortune is an error. Everything happens for a reason, and sometimes the reason is that I make really bad decisions.
To set the ball rolling: this is where the sine qua non for the misfortune is my misfortunate conduct; if I had left alone, the situation would not have arisen or would have resolved itself.
Fear is obviously in a different order than stealing; one is a mental attitude; the other is an action.
This should not be read as suggesting that fear is in the class of stealing but that fear and stealing are both in the same class.
What class might that be?
Immoral activity (mental or physical).
This is an unexpected turn in the argument.
How is fear linked to morality? Surely it is a psychological question?
To fear is to judge a speculated, usually future state of affairs as undesirable. It is a rebellion against a reality that has not yet arisen. It is a pre-emptive resentment. It requires not just this observation of an undesirable state of affairs but the underlying staking of assets that are threatened by the undesirable state of affairs. It is this staking of assets that represents the moral failing: rather than relying on God, one is relying on oneself, one’s assets. And these assets are houses built on sand, which the rational recognise to be the case. Hence fear.
We reviewed our fears thoroughly. We put them on paper, even though we had no resentment in connection with them.
First a note on simply putting them on paper:
I’ve certainly been tempted to analyse fears rather than just write them out and have performed elaborate exercises to do so. I see little use in these now, although, arguably, this is only because I have been reduced to simplicity by trying and failing at more complicated approaches. Although I might have learned a lot, I don’t think the lessons I have learned can be learned exclusively that elaborate way. If I’d kept it simple from the start, I suspect I would be just as far ahead. I would have read on to the solution and sought the solution in the solution rather than in an elaborate understanding of the problem. I’ve learned more from explaining what the words on the page say to others than from analysis of my own predicament.
To return to the task at hand:
I thus transfer the fears written about on page 67 then brainstorm (in the modern, not the page 66 sense) to record all other fears. This produces a complete list.
Repetition and overlap are to be avoided. Simplify and rationalise the list.
This produces a complete but concise list.
Occasionally look a little past the fears that present to the fears that lie behind them.
Most things feared are not feared in themselves but for what they represent or bring about, in particular in terms of internal experience.
Such an investigation is not analysis but merely following the instruction to catalogue the fears.
Rummage all the way to the back of the cupboard.
When the list is complete, simplified, and rationalised down to its essence, the observation is valuable that the entirety of one’s unhappiness is circumscribed by this paltry list.
We asked ourselves why we had them. Wasn’t it because self-reliance failed us?
The apparent instruction to investigate further is not really an instruction but a device to introduce a conclusion we are encouraged to make: self-reliance fails.
For this to be true it must be true of all fears.
Where the insistence on going it alone produces the credible speculation one will fail in an endeavour, it is easy to see how self-reliance fails. Self-reliance, in that purely practical sense, cannot guarantee success and thus cannot guarantee the avoidance of the undesired outcome.
However, the proposition contained in the rhetorical question hold only if it holds for all fears, not just those flowing from self-reliance in the narrow sense. What about fear of spiders, fear of death?
We thus need a sense of self-reliance that goes beyond the refusal to accept guidance or assistance.
Self-reliance produces or perpetuates fear in two ways.
Firstly, self manifests in attachment to a particular set of favourable conditions and aversion to a particular set of unfavourable conditions. The judgement as to favour or disfavour is tied up in the various areas of self: relationships, money, needs, wants, and image. Self wants, and wanting, in an uncertain world, inevitably produces fear.
Secondly, self-reliance is opposed to God-reliance. How does God-reliance solve fear? If we are not physical bodies, which is the premise of self, but spirits temporarily inhabiting physical bodies, our conditions are merely aids to navigation rather than favours or threats. The ultimate identity and value of the person are kept safe in the realm of the spirit. Purpose is indeed fulfilled in the world, but money, power, and prestige, in particular, are not the purpose or the measures of the attainment of purpose.
What are the measures? The fact of seeking to do God’s will; the skill of enjoying life despite conditions; the pursuit of truth, understanding, insight, correct perception; the assistance of others; the maintenance of detachment throughout all of this; and constant conscious contact with God.
These cannot be confounded by any reversals of fortune or even the end of the world: one’s job will have been accomplished.
Thus self-reliance fails in three ways:
- Material success requires humility and interaction with others, not going it alone, and the prospect of sure failure on the track of ill-judged independence generates fear;
- Relying on self to generate objectives in life produces objectives contingent on uncertain outcomes, and this necessarily generates fear;
- Denying the realm of the spirit, denying God Himself, denying our reliance on Him, denying our purpose in Him cuts off the escape route, the home realm from which we can operate in an insecure world, safe in the knowledge that everything of value is safeguarded by God.
If you take all that is valuable out to a treacherous sea in a little leaky boat, it is sure to be lost.
If you leave everything that is valuable on the shore, whatever happens to the boat, everything you value is waiting for you on shore.
Self-reliance was good as far as it went, but it didn’t go far enough. Some of us once had great self-confidence, but it didn’t fully solve the fear problem, or any other. When it made us cocky, it was worse.
Self-reliance in the ordinary sense is the refusal to depend unreasonably on others, to outsource responsibility and authority to others. This is a virtue. But practical problems are best solved taking note of the accumulated wisdom of the world, securing the will and resources of God, and employing both to the matter in addition to one’s own wit and wherewithal.
Taking charge of situations, taking remedial or evasive action, setting up contingency plans and buffers, building dykes, putting in alarm systems, all of these measures have a beneficial effect and make life easier, but nothing prevents ‘bad things’ from happening, and few such measures make the ‘bad thing’ much easier to deal with when it hits.
Self-confidence is thus no comprehensive solution to fear.
What is cockiness? Excessive self-confidence.
How is that a problem?
Firstly, I will make errors I would not otherwise make because I trust myself where I should take more care and be more skeptical of my own ideas.
Secondly, in depriving myself of wisdom and resources from beyond myself, I’m tying one hand behind my back.
Humility produces strength because it excludes rash, peremptory, and foolish decisions and because it makes wise use of whatever is available from the outside in pursuit of one’s legitimate ends.
Perhaps there is a better way—we think so. For we are now on a different basis; the basis of trusting and relying upon God.
The programme is not an activity (although it involves activities). It is not a bolt-on. It is a method of living.
To trust God means to trust that the outcomes of adopting the system proposed are the right ones, which means to give oneself no further trouble about particular ups and downs, because the overall outcome is safe in God’s hands.
To rely on God means to do what we think God would have us do. This means we cannot explain our decisions, which are received from God rather than made, as one makes an omelette from identifiable ingredients. If someone in authority hands you a slip of paper with an instruction but does not explain himself, you can speculate as to the reasons, but you can’t be certain. When one makes a decision by asking God, one might have done one’s homework, thought through the situation logically, consulted, and paused, but one asks God for the final nod: left or right. The nod might obviously accord with one’s considerations or might run counter to them. But even if it happens to coincide with one’s reasoning, God’s real reason might be quite different. So, when one makes a decision by referring to God, there’s no point in anyone asking ‘why’ and expecting an explanation. The only explanation comes from God, and God’s not talkative.
Living this way is nerve-wracking and possible only with trust, which is acquired only gradually and never perfectly.
We trust infinite God rather than our finite selves.
The two operative commodities are knowledge and power.
God, as a matter of principle, has infinite knowledge. I have extremely limited knowledge.
God, as a matter of principle, has infinite power. I have extremely limited power.
I can trundle along at my own space navigating as best as I can.
Or I can trust, which means asking and doing.
Those are the only two options.
We are in the world to play the role He assigns.
The text does not say ‘we exist’ but ‘we are in the world’. Our being in the world is a narrower statement than that we exist. That means we have an existence outside the world, too (maybe before we are here, maybe after, but certainly at the same time as playing the role).
Playing the role I am assigned requires that I absolutely relinquish playing any other role I might assign myself, which, in turn, means absolutely relinquishing any notions of what life should look like in general or what my life should look like in particular.
As the actor, I remain separate from the role. It’s played with diligence and aplomb but it is not who I am. Its fate is distinct from mine. Its fate depends on me, but my fate does not depend on it. The relationship is not symmetrical.
I may not find out what the purpose of the role really is but I will find out the lines to say (where to go, what to do, what to say, to whom). The purpose grows out of that. I need not define or understand the purpose.
We never apologize to anyone for depending upon our Creator.
The notion of God as Creator is slid in. One can have any Higher Power one wishes, but the gold standard is God as Creator.
If God is Creator, I’m creature: subservient, subordinate, and created for His purpose not mine. No room for hubris there. God is the alpha, the start, and the omega, the end, in the senses both of termination and purpose. I’m merely somewhere in the intervening alphabet.
One does not harm others by depending on our Creator, so the imagined apology is not an expression of sorrow for having harmed someone, but a more unusual use of the word: a formal justification or defence.
People will indeed level the charge of silliness or insanity, and the line suggests I do not engage in argument about this.
The charge may come internally, from the ego, or from common sense. Likewise: no argument is necessary or fruitful.
We can laugh at those who think spirituality the way of weakness. Paradoxically, it is the way of strength. The verdict of the ages is that faith means courage.
Rather than trying to justify God-dependence from scratch, we merely adduce as evidence the considerable body of writings over the millennia in support of this position and let it go. The counterarguments are so primitive as to be laughable.
The truth is that God-reliance is powerful. The analogy of machinery is useful: if we use certain types of machinery, we can do more than if we try to do things by hand. We are dependent in the sense of using the resource and living by routines that require such resources, but we are not dependent in the sense of being slavishly addicted to something deleterious against our will. There is nothing harmful about this process when operated correctly and as a part of a package deal that includes checks and balances, which is what the programme is.
All men of faith have courage. They trust their God. We never apologize for God.
Much of this passage is repetition: trust in God and reliance on God produce the ability to handle whatever comes, both psychologically and practically, and confidence in the provision of these two resources produces courage.
Instead we let Him demonstrate, through us, what He can do.
Firstly, I needn’t attempt to control or manage a situation (though I must control and manage myself).
I retreat from that position, standing back, taking only such action as is minimally required by God.
What I do is really done by God through me. My job is to make myself available to this process and to avoid blocking the operation of God.
The point of what is done is not the thing itself but its usefulness as demonstration, to bring others to want and seek God.
We ask Him to remove our fear and direct our attention to what He would have us be. At once, we commence to outgrow fear.
When I ask God to remove my fear, God immediately delegates back to me the responsibility for continuing to seek the right thought and action (page 87).
That means positively working in the right direction and actively defending against temptations to indulge fear.
How is it God who is then removing my fear? It is God who provides the knowledge of what to (think and) do and the power to (think and) do just that.
Note that fear is presented here as something childish to be outgrown.
Now about sex. Many of us needed an overhauling there. But above all, we tried to be sensible on this question. It’s so easy to get way off the track. Here we find human opinions running to extremes—absurd extremes, perhaps. One set of voices cry that sex is a lust of our lower nature, a base necessity of procreation. Then we have the voices who cry for sex and more sex; who bewail the institution of marriage; who think that most of the troubles of the race are traceable to sex causes. They think we do not have enough of it, or that it isn’t the right kind. They see its significance everywhere. One school would allow man no flavor for his fare and the other would have us all on a straight pepper diet. We want to stay out of this controversy. We do not want to be the arbiter of anyone’s sex conduct. We all have sex problems. We’d hardly be human if we didn’t. What can we do about them?
The topic here is not sexual activity per se but relationships where sex is involved.
This paragraph indicates not what is our concern but what is not our concern.
The programme has no position on:
- The nature of sexual desire
- The necessity of sexual activity
- The desirability of acting (or not) on sexual desire
- The appropriateness (or not) of marriage
- The role of sexual desire and activity as the cause of other problems
To anticipate what is to come, we will be concerned only with:
- Our conduct
- The improvement thereof
- The obtainment of God’s will in this regard.
Although no position is stated, there is an unstated premise behind the statement of no position.
In describing sex (i.e. sexual activity) as ‘pepper’ it is classing sex as a condiment not a food group, as something that can improve a meal but is not integral to diet.
One can take this as entailing the following: sex, as such, is not required for health, and sex is not a domain of life or an activity, but a means of expression in certain types of relationship.
In saying that they do not wish to be the arbiter of anyone’s sex conduct, they are anticipating the later advice to follow God’s revealed will rather than directly following another’s advice.
There is also a general suggestion that one should not be embarrassed or think oneself odd for having problems in close relationships, because people invariably do.
We reviewed our own conduct over the years past.
First of all, this is a conduct inventory. We’re not interested in attitudes, values, thoughts, or feelings but behaviour.
If the page 67 questions have been answered thoroughly, all of the content will already have been covered.
However, some people will deliberately refrain from examining this domain when answering the page 67 questions on the basis that the matter can be deferred until now. The error in this is that, because this concerns just conduct, the attitudes, values, etc., will be missed.
It is better, therefore, to cover this area properly when answering the page 67 questions at least in relation to major relationships, and use this inventory:
- To condense in one place the behaviours
- To examine anything else that did not come up when the page 67 questions were answered, through oversight, on grounds of relative triviality, or because the page 67 questions will not necessarily cover everything in the past whereas the sex inventory will.
Here, there is no threshold for triviality or temporal distance. Everything must be covered.
Where had we been selfish, dishonest, or inconsiderate? Whom had we hurt? Did we unjustifiably arouse jealousy, suspicion or bitterness? Where were we at fault, what should we have done instead? We got this all down on paper and looked at it.
One can read this as containing nine questions. One can also read this as a general set of prompts to write, for each person or category of persons, a simple list of undesirable behaviours and a simple list of ‘insteads’.
Generally, when people try to treat the questions as separate, there’s an awful lot of overlap, and the resultant picture can be incoherent and patchy.
It’s best, therefore, to use the questions as prompts and to write a coherent picture.
We’re looking for patterns and events. Work chronologically in each relationship.
The categories might involve one-night-stands, other casual sexual interactions, flirting, crushes, brief dating experiences.
Significant relationships should be dealt with separately, but a degree of copying and pasting between them will be possible. Most people’s repertoires are very limited.
Regarding the unjustifiable arousing of jealousy, suspicion, or bitterness: innocent acts that happen to trigger these feelings in people who are mentally unstable should be ignored, but if such situations arose repeatedly, one might ask oneself why one remained in a relationship that is being systematically torpedoed by hostility or why one failed to make reasonable accommodations to avoid unnecessarily upsetting unreasonable people.
In this way we tried to shape a sane and sound ideal for our future sex life. We subjected each relation to this test—was it selfish or not? We asked God to mold our ideals and help us to live up to them. We remembered always that our sex powers were God-given and therefore good, neither to be used lightly or selfishly nor to be despised and loathed.
The sane and sound ideal comprises attitudes and principles to govern my conduct, with as much detail as is necessary to provide clear guidance.
Selfish, here, is not to be understood as the presence of desires but either an unreasonable assertion of one’s own rights and interests of those of someone else or a negligent use of sex for trivial ends.
God turns out to be a far tougher director than human moralists. We’re not getting off lightly by having God mould our ideals. For some, the ideal turns out to be celibacy, hardly a goal of even the most shrill advocate of restrained sexual behaviour.
Note: live up to them. Not down. The ideals should take me higher not lower.
Aside from sex within a committed relationship, with or without procreative purposes, is there such a thing as legitimate recreational sex?
You’ll have to ask God about this. Many people find this problematic, however.
God alone can judge our sex situation. Counsel with persons is often desirable, but we let God be the final judge. We realize that some people are as fanatical about sex as others are loose. We avoid hysterical thinking or advice.
‘God alone can judge our sex situation’ is often rationalised to mean ‘I can do what I want.’ Of course, one can do whatever one wants, but not without the associated consequences. The question is not whether I can do what I want, but whether I should do what I want. The programme suggests something different: doing God’s will, and, to that end, one has to sincerely want to do God’s will to even discern it in the first place.
Talking things through with other people is a good idea because it gives me a clear read on whether I am rationalising to myself or whether I am genuinely accessing a vision of God’s will. The danger is believing that discussion with other people will necessarily produce the right answer. Sometimes it only produces what I want it to produce, because I have chosen a particular person to talk the issue through with. This person is the person who I know in advance will give me the answer I want.
Very extreme solutions and immediate zero tolerance of any deviations are very unlikely firstly to be God’s will and secondly to be feasible for the individual. Most people are going to need a pathway rather than the immediate imposition of a strict moral code, even if a strict moral code is what they will ultimately be abiding by.
Other people will need immediate zero tolerance of certain behaviours, because the behaviour is, for them, like drinking: any indulgence at all opens the flood gates.
Suppose we fall short of the chosen ideal and stumble? Does this mean we are going to get drunk? Some people tell us so. But this is only a half-truth. It depends on us and on our motives. If we are sorry for what we have done, and have the honest desire to let God take us to better things, we believe we will be forgiven and will have learned our lesson. If we are not sorry, and our conduct continues to harm others, we are quite sure to drink. We are not theorizing. These are facts out of our experience.
This section reveals the perfectly reasonable expectation that people will in fact fail to achieve the ideal straightaway. Quite rightly there is the recognition that there will be stumbling. This is a good example of the principle of God’s mercy: as long as I am sincere in wanting to do the right thing and improve in my adherence to the principles of the programme, I will be forgiven and I can carry on attempting to work the programme after my mistake. A line is drawn under the behaviour, and I am reset.
Note the double condition first of all of lack of repentance in relation to one’s behaviour and secondly the harm of others. If these two conditions are met, as the book says, we are quite sure to drink. I’ve seen this happen.
To sum up about sex: We earnestly pray for the right ideal, for guidance in each questionable situation, for sanity, and for the strength to do the right thing. If sex is very troublesome, we throw ourselves the harder into helping others. We think of their needs and work for them. This takes us out of ourselves. It quiets the imperious urge, when to yield would mean heartache.
Nothing is added by this summary, but it serves as an adequate aide-memoire.
As with most difficulties, the solution lies not in attempting to solve the difficulty but in getting as far away from the problem as possible by engaging in some other interesting, constructive activity, so that God, as it were, can perform the necessary work within me in order to pull out the problem by the roots, to remove the basis for the problem. Whilst I’m still fussing around the problem, attempting to fix it myself by thinking and talking about it, I’m acting as my own human shield against God’s positive intervention in my life. To put it simply, all I need to do is work the twelfth step, either in terms of carrying the message or being of constructive use in some other area of my life, and I discover myself first of all refraining from the behaviour in question and secondly acquiring a different view of the situation. Having acquired this different view, I can see the folly of my behaviour and the desire to act out starts to abate. I can see that the acting out brings no real, lasting, valuable benefit and brings only heartache.
This applies to any sort of acting out, not just in the sexual or romantic arena.
This formula, succinctly summarised in this paragraph, has turned out to be the answer to all sorts of problems for which Twelve-Step fellowships are available. Just because a Twelve-Step fellowship exists for my problem does not mean I cannot get well using the programme in my existing fellowship: most problems, most of the time, yield to this simple approach. It should be recalled that the main reason why so many Twelve-Step fellowships exist is so that people who are not alcoholic can gain access to the Twelve Steps. The world of recovery does not need to be treated like a department store, where I go to a different fellowship for every problem. Essentially the one system of the Twelve-Step programme set out in the Big Book is sufficient to solve all of my problems. Where other fellowships can come in very useful is firstly with the mechanics of the first step and the twelfth step and secondly with identification, fellowship, and finding people to sponsor. Other Twelve-Step fellowships I’ve found particularly useful in terms of defining so-called bottom lines and devising tactics for detoxing and avoiding a slip or acting out. even though the basic solution to all of our problems lies in the Twelve Steps, it can be useful to have people around one who have the exact same problems in order that, for instance, rationalisations and self-deception can be spotted earlier. I have also noted how the first stages of the preparation for a slip can be more visible to someone with exactly the same problem than to someone who is also an addict but whose specific problem is a different one. Pill people have a keener eye for the rationalisations and self-deception of other pill people, for instance. The same with food.
If we have been thorough about our personal inventory, we have written down a lot. We have listed and analyzed our resentments. We have begun to comprehend their futility and their fatality. We have commenced to see their terrible destructiveness. We have begun to learn tolerance, patience and good will toward all men, even our enemies, for we look on them as sick people. We have listed the people we have hurt by our conduct, and are willing to straighten out the past if we can.
There is nothing essentially new in this paragraph. It should be noted, however, that the primary criterion for the writing of a personal inventory is that it be thorough. It needn’t be written well or convincingly. As long as it is a sincere attempt to write an inventory, it is sufficient for the purposes at hand.
Enemies have not been mentioned before, but they do get a look in here. It should be understood that the procedure for excusing or forgiving people in the Fourth Step must be applied universally without exception, regardless of the nature of the harm done to us, or the perceived harm, and regardless of whether or not the other person has recognised their wrongdoing and apologised to us or made amends. There may be people with whom we are in some form of open warfare. We must be as stringent with excusing or forgiving such people as with the more minor situations.
There is also the suggestion that we have effectively written out our full Eighth Step list at this point. There is doubt about that. Typically, all of the wrongs done towards others have indeed been written down, but they have been written down in response to the page 67 and page 69 questions, which means that the wrongs are scattered through all of the other observations forming part of the answers to such questions. We might consider writing out all of the harms separately by transferring them from the answers to the page 67 and page 69 questions to a fresh sheet of paper, or we could wait until we get to the Eighth Step proper. I tend to advocate the latter, because such greater clarity is achieved through the processes of the Fifth, Sixth, and Seven Steps that, by the time I come to write out the full Eighth Step list when following the instructions on page 76, I discover that the content is in far better shape.
The text also suggests that by this point we have become willing to straighten out the past, by making amends. As with the Eighth Step list, this assertion might be a little presumptuous. Sometimes it is only by taking the Fifth Step, for instance, that the willingness to make amends arises in practice. In some cases, the acquisition of willingness with regard to the Eighth Step was baked into the Step Three decision. To acquire willingness to make amends to everyone means recognising that, by signing up to the programme through the Third Step, what I have done is signed up to a moral system, a key component of which is making amends to others whenever I have harmed them.
If the willingness has not been acquired, one must work to acquire it. Here’s a good method:
Since the principle of making amends is a universal principle, it need not be worked through with each individual person. Like an amnesty, it is general. If it is not general, it is not an amnesty but a series of individual pardons.
Behind the moral principle, however, there is a colder, harder reason:
On the far side of all of the other, obvious, motivations, there is the observation that, unless I complete my Steps Eight and Nine, I will not form a robust relationship with God, and that means that I will not secure the defence necessary against the first drink, which can come only from God. In other words, I need to make amends all round to stay sober.
In this book you read again and again that faith did for us what we could not do for ourselves. We hope you are convinced now that God can remove whatever self-will has blocked you off from Him. If you have already made a decision, and an inventory of your grosser handicaps, you have made a good beginning. That being so you have swallowed and digested some big chunks of truth about yourself.
The first assertion of this paragraph is that it is faith that brings about the necessary change of mind. In other words, faith, which is a feature of the relationship with God, is presented here as the actuating force. Whilst I think that what Bill is probably doing is using faith as a placeholder for the entire spiritual experience, I think there is a valid point: the mere faith that God can save me will produce a sufficient confidence and resolve that I can withstand any temptation.
Axiomatically, anything that I cannot do is something that God can do.
My experience with God’s removal of my self-will is this: when God offers me an alternative course of action and when I adopt that course of action, work takes place below the surface, which I presume to be mobilised by God, which, if not entirely removing self-will per se, at least removes my attachment to it. No longer loyal to desires and impulses, I am free of them even though they might still be present.
The making of the decision is the Third Step. The inventory of my grosser handicaps is the Fourth Step. Note that the completion of the Fourth Step is the making of a good beginning. Not only does this mean that the Fourth Step is part of a larger process of Steps Four through Nine; it also suggests that I will be taking inventory for the rest of my life. This will not be on the same scale as the gargantuan Fourth Step of the first, second, or third runs through the Steps. But I will have to remain vigilant to where my attitudes and actions run counter to God’s will, for the rest of my life.