That dreaded fifth step
Tuesday, August 20, 2019
It's interesting to me that so many people dread doing the fifth step. If you're not familiar allow me to enlighten you. The fourth step says: "We made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves" and the fifth step is: "Admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs." Basically, we make a list of resentments and other shit we've done that we carry around with us then we tell someone all those deep, dark secrets that kept us sick. The point is to unburden yourself of all the stuff you've hauled around that you then used or drank over. Now, obviously, I'm not going to get into specifics here about my shit but I can speak to all this in a general way.
I've been really anxious about doing this step for a while now. I wrote down all my stuff during the fourth step. I looked at my behaviour past and present and wrote down all those things about which I'm embarrassed, ashamed, guilty, resentful, whatever. Anything that I used over for whatever reason. I tried to be as thorough as possible. I mean, I really want to get clean and sober this time. I'm tired of living the way I was and I don't want to do it anymore. My sponsor was amazing, truly! There's a reason she and I were paired up together. She understood a lot of where I'm coming from. It's kind of weird talking about deeply personal stuff with someone you don't know that well but then again I know that she's been in the same hell I've been in so what else really do I need to know? Like the big book says, we're like shipmates that have survived a shipwreck. We feel that overwhelming happiness to just still be alive and we know that the person in the life boat with us experienced the same terror we just did.
My sponsor and I went through steps 5, 6, and 7 so now I'm up to 8 which is the one where you make a list of all people you've harmed and becoming willing to makes amends to them all. So, back to the notebook for more writing.