Tag Archives: moral inventory

Resentments: People, institutions, and principles

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We addicts have to get rid of resentment. It keeps us away from our Higher Power and from our fellows. The Big Book tells us it is “the ‘number one ‘offender. It destroys more alcoholics than anything else.” It also tells us that resentments fall into three groups: People, institution, and principles. Easy enough, right? But what exactly is resentment, and   if we’re going to be specific about it, how do we define people, institutions, and principles?

[In this post, we’re going to explore some real-life examples that can be found on many people’s Fourth Step lists. The mention of anything or anyone here is not intended as a judgement of anyone or anything nor an endorsement or a denunciation.]

The Big Book uses a couple words or phrases around resentment: anger, burned up, sore, grouch, and grudge. It’s pretty clear that resentment begins with anger. But it’s equally clear that the anger remains potent and active over time. In fact, looking at the word resentment, we see the same thing. Re- is again. Sent- is related to sensing or feeling. Meant- denotes a state of mind or being. Put it all together, and we are in a state of feeling something again and again. Or as the dictionary might put it: “A persistent feeling of ill will.”

While that tells us what resentment is, and a little about how it functions, when we’re making our Fourth Step lists, how do we identify it? That’s not necessarily as simple. As addicts, we eat to cover up and subdue our feelings. We have spent so much time denying that those feelings still control us and telling anyone who will listen that we aren’t angry people. So we may have some difficulty admitting to resentment or locating it.

Sure there may be some instances where we have alarming clarity about a grudge we hold. But often we’ve used food to turn dangerous feelings of anger into disappointment, sadness, or just a numb and nebulous sense that something’s not right about the person or situation. We must be honest and thorough as we compose our lists, and members’ experiences suggest a few strategies for prying out names from our subconscious.

  • Contacts: Check the contact list on a cell phone, a rolodex, or an address book.
  • Yearbooks: Look at the pictures in your middle school, high school, and college yearbooks and don’t forget the teachers.
  • Directories: Church, business, or organizational directories are full of people we’ve had dealings with
  • Memory Lane: Imagine the streets in the neighborhoods you’ve lived in and look at the residents or workers in your mind’s eye.
  • Home Inspection: Consider the objects in your home, the people and businesses that sold them to you as well as any maintenance people associated with them

As we use these strategies, we can look for people, places, things, and ideas that pop out as uneasy for us. We might not even remember precisely why that unease lingers, but it will be revealed to us as we continue the Fourth Step. If we sense the unease in us, even in the case of grief, we can ask ourselves if there’s resentment associated with it and whether the feeling is anger that’s been transformed by us into something else more palatable.

So how do we differentiate between people, institutions, and principles anyway? And what about those things that seem like none of the above? Let’s start with people. Here are examples of what could go into the category of people:

  • Individuals we have met: Family, friends, coworkers, clients, people we do business with, the person who crashed into our car, antagonists/bullies, rivals, members of our church or its congregational leader, fellow students, teachers, our doctors, our lawyers, OA members, ourselves, God
  • Individuals we have never met: Celebrities, professional athletes, historical figures, world leaders, family members we never met, authors, business leaders, politicians
  • Non-human people: This may seem controversial to some, but we’ve got to put pets, plants, animals that have attacked us, and annoyances from the natural world somewhere (all that counts are thoroughness and honesty!)
  • Fictional people: Characters in film or literature, imaginary friends
  • Groups of people: School cliques, demographic segments (socioeconomics, nationality, race, gender, sexual orientation, religion, location, citizenship status etc), professional groups (e.g. insurance salesmen, doctors, lawyers, politicians, CEOs), folks with certain beliefs (e.g. anarchists, liberals, white nationalists, tree huggers), people who engage in certain taboo practices of a greater sort (e.g. cannibals, pedophiles, murderers) or a lesser sort (e.g. jaywalkers, smokers, gluttons), and people who belong to organizations (political party members, members of social/fraternal organizations, and members of a specific religious membership).

That last item, the people who belong to organizations, leads us to institutions. It’s important to remember that the people who belong to an institution are people, but the institution is separate. Institutions has two important definitions to guide us:

  1. A society or organization founded for a specific purpose, including religious, governmental, societal, social, educational, and business reasons. Here we can list businesses, schools, universities, political parties, local benevolent groups (Rotary, Lions, etc), Boy Scouts, Congress, charity organizations, religions and their individual sects and their local places of worship, school boards, research organizations, professional associations, lobbying groups, support groups (yes, including OA), and the zillions of other contemporary, historical, or fictional organizations out there (the IRS, the Nazi Party, and the Legion of Doom respectively)
  2. An established law, practice, or custom. This one is a little trickier. It includes things like bills (the Mann Act), Supreme Court decisions (Roe v. Wade, Citizens United, or Plessy v. Ferguson) common law, marriage, the Constitution, one’s mortgage or lease agreement and similar contracts.

That bit about practice and custom verges closely on our final group, principles. These are fundamental truths and the codes of conduct or ideas that stem from them. “The early bird gets the worm,” for example. But also the ideas behind it: industriousness, discipline, and responsibility. It’s easy to understand why this can get a little gray when compared to the practices or customs that we talk about in the institutions. Better ask God to let you know how to sort that one out.

So what about items such as food addiction, earthquakes, and racism? These fall into that gray area between institutions and principles. With a disease (addiction or cancer) or condition (such as poverty), we can probably safely put them into principles. Why? Because they are, ultimately, ideas and theories about the actions of our minds and bodies rather than prescribed practices or customs that we are “supposed to” follow. Earthquakes, similarly, are an idea about the behavior of our physical world but not societal prescriptions. They certainly aren’t codes of conduct, but for some people they do create a set of actions or behaviors that are crucial to staying alive. Then there’s racism. That’s a hard one because racism is often described as a system of oppression, which makes it a practice or a custom, especially in those areas of the world where it affects governmental or institutional policy. On the other hand, it is an idea as well that begets a system or set of behaviors. It could reasonably go in either list. We just have to ask God where to put it.

So that’s a crash course on the lists we make for the Fourth Step. The most important thing to remember about making this list is to pray before we pick up our pen, asking God to guide our thoughts and push our pen. That way, we can feel more confident that what’s coming out is accurate and that we don’t have to censor ourselves. We can’t leave out our basest resentments because we’re afraid someone else will judge us for them. The whole point of the Fourth Step is to get rid of the stuff inside our minds, hearts, and souls that distances us from one another. Besides which, our disease needs only one resentment to use as leverage against us in its fight to keep us enslaved by food.

 

What is self-seeking anyhow?

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What the heck is this “self-seeking” thing we hear about in meetings? The term gets bandied about quite a bit, and we know it’s something to do with our behavior, but what’s the difference between self-seeking and selfishness? Or self-seeking and self-centeredness? And most important, why is it crucial that we recognize our self-seeking behaviors and tendencies?

The Big Book introduces the word self-seeking in its discussion of Step Three. In fact, it uses the a form of the word three times from page 61 to page 67. On page 61, in the example of the actor who wants to run the entire production instead of just doing their part, the Big Book describes how this person can be either gracious or cruel in trying to make things go their own way:

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?

Here the book tells us, by the actor analogy, that when we try to exert control over situations or manipulate them for our own purposes we are being a self-seeker. By extension, self-seeking has something to do with the actions we take as self-seekers.

Here it comes again on page 62:

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.

One of the four items in the series above is materially different than the others. Fear, self-delusion, and self-pity all occur in our minds and directed at ourselves. But self-seeking, as we discovered on page 61, connotes an action, and those actions affect others directly. Self-seeking is the stepping on other’s toes that we do, and even its urge is different than those other three things. As we are about to find out, it is a product of them.

On page 67, we learn that to be truly free from our resentments, we must recognize and admit to the part we play in them. We have our list of resentments and the effect they’ve had on us, and we now turn the lens of inquiry onto ourselves:

Referring to our list again. Putting out of our minds the wrongs others had done, we resolutely looked for our own mistakes. Where had we been selfish, dishonest, self-seeking, and frightened? 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 in black and white.

Let’s look deeply for a moment at these instructions. At the topmost level, we are acknowledging our part in a situation that involved resentment. And from the looks of it, we will always have some part, minor or major.

Once again, we see that self-seeking is different than its mates selfish, dishonest, and frightened. Those are states of mind, but self-seeking indicates action. What if we asked these questions in a slightly different way?

  • Selfish: What did I want?
  • Dishonest: What lie did I tell myself?
  • Frightened: What was I afraid of?

Those three things all point inward toward us, ourselves, not outward toward the world. And then,

  • Self-seeking: What did I do to get what I wanted or feel better?

This time, we aim our will at the world around us, and we do something that affects others. Sometimes the actions and effects are big: cheating on a spouse, punching someone, cutting a person out of our life. Sometimes, however, the action and effect is subtle: judging someone harshly, staying home from school or work, pitying ourselves. These actions, which seem as though they are pointed at ourselves actually effect others. How? By separating us from them, be they family, friends, or the world. Through behaviors like these we lose effectiveness at work, presence in relationships, and even financial resources.

What is the number one most popular self-seeking behavior in OA? Eating, of course! It’s our primary coping tool. If we can’t get what we want in a situation (and sometimes even if we do), we eat away our feelings. It’s how we feel better in the moment. Turns out it’s a lousy coping mechanism. While we eat at the person we’re angry with, our resentments inside of us remain very much alive and wriggling, so we need more and more food to keep them at bay.

Here’s two more visual ways to think about it.

First, imagine that you’re writing your Step 4 inventory, and at the same time your father is too. You each make a list of people you resent, and guess what, you’re each on one another’s lists! Shocker!!! You both have resentment around the time that dad wouldn’t let you borrow the car. You each follow the three-column format on page 65. On your resentment you list dad’s name in column one. In column two, you note that you resent his not letting you borrow the car. In column three, you write down that it affects your personal relations and fear. Then when you ask yourself Where was I self-seeking?, you answer I took the car without permission. Here’s the kicker: Dad wrote your name in column one, and in column two he wrote Took the car without permission. In other words, the answers we give to the question of Where was I self-seeking? produce resentments for other people.

Second, and simpler. Imagine you are pointing your finger at someone else in anger. The finger you point at them represents your self-seeking actions. But the other three fingers on your hand are all pointed back at yourself. They represent selfishness, dishonest, and fear, the things we do to ourselves that drive us to act out.

So what is self-seeking? It’s the acting out we do when we don’t like how life is treating us. It’s what we do when we are unable to be our best selves. Its how we’ve done most of the instances of damage that litter our lives. And ultimately, it is what we’ve done instead of trusting and relying on God.

Step of the Month: Once You Know…

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There’s a 12-Step slogan that takes on a variety of wordings, but boils down to “Once you know, there’s no not knowing no more, don’t you know.” Usually, it’s an alternative to the also popular, “OA ruins your eating.”

Once we learn the truth about compulsive eating, we cannot unlearn it. Forever more, every time we take a compulsive bite, we will know exactly what we are doing. We will know that we are activating the physical craving and the mental obsession as well as dooming ourselves to food hell.

That’s just the tip of the iceberg for us because in Step Four, we come face to face with the rest of our compulsive self. Many of us discover that our coping skills consist of eating and a motley assortment of esteem-squashing other behaviors that we didn’t realize we used to medicate ourselves.

Gossipping is a prime example. We may have used gossip to reduce our anxiety about a situation. We think that if we control certain information, then we control a situation. We can’t be blindsided. So we gather intelligence. We reconnoiter. We gather up every scrap of intelligence we can from our carefully developed network so that we can’t be ambushed.

We might also use gossiping to feel better about ourselves. If our allies see the predicament the way we do, we are validated in our righteous anger or our victimhood. We can get an outside of assessment of how good or bad we are in comparison to others.

And we can run our enemies down so that we feel superior.

We prescribe ourselves a cocktail of food and gossip when we feel insecure in our position in a situation. We might add some other off-label meds as well, for example self-pity, complaint, binge-watching television, people-pleasing, isolating. Bring ’em all to our pot-luck pity party!

When we get to Step Four, we have a lot of untangling to do. We think food is the big, hairy monster, when, in reality, the monster is inside our mind. Food is but a symptom, and so are all the other behaviors that we lean on. But until we write out our inventory and see how it has affected both ourselves and those around us, we don’t even realize how badly the disease has us.

Our addiction-addled brains will do anything to take the edge off of. Our disease has grown tentacles that weave themselves into our neurons. We can no longer tell where our personality begins and the addiction ends. All we can think about is how we will relieve our pain and anxiety, and so we use food and any other behaviors we have at our disposal to feel a little better. A little more in control or a little more numbed.

In Step Four we must see these other behaviors in black and white. And not just once. We’ll see them again and again, if we do an honest and thorough job. In fact, the repetition of these defective behaviors is part of the magic of doing inventory.

First, we have to know what behaviors are killing us spiritually so we can avoid them. Second, many addicts tend to cling stubbornly to their defects of character, so if we don’t seem them numerous times, we may gloss over them. Third, until we understand the hurt we cause to ourselves and others by practicing those behaviors, we may not feel much impetus to ask our Higher Power to remove them.

So we do our inventory, discover the damaged and damaging goods in our stores, and we  ask for their removal. And then we practice living without them. They may well come back. Our disease is cunning and never cured. It will try to loose our grip on God’s hand by whatever means it can, and that may mean a slow, nearly imperceptible slide back into some secondary behaviors like gossip.

But once we know we can’t not know. We remain vigilant. We ask others for feedback. We listen to the voice in our gut that tells us to avoid doing what we used to do. Most important, if we find ourselves resuming those old behaviors, we must stop them or ask for help in stopping them. They are a pathway to the first bite.

Step of the Month: 10 Suggestions for Completing Our Inventory

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4. Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.

Oftentimes when members contemplate Step 4, the moral inventory, they think Uh-oh. Who wants to face the past? We’ve been eating compulsively to forget it. Who wants to know the bad stuff about themselves? We’ve been eating compulsively to forget that too. Who wants to stare down their fears? We’ve also been eating compulsively to forget them. But compulsive eating never solves the problem. It’s only delaying the inevitable confrontation with ourselves or hastening our demise so we won’t ever have to look ourselves in the eyes.

Are we really that awful? We’re not, but we may not be able to understand that until we actually write our inventory. So for those wary of the inventory or approaching it in their step work, here are several suggestions for completing Step 4 that we hear frequently from those that have worked through it.

  1. It’s not as scary as we thought. In fact, for many of us, we realized that we’d built it up into some kind of monster, yet it turns out to be very gentle.
  2. Just get going. If we wait until we’re ready, we may never start at all. Our window of willingness is only open for so long before we’re again drowning in self-pity and sugar-coated sugar bombs (or whatever our favorite kind of binge foods are).
  3. Write every day. Look, if we’re going to do this thing, let’s get it the heck done! Why delay receiving the gifts of recovery! Even if we only write one page or one entry on a given day, it’s better than nothing at all.
  4. Use a timer. Commit to a certain amount of time each day, and use a kitchen timer to ensure to reach that goal. Because otherwise, our sickened minds will tell us that five minutes is thirty minutes.
  5. Say the Third Step Prayer every time you write. If we’re writing our inventory, then we ought to have completed Step 3. The prayer associated with it (on page 63 of The Big Book) is, in essence, a contract with God. If our HP helps us recover, then we’ll pass it on and be of service to others. It’s helpful to be reminded of that goal while we write. We’re not there to recover so that we can merely feel better. We’re writing inventory so that by our surviving this disease, we can be a beacon to others with our affliction. By helping them, we further insure ourselves against recidivism. So we say the prayer to remember Who’s in charge, and how the program will transform selfish us.
  6. Let God do the writing. By saying the Third Step Prayer, we’re acknowledging that HP is in charge. So then, as we write, we can take care to listen for God’s voice. We may think we know all about ourselves, but in reality, much is buried deep inside us, and we need more power than we have to dig it all out. When we let God push our pen and run the show, we are assured of success.
  7. Perfect is the enemy of recovery. Seeking perfection is self-centeredness running amok, and the Steps are helping to deflate that very kind of attitude. Instead of asking if it’s a perfect job of inventorying, we trust that God will help us see what we need to see. Getting stuck in perfection is a great way to just get stuck.
  8. Use visual aids. The Big Book tells us to be fearless and thorough. So as we make our grudge list, before we declare it done, we might consult yearbooks, photographs, directories, old address books, Facebook, any place where we might get a visual reminder of someone we resent. If we feel anger toward a person, or if we feel some gnawing but unnamable feeling, it’s worth adding them to the list.
  9. Lean on a sponsor. To write an inventory, we must be sure our sponsor has written one, and talk to them frequently about it. We check in with them often, showing them our writing. We can’t be too careful because our minds love to sabotage our efforts to get better. A sponsor can gently show us where our brains are trying to take over and BS us.
  10. The BIG SECRET is that we’re not so bad after all. Yup, if we do this inventory well, trusting God along the way, and working closely with our sponsor, we’re going to discover that while we may have done some bad things, we are not bad people. In fact, we’re good people who have been stuck in a rut thanks to a disease that controls our minds and actions. We see how we’ve been trapped and now we start to see the path ahead of us. A path that’s cleared of choking debris and that leads in  purposeful direction. All those defects of character and experiences we’d rather forget are about to be turned into assets by which we will help others and lead a happy, joyous, and free life.

GET WRITING! KEEP WRITING! FIND FREEDOM!

THE Cause versus Because

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Here’s an obvious statement: We OA members eat over our feelings. Our program literature tells us that the cycle of addictive behavior begins with a thought. We are activated before the first bite. A primary emotional trigger for addicts of any stripe is resentment.

The Big Book describes resentment as “the number one offender.” We eat because we are pissed off at the world, at people, at situations. When Bill Wilson and company put together the Big Book in the 1930s, they very carefully selected their words. They knew that the addicted brain manipulates us by turning our feelings into powerful language. So when they wrote down how they inventoried resentment, they used precise language that doesn’t give our brains wiggle room to make excuses.

Look at page 65 in the fourth edition of the Big Book. It lays out the first three columns of resentment inventory (the fourth column, or “turnaround” appears in the middle of page 67). The first column is headed “I’m Resentful At.” The second: “The Cause.” Notice they didn’t say “BEcause” but rather “The Cause.” There’s a world of difference.

Our addict minds are like little lawyers, always seeking to parse language in ways that justify or excuse our behaviors and let us keep eating. Among trial lawyers, there’s a well-known axiom about questioning a witness. Never ask why [unless you’ve personally coached the witness’ answer]. Lawyers frequently ask leading questions that begin with What, Who, When, Where, or How. These are all closed-ended questions with a single answer: “I saw Joe”; “I was cleaning the barn”; “8:19 PM”; “He opened the door with a lock pick.” But why is open-ended. It allows a witness to pontificate and deflect blame elsewhere. It allows opinion to enter the record. It may also give a witness license to build sympathy when sympathy is the opposite of what you want to elicit.

In a similar way, “because” is a weasel word for us addicts. We use it as a way to keep on destroying ourselves with food. Why do we eat? Because blah blah blah. If someone asked us why we were burnt up, we’d give them a litany of because statements. Insidiously, what “because” does is shift the blame to someone else.

Because Mom said I was fat, I am resentful.

This is far different from the language the Big Book recommends in that second column: “THE Cause.” To get grammatical for a second, “the” is the definite article. It indicates singularity or specificity. It reduces confusion and ambiguity. To use it in a sentence related to resent would sound like these examples

The cause of my resentment is Mom’s saying I was fat.

 

We can see that when we use “the cause” instead of “because” we turn a statement of blame into a statement of fact.

Here’s a big difference between these two ways of talking about resentment. “Because” creates slippery slopes. We’ve all heard someone talk about how their mind will create a chain of because statements that leads to eating:

Because Mom said I was fat, I must not be good enough. Because I’m not good enough, I feel pain. Because I feel pain, I need to get rid of it, so I eat.

The struck out text is a reminder of how over time our brains skip over the “reasoning” and go straight to the food. But “THE cause” doesn’t easily lead to that slippery slope.

Mom said I was fat, so I must not be good enough….

Here we can see that when we put “because” ahead of Mom, she bears the blame for our believing her. If we put “because” instead of “so” it wouldn’t even make sense. When we put “so” in front of “I,” we start to see that we are taking someone else’s words and turning them into a reason to eat. Why should we believe that we are not good enough just because Mom says we are fat? Unless we, of course, we, ourselves, are complicit in that belief?

We don’t have to be linguists for OA to work. But the folks who wrote the Big Book used “The Cause” instead of “Because” because they knew from personal experience that blaming the rest of the world for their drinking predicament didn’t work. We have to own our part of things. We’re the ones holding onto the hurts, big or tiny. We’re the ones eating ourselves to an early grave. After all, it’s our inventory, and no one else’s.

Step of the Month: Step 4

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4. Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.

Perhaps nothing in OA’s program of action inspires more dread than writing a fourth step inventory. We’ve been eating over all the hurts we’ve accumulated, trying to avoid them. Now OA tells us that we have to allow them out of the cage inside that barely keeps them under control.

Well, we’re fooling ourselves, of course. We don’t control our fears, resentments, bad memories, and feelings. They control us! Truth is that until we look at them, all of them, they own us. Every time we feel any kind of feeling, we are driven back to the food because every feeling we have reminds us of the ones we are covering up with food. Yes, even happy feelings, because they remind us of how awful we generally feel.

When we write an honest and thorough inventory of ourselves, however, we discover that we have not been victims of others so much as victims of our own thinking. Our disease has taken control of our thoughts and used them as a weapon against our better judgment. We see through an inventory that we are human beings being human with all the same flaws that everyone else has. That we take personally what is not ours to take. That we have little ability to distinguish feelings from facts. That we have precious little accuracy in our self-reflections…if we’ve bothered to be self-reflective.

In some cases, we learn that we have been victimized by someone at one time, but that, even though it is not our fault, we have to claim what’s ours: we carried around that victim mentality for years; we are the ones replaying the past over and over again and using it as a reason to eat.

Anyone who has done a thorough fourth step will tell you a few things:

  1. It is simple, but not easy
  2. It is life changing
  3. It us utterly necessary for recovery.

The third point is the one that we must all pay attention to in OA. If we don’t do the work, we will not get the results our program promises. It’s like staring at the aspirin bottle in hopes a headache will go away. We’ve got to take our medicine. Hanging around in meetings and waiting for the “right” time to do an inventory just prolongs our agony. It gives our disease time to reassert itself inside our minds. Our window of willingness is only open for so long.

We may be afraid of digging too deep, of reliving past episodes we’d rather forget, and of seeing the worst of ourselves. But we aren’t writing to be published in The New York Times. Our inventory is ours and will only be shared with one other person (in our fifth step). We make it objective. We don’t lard every resentment with the whys and whatfors. We keep our writing concise so that our disease doesn’t have room to turn us toward excuse making. We only want to record those things that our illness uses against us. That way in Steps 6 and 7, we know exactly what it is we are asking God to remove from us.

The Big Book has very specific suggestions for structuring an inventory. They have proven over 80 years to be immensely powerful and helpful. There are other means as well. In the end, however, the most important things are honesty, fearlessness, and thoroughness.

Honesty: We must be wiling to be completely and utterly honest about our part in what we write about. No excuses, no stories, no bullshit.

Fearlessness: We must not shrink at writing about the most difficult aspects of our lives. For example, many, many survivors of physical, sexual, and mental abuse have written fourth steps about them and found the inventory transformative as a result.

Thoroughness: We must get it all out—everything that keeps our true selves at bay and allows our illness to run the show. If we hold onto something we may not recover. Like one rotten apple spoiling the whole barrel.

This is our course then. In Step 3, we’ve told our Higher Power that we’ll go to any length for recovery. Now we put pen to paper to start the process of getting rid of what separates us from God’s love. Then we’ll have it removed so we finally have the slate cleared and into the business of living a useful and productive life.

KEEP WRITING!

Step of the Month: Step 5

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  1. Admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.

Imagine that you’ve decided to clean out your house. There’s too much stuff in there bogging you down, covering every surface, stuffing every closet. You’re constantly reminded by the clutter that it’s time to pare down. When you finally do it, you realize that you need to determine what stays and what goes, so you make a list as you sort through all the stuff.

Once the list is made, you need to get rid of everything that’s not useful, so you pick up the phone book and call for a dump truck. Then you ask a friend to come by and help you carry all the dreck out of your house. The driver arrives and backs up to the house, and you and your friend load the items you are throwing out into the truck, one by one. As you go, you carefully tick them off your list.

That’s exactly where we are in step five. Just prior, in step four, we made our list of the damaging attitudes, behaviors, thoughts, and situations that have gotten in our way. They have weighed us down, and every time we think about our lives, they are there to remind of us why we have sought comfort in food. But the trick is that making a list of our ugliest characteristics isn’t the same as getting rid of them. We need to expose them to the light of day where they lose their potency. We need to share them with another, understanding person who will see our humanity instead of judging us. We need to share them with God to demonstrate our continuing willingness to let go of what has blocked us from a relationship with our Higher Power.

Reading out our inventory to another person and God is how we load up the psychic dump truck so that our emotional and spiritual junk can be taken away from us.

* * *

The Big Book tells us that “a solitary self-appraisal seldom suffices.” We must reveal our darkest secrets and our tiniest missteps if we want to recover. Why? Because we have used food to bury our feelings alive. All the resentments, fears, and self-loathing remain inside of us, squirming to get out. If we leave even one or two behind, we will soon feel the need to beat them back with food once again.

Were that the only benefit of step 5—to expose our worst thinking to the disinfecting power of sunlight—we would be much better off than before we reached OA. Yet there is a further benefit from this step that pushes us onward. The OA Twelve and Twelve tell us “Through the fifth-step process, we begin to see reality.” Our damaged thinking begins to right itself:

All our striving to get ahead has been useless. We are neither above nor below the rest of the human race; we’re a part of it, shaped by the same basic needs and desires as all our fellows. Those of us who have belittled ourselves or felt we were worse than others also gain a new perspective. In talking honestly with another person about ourselves, we begin to feel a sense of relief. Someone knows all about us and still accepts us unconditionally. (47).

So we disinfect our insides, and we change our attitude about ourselves and others. And even that’s not all. We also learn, by watching our sponsor, how to listen. We will be grateful for that person’s help and support and will look forward to a time when we can sit in their chair, listening to another’s inventory with the same compassion and identification we were given. It is yet more motivation to continue through these steps and achieve the fullest extent of the spiritual awakening promised in step twelve.

Depending on how much we’ve written, reading our fifth step may take an hour, hours, days, even a month or more. No matter how long, this quiet, intimate, sometimes sad, and not infrequently hilarious process takes, the benefits can last a happy, joyous, and free lifetime.