Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.
step 4 – ALCOHOLICS ANONYMOUS
Don’t know about you, but I hate turning the critical eye inward. Presumably you will ask, “Why is that, Larry?”
Up until I had several years sobriety behind me, LarryPaulBrown was the world’s foremost expert at condemning himself. “You never do anything right, you are a failure,” were my life’s defining words. “Why can’t you be more like Joe, the school sports jock, or Mary, the class valedictorian, or Pastor Jones, the community rock? Why, why, why?”
Doing an honest 4th step, a searching and fearless assessment of me was a daunting task until my spiritual advisor set before me on paper two columns – one for the negatives and one for the positives.
“But,” I protested, “I can’t think of any positives.” Thank God for the patience and insight of our sponsors who guide us through these growing pains.
Even today it is infinitely more comforting to look at you and take your inventory. Yes, old habits die hard. The ego loves this – ‘I’ and ‘me’ become bigger and superior – it creates separation and otherness. My defects are not as severe or humiliating as yours. “Well, I never did that. Tsk, tsk.”
Ultimately an overly active ego, a continual subversion of one’s inner truth to ‘I, I, I and me, me, me’ creates violence between individuals and warfare between nations.
Verse 41 in the 6th chapter of Luke says, “Why do you look at the speck that is in your brother’s eye, but do not notice the log that is in your own eye?”
What’s in my eye today? What’s in yours?
lpb quest - the twilight dance 
We always feel better when we have someone we can look down on.
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Yes, you are right.
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i used to hand out sheets of paper with a bisecting line right down the middle to my clients and told them to list as quickly as they could 10 things they hated about themselves…that went on one side…then to as as quickly as they could write ten things they LIKED about themselves. They NEVER, not a single one of them, could find ten things they liked during early recovery. BUT, they could certainly write down 50 or more they hated. As treatment went on, suddenly they had less negative and more and more positive to say about themselves. Only one ever caught on that I was forcing them to do step four….
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I guess its a common human thing, but we alcoholics seem to be great at denigrating ourselves. Thanks, Suze. A video I watch every morning says that love of self begins with reverence for all of life.💖
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