Step 4: Fearless Searching Moral Inventory, The Dreaded Step

This time we are going to talk about step four. Step four, fearless searching moral inventory of our character defects. Oh boy, who wants to talk about their character defects? Usually no one, and that's why most people who are stumbling and tragically having a hard time with recovery, finding themselves at that place where they have to be fearless in their searching moral inventory is really problematic. So I want to explore why step four is so hard for people.

Fearless searching moral inventory. That's a mouthful, right? And it's a brainful. How do we get to the point where we have fearlessness in the search of our inventory? I don't know. But let's figure that out so that maybe you can stop making that same mistake. What do you get to step four? Step four, fearless searching moral inventory. Before I get started with today's episode, I wanted to take a moment to talk about addiction and recovery.

If you are in need of help, you can reach out for help through a residential treatment program, a local hospital, even an emergency room. But if you do need help and you really are looking for a chance to get into recovery, reach out to me. I can direct you where you need to go. I can get you the help that you need. Get you in touch with the right people. And if you're watching a loved one suffer with addiction, you don't have to stand by and watch it happen. You can act. Make that call.

It's hard to do. But it's the first thing that you're going to do that's going to help save their lives. So, if you're in need of help, you can call a local professional who can help you. Wherever you are, in whatever state or whatever country you're in, there are people out there that do want to help and help you. Get into recovery. You can reach me through my website, wellspringmindbody.com. Don't let shame and embarrassment take you or your loved one down.

Just remember that this is a life-threatening condition. So take it seriously. Get help today. So let's talk about step four. Step four. We made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves. Creation gives us instincts for a purpose. Without them, we wouldn't be complete human beings. Wow. Fearless, searching, moral inventory. You know, and I'm going to take apart this step four as if I was taking apart some scripture or legal reading as an attorney or something. Let's look at that.

So I'm going to look at every word. We made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves. So we, who are we? Well, we are either addicts or in the case of Al-Anon, we are family members of addicts. And it doesn't matter if your addiction is food, drugs, alcohol, gambling, sex, pornography. It doesn't matter. We are those who suffer from addiction. So that's the we. We. We made. That means we do it. That's us. We have to do this. We made it. We did it. We're the ones that created it.

If you want to... We made it. I mean, you pretty much know what that means. We made what? A searching and fearless. Searching and fearless. Searching. Meaning you're not going to stop until you have figured out every single step along the way. Everything. You know what? Some of my clients complain about their sponsors making them write this stuff down on page after page after page of what they've done. And I would say that's a good start.

That's probably what most sponsors say when they get handed that first sheet of paper with a few scrawlings on it of whatever that person has decided is their fearless and their searching moral inventory. It's kind of like an outline. I always look at it like it's an outline. They gave me this thing and it's like five sentences or maybe bullet points. I get that one sometimes too. They might not use a bullet. They might use a dash. But it's like just, you know, a few things.

Like five or six things. I wouldn't exactly call that searching. And so usually when a sponsor gets that, they hand it back to the sponsor. And they go, yeah, this is a good start. Or this is a good outline. Or, yeah, for page one. Okay, now let's get some details. And that's the fearless part. Searching means you're looking for something, and in this case, it might seem like a needle in a haystack, but actually it's a needle in a needle stack.

It's a whole bunch of needles, and they're right there. It's not like it's hidden amongst, you know, it's one thing amongst millions of things. That's our life, right? A whole bunch of stuff. But searching means that you're looking for it, and you're looking for all of it, because until you root out that evil, if you will, you're not going to find... What you're looking for. Fearless. Searching and fearless. Meaning I fear nothing. I don't fear what I'm going to find.

Or I'm going to somehow find some kind of something in me that allows me to understand that I don't have to be afraid of this. I'm less than fearful. I'm fearless. I have no fear. And that's probably one of the harder things that we do.

in recovery is is using fearlessness because we're afraid of everything right addicts are afraid of everything they're afraid of their story they're afraid somebody's going to find out they're afraid to seek the truth they're afraid of the truth and to completely out of context and paraphrase some scripture understand the truth and the truth will set you free see that's why we make this a fearless and a searching moral inventory because we need to know the truth and that's at the root of all

trauma usually is like i can't accept this i can't accept this truth i don't believe you know this this couldn't have been the truth or sometimes people just lie to themselves so much that they begin to believe the lie so it's got to be searching and it's got to be fearless and you know that's part of the thing about doing this step four stuff you're not doing it by yourself You shouldn't be doing this by yourself. If you're doing it by yourself, you're doing something wrong.

You got to do it with another person because you're screwed. You're told something and you start to believe it. So what are the things that you go through? Well, there's the resentment. This is what happens in stuff for, for those of you who don't know. I'm going to tell you. So it's something like this. It's an exercise where you sit, and you're writing this down. Hazleton puts out a workbook, and it's divided up into different sections.

So you have one, the resentment, and then the second column is because, and the third column is this affects my... And then the fourth one is my part in this because we are experiencing things, but we're also causing things. So sometimes we have to look at what our part is. You know, that's that's you got to look at both the other person and yourself or the situation in yourself. So I resent I resent this thing that this person did to me. It made me very angry and upset and resentful.

I resent them. I resent that institution. I resent what happened to me. Because, and then it makes me feel horrible or whatever. And then this affects my ability to cope with whatever, you know, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And then my part in it. Person, place, or thing. You know, sometimes situations are out of people's control. Sometimes there's an accident. Sometimes there's a weather thing, a fire, a flood, whatever it is. It's kind of hard to pinpoint it.

It's like, I resent this because this and this affects my part. So you got a pandemic. There's a hurricane. There's a fire. There's a flood. There's an earthquake. I resent that. I resent that thing. Could you control it? No, you can't control it. But my part in this is my ability to feel angry and to express that. And I can't. I can't cope. I'm too afraid to say anything to anybody. So then we look at pride, self-esteem, relationships, your security, your finances, your well-being.

There's different things that you feel resentment about. And it affects you. So, you know, my mom died when she was, I believe, 50, but nobody bothered to tell me. And so I lived with that. I still live with it. Nobody's ever really acknowledged. I have one relative who talked to me about it, but nobody's ever talked to me about it. Like nobody ever told me.

Ironically, the person who actually for sure knew where I was when it happened was my mother, who apparently, from what I understand, was in a coma for 30 days. And so she obviously couldn't say to anybody where I was. And so that happened. But then again, I got a last name that's pretty unusual. How long would it take to find me? Yeah. my first and last name together, there's only one of me on the planet. There's nobody else on this planet with my, my first and last name.

So all these resentments come up about like, well, you know, why, why did this happen? Who, why didn't somebody tell me? Why didn't somebody acknowledge it? And then when I was informed in typical fashion, uh, I was not informed in a way that was left any room for discussion. it was like coldly given information as if I'm supposed to somehow process that without any emotion. It's just bizarre. So that caused, you know, all kinds of resentments and I had to work through that.

And, um, so doing that was, was, you know, really difficult. And so your self esteem gets hit, your pride can get hit your, um, you know, different areas and identifying what those are, you know, security, family, finances, relationships, well-being. You've got to look at how that affects you. Your pride gets hurt. Your finances get hurt. Your self-esteem or whatever. You note that on that line. Listen, I guess what I'm trying to say is, as an example, my own personal stuff.

I'm not trying to throw it out there. Wow. This takes a long time because if you think about When you're starting to work on recovery, most people with alcohol, for example, they don't really start getting into recovery until their 40s, 50s, or 60s because it takes that long for alcoholism to really kick in. With drugs, a little more early in people's lives. Heroin, you know, you don't see too many 60-year-old heroin addicts, although they do exist.

So they're drawing upon a much shorter frame of reference as far as time within their lifetime. So their resentments, and I find this to be true, usually are around pretty severe traumas in early childhood. So again, you know, how many did you have in your lifetime? How many things happened? If you have 52 years of time to experience life, you're going to have 52 years of stuff that could be stacked up as opposed to 18 or 19 or 24 or whatever. But you've got to do this with everything.

And it's this searching part of it. It's like, oh, this could take months. And sometimes it does. Because, you know, people don't... First of all, their opinions about what is actually traumatic to them sometimes is very distorted, especially if they have lived through a really traumatic life. And they've kind of just minimized everything, which happens all the time in my practice where they just, you know, this happens, that happens.

And they just kind of gloss over it or maybe they don't even mention it. I've sat with people sometimes for years in therapy, weekly therapy. And after a year or two, all of a sudden something comes up where they were molested as a child. And I'm like, how could you sit here for 52 hours a year and never mention that? It's because you minimized it. Or you were trying to protect yourself. Sometimes it's not as extreme as molestation. Sometimes it's just child neglect.

But They don't recognize it as neglect or physical abuse. They're beaten, you know, and it's just like, oh, this is the culture. This is kind of how it was. You know, what are you going to do? Or as guys put it, you know, like, well, that was then and this is now. And I got to stop them and go back. And that's the that's the searching part of it is recognition that things really caused you resentment.

So I think if you run it through that filter of understanding that there was resentment and And that's where the first part of this is. I resent this because this is what happened. And this is how it affects me. It affects my security, my belief in others. It put me at financial risk. And then my part of it. And this is where it's hard. My part in this.

Because usually in that searching moral inventory of ourselves, we kind of push aside the morality of it, and suddenly nobody's responsible for whatever happened. And I've talked about that in past podcasts. Like, where do you put responsibility? And most children are me-centric. I'm going to say all children, actually. All children are me-centric. They think the universe revolves around them. And so anything that happened around them was caused by them. That's how children see it.

So again, that's back to that minimizing. And that's what the enemy wants you to do. Wants you to minimize your understanding of reality. And that's an effective tool to really throw it into a tailspin as far as like, how do I get out of this? Because nobody's responsible for their actions in the mind of an addict, right? In the past. And I'm the one that caused it. So I could have stopped it. And I hear that quite frequently too. Like if I'd have just done this as a kid.

Yeah, but you're looking through the lens of an adult brain who can process information in a completely different emotional capacity and a moral capacity that children do not have. So no, you are not responsible for it. And again, these are just things I go through in my practice all the time, almost with every addict. Nobody's responsible.

There's always a reason or excuse that the addict who's sitting across the room from me, sitting in that chair, and then ultimately they somehow pin responsibility afterwards on themselves. I'm at fault. Trust me. You are not at fault as a child. When you're four, five, three, six, unless you're possessed, you're not at fault because you're not in charge. The world happens as you're looking up and you are not in control of that.

But yet somehow magically everybody thinks that they are and it's their responsibility. So they turn to themselves and they become both the victim and the victimizer as an adult and then they start using drugs of choice to cope because nobody understands. But I understand. And hopefully now you understand that Empathy goes a long way when trying to help somebody in their recovery. So fearless, searching, moral inventory of ourselves.

Let me take a break here for just a second and we'll come back and start talking about morality and see what we get there. So hang on. We'll be back. I wanted to give some free advertising to a couple of my friends, Dave and Ashley Willis. Dave and Ashley Willis are with a group called XO Marriage. They have a book that I use all the time in my practice, and I highly suggest it for those of you who practice faith and are struggling, particularly with sex addiction or pornography addiction.

You can generalize that to other addiction.

They have a wonderful book called The Naked Marriage, and they were so kind to to put me on their podcast and I really did appreciate that but I really do believe in what they are doing and there are a million books on recovery out there and addiction and suggestions and treatments all kinds of things but their book The Naked Marriage and it's been out for a little while now really a wonderful book get a copy of it you can still get it on Amazon or your local bookseller if there is such a thing

anymore The Naked Marriage by Dave and Ashley Willis who I heard this great quote. It was, If things aren't adding up in your life currently, maybe it's time to start subtracting. It was an anonymous quote from who knows where, and I'd never heard it before, but wow, did that seem inspiring. Especially when it comes to recovery and addiction, because if we're carrying these burdens of resentment and upset...

There are many ways that this affects our lives and our relationships because it makes us distrustful and to not like what's going on. But then we're also stuck with paralysis of movement. There's always some recovery story that somebody can use to relate. One of them I heard in a meeting was great. It was... Just hold on if you've heard this before. If you're in meetings. It was... There were two Buddhist monks who were walking through the forest.

They had taken vows of chastity and poverty and silence at times and different things, and they were walking along through this forest, and they come across what should have been a stream with stone pathway over it, a flat stone pathway.

Unfortunately, it had been raining a lot, and so all of the waterways were flooded, so this seemingly simple stream to cross had become a raging torrent of flood and they get to that stream and it's now a river and there is a woman who is dressed in these beautiful gown silk and she is crying and they come upon her and they ask her if she's in distress and if she needs help and she says that she has to cross the river to be able to go to some event that at some village somewhere and this is her

nicest clothing and silk doesn't really do well with water but it'll ruin her clothing so she does not know what to do because she can't cross the river so the older of the two monks who is much older offers to help her and he says i'll carry you across the river after he's thought about it for a while And so she agrees, and he picks her up and carries her across the river and then sets her down.

And he and the much younger monk continue on their way, going one direction, and the woman goes the other way. And after about four hours, they get tired and they decide they're going to take a rest. And the younger monk then asks the older monk, a question. He says, I don't understand. Can you help me and explain to me what just happened four hours ago? Because we are supposed to be taking a vow of chastity and poverty, and we are not supposed to make physical contact with a female.

And the older monk says, yes, I'm aware of that. And the younger monk says, but I don't understand. You did that willingly, even though it was completely against our moral code. And the younger monk says, that really, really is upsetting to me. It's been bothering me the whole time. And the older monk says, well, that is true. But in this instance, I weighed the options and I could not just leave her to be in continued distress on the other side of the river while I went across.

And the only answer that I had was to be able to carry her across the river. So I did so.

And when I sat her down, I allowed myself to contemplate that and then be at peace with what I had done which seemingly was against my moral code but I did it and I didn't think about it again and he said and that's the difference between youth and age you see the only answer I could come up with was to carry her across the river which I did and then I put her down and I made peace with myself and how that could affect my morality, but you've been carrying her for the last four hours.

There's a lesson in understanding perception and understanding reality and how much we can distort our own moral compass and misunderstand ourselves. So let's talk about one of the words in that step four process, moral compass. Moral. Moral understanding of ourselves. Morals. What are morals? Well, if we looked at the Oxford Dictionary definition of morals, it says a person's standards of behavior or beliefs concerning what is or is not acceptable for them to do. Interesting.

Is or is not acceptable. You know, in addiction, what's acceptable is morality. Utter chaos, honestly. It is just chaotic. And when you start going through the step process, you have already gone through a process of somewhat getting some stabilization and separation between you and your drug of choice. So therein lies the problem with a moral compass, is that it's set and determined based on what you're doing.

And at the time that your brain has stabilized a little bit from the influence of a drug or an alcohol or something, it... Morality changes. And I think that's probably where the problem lies is the self-loathing that occurs when somebody stops using their drug of choice and they feel just crappy because they realized what they've done and that they've hurt other people. So a fearless searching moral inventory is an inventory of what happened, right? So your morality.

So you're looking through the behaviors of what you did in the past through a different lens, through the lens of a different understanding of morality, right? It's your current morality. Interestingly, also morals, the number one definition from Oxford is a lesson, especially one concerning what is right or prudent, that can be derived from a story, a piece of information, or an experience.

Well, you know, if that doesn't just sum up right there what happens when we go through step four, it's lessons, right? We had an experience. We experienced our own destruction and the destruction of people around us. So therein lies the whole purpose of step four, a fearless, searching, moral inventory of ourselves. So if we look at our lives through a lens of chemical-free brain and somewhat stabilized brain, we're probably going to be very upset about what we see.

And what we see isn't necessarily going to look that good. And so then we must sit down and write this stuff down. Get it down on paper. Go through that moral inventory. I change step four a little bit. And I say it's fearless searching moral inventory of your character defects. Because I think it's those defective parts of you that you want to get rid of. You want to keep the good stuff. And trust me, even in recovery... And in addiction as well, there is good stuff.

For God's sake, you made it to the point of working on recovery. How bad could you be? But we have to get to the point where it's all aimed at, and again, this is my interpretation of the step process, it's all aimed at step nine, making amends. I alter a little bit the step nine for my clients because it's not just making amends to people you've done harm to.

But it's funny, to those we have done harm in step nine, we don't really take into consideration that we've harmed ourselves along with other people. So I always include that in it and want people to make sure they understand that they are just as worthy of that acceptance as the person that they harmed before. They are harming themselves. So a moral inventory of yourself, I think, really includes your character defects. And we see them as defects. And so work on understanding step four.

Do step four. Don't be fearless. Come on, man. Don't fear step four. That's the hard part.

It's easy to accept the fact that your life is out of control and that you're going to turn... yourself over to some form of higher powers you understand them and then to actually do that that seems easy by the time you get to step four because step four is like all about all your garbage let's open up the trash can and take a big whiff of the steaming pile of garbage that's in there no thank you no not going to do that yes you are because you're going to get into recovery and that's how you do

it so get out there Get with somebody. Hopefully, you can get into the recovery community. I think I heard Dr. Drew one time say, every time I hear somebody say, no, I'm not going to meetings. I'm not doing that. He said his response in his head is, I don't want to get in recovery. I think that's true. Pretty much it. You know, I don't like the God talk. I don't like this. Oh, you know what? Then don't listen to the God talk, but get into the meeting. But you know what?

You might find God in that meeting. And what an awesome thing that would be. So let's work on recovery. And step four is so important to your recovery. Don't ignore it. Jump in there. Don't be afraid. Get it done. Be fearless. Be fearless in the face of the enemy. and you will conquer him. Let me leave you with a little scripture today. Joshua 1.9 Be strong and courageous. Do not be frightened or dismayed. For the Lord your God is with you wherever you go.

And maybe you went to a bad place, a dark place. But you know what? He was with you. And he's with you now. He didn't turn his back. And we don't turn our backs on addicts. We just don't like addiction. But addiction is not the addict. The addiction is the enemy. And it wants to conquer you. Don't let it. Have strength. Have belief. Have faith. Turn yourself over to that higher power. And you will be saved.

Well, that's it for this edition of Doc J. I hope you have gotten something out of this podcast. And if you want further help, please reach out to me. I can help you. I can be reached through my website, Wellspring MindBody. Until next time, this is Dr. Jacques DeBruker, your addiction lifeguard, here on the beach of life. See you next time.