Turning Tools Into Tyrants

January 1986

By: J. T. | Alto, New Mexico

OF ALL THE STEPS, the Fourth seems to have the biggest reputation for being a real bear. Perhaps we are doing it a disservice, and the newcomer as well, by convincing them they are approaching a two-headed monster. So many of us, it seems, have a fine-tuned ability to complicate things and make life tougher for ourselves. We hardly need more encouragement in that direction.

My own initial approach to the Fourth Step was in itself a lesson. I began with the attitude that I was launching into an ordeal, and that I must do the “perfect” moral inventory. I completely forgot the wisdom of striving for progress rather than perfection, and the idea that my own attitude was changing a useful tool into a burden never occurred to me.

Swinging into action, it became essential that I learn every conceivable way to approach this Step. I polled AA members, collecting approaches, opinions, suggestions, and a lot of sympathy. I gathered piles of pamphlets, guides, questionnaires, and workbooks on the subject. This was becoming a career, and a cause of great clutter, not only in the house but in my mind. With all this studying, filling out, answering, and outlining, it began to occur to me that I had launched into what was becoming a novel, without including in its contents any real moral inventory.

Looking back, I did a great deal of work avoiding that Fourth Step. Finally, out of frustration, I looked again to the three-column format shown in the Big Book. Initially, I had discarded this who, what, and why approach as much too simple to serve for someone so complex as I. Indeed.

Easing into the water with some of my more minor transgressions, I was soon under way, daring into more sacred ground as my confidence grew that nothing dreadful was happening. As I finished, I wondered why I had made the job so complicated, and why I decided, before even starting, that I would have a hard time. I also had to reflect on how many times in my life I had used this very same line of thinking when approaching something new, and how I had crippled myself with it.

The knowledge gained in taking the Fourth Step seems to have grown. At first, I was primarily aware of the sense of release from my past. I had always given my past a tremendous power over my present, trying to hide it, and trying to hide from it. I had judged myself by my past mistakes, in fact, I had unknowingly come to believe I was my mistakes.

Being able to look at them on paper seemed to defuse them. They became nothing but molehills. It has taken some time, but I am no longer as emotionally involved with these things. I look at my inventory now as a personal feedback system that reminds me of what does not work in my life; it is not a judgment on my own self-worth.

Happily, I’ve refrained from judging my extensive research into the Fourth Step as spinning my wheels. I did learn from it. Now, when a newcomer gets that Fourth Step pallor, I try to accentuate the positive. If I drag out my own war story, I have to include that my own attitude made things much tougher than necessary. I tell them also that I look at the Step as one might consider the job of cleaning out the refrigerator. While I can worry and put it off until it’s gone from a minor to a disgusting (if not downright dangerous) job, it’s much easier if I don’t bother loading myself down with negative opinions beforehand. Some of the things in my refrigerator were rotten and so grown over that I had no idea what they started out as. But there’s only so much room in my refrigerator, and if it isn’t, cleaned out periodically, I have no room for fresh food. Not only that, but I risk poisoning myself or someone else with what needs to be thrown away.

While I can spend much energy in making it a tedious and hard job, the garbage has got to go. More and more I find myself fourth-stepping my refrigerator–focusing, instead, on the satisfaction of knowing that soon there will be clean, fresh shelves, ready to be filled with good things I can use!

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