I won’t bore you with the details of my Step Four, except to say that it was a process. Meaning, of course, that an abundance of cussing and crying was involved.

With the guidance of my sponsor, I worked through the Step Four questions in the Paths to Recovery book. It took months of daily journaling, three and a half notebooks, and more prayer than a tightrope walker on a windy day.

Reviewing the day’s events

I bet you won’t be shocked to hear that excessive introspection is one of my character defects. And that can kick my butt when it’s time to practice Step Ten. I get off into obsessive thinking, analyzing and re-analyzing every little outward and inner event of the day, until it’s doing me more harm than good.

Back in my Really Crazy Days, introspection was one of the main weapons I used to beat myself up. There was nothing so trivial that I couldn’t torture myself for days (or weeks) by replaying it on endless repeat. It’s classic Al Anonism: An incident happens once, but I live through it dozens of times in my head. And then The Committee gets involved.

This is no bueno.

That obsessive thinking started in my childhood, when, because of the disease of alcoholism, I had to try to figure everything out on my own. It didn’t work then, and it doesn’t serve me well today either.

Helpful hint: When the literature says our past defects no longer serve us, it means they’re making us crazy. Whatever doesn’t move us forward pulls us back. My recovery depends on staying out of that black hole. Or at least, spending as little time there as possible.

Will the real Step 10 please stand up?

When I learned about Step Ten, I thought, Ugh, I already do that. To me, “continuing to take personal inventory” meant lying awake at night bashing myself for all my mistakes, with all the day’s events running through my head.

Yeah, it’s not that.

Still, I could only start with what I knew. My usual “daily inventory” started with all the day’s unpleasant moments in slow-motion review and went straight to the black hole: resentment, blame, and self-loathing.

Again, the Step Ten questions in Paths to Recovery were helpful. Not so much the questions themselves, but the tone they set. “So what did you screw up today, loser?” was not one of the Paths to Recovery questions.

My sponsor suggested that a gentler approach might be to take some of those questions and use them to guide my Step Ten time. She’s right, as usual. (She’s always right! Not that I have her on a pedestal or anything.)

The problem? There are so darn many of those Step Ten questions. Answering them all (hello, compulsion demons!) would turn my Step Ten from a brief tidying up into a massive ordeal. How can I review the day’s events without activating my obsessive thinking?

Enter Step Four!

From one inventory to another

My Step Four turned up a whole menagerie of defects. But after some list-making and organizing, it turned out they’re really all different varieties of the same few issues:

1. Resentment
2. Cowardice
3. Dishonesty

That’s it. From those roots spring all the weeds: self-pity, stuffing my feelings, avoiding confrontation, emotional dishonesty, manipulation, fixing, masking, and all the rest of it. Whatever form they happen to take today, the underlying causes don’t change.

Seeing this helped me to quit blaming my behavior on my circumstances. I’m always operating from the same core. Whatever brought that defect out today is less important than the fact that the defect is still there.

If all my little faults are manifestations of those few big ones, it makes sense to focus on the roots. So, based on my Step Four inventory, I came up with three daily questions to ask myself around these defects.

In their final form, here’s what they look like:

Defect/QUESTION

Resentment: Did I take responsibility for ALL my feelings today?

Cowardice: Did I move against fear today?

Dishonesty: Were all my words and actions true?

I also adopted one of the Paths to Recovery questions: “Did I examine any uncomfortable feelings today?”

These four questions cover 99% of my character defects. Because they focus on core causes rather than today’s particular circumstances, they help me avoid two traps: obsessively rehearsing details, and blaming people, places and things for my behavior.

It took a lot of work to phrase them positively. (“Are you still up to your same old bulls#!t?” got vetoed.) But I think that’s their strength. Each of them encourages me to look for where I’ve practiced healthy new behavior that day and gives me a chance to celebrate my growth, however small.

I need that, because I need help noticing the positive. Negativity is a hard habit to break. I need daily practice in acknowledging my progress. That helps counteract my tendency to focus on failure and beat myself up.

My Step Ten time leads to the black hole way less often now. And for that, I’m grateful, grateful, grateful.

Introspection is a valuable tool when I use it for its right purpose. I don’t need God to remove it entirely–and, incidentally, He probably won’t.

Instead, I need guardrails. I need a way to examine my own actions and motives without falling into the craziness of obsessive thinking and morbid introspection.

Sticking to the questions lets me review my day without ending up in the ditch. If I’m lucky, they help keep The Committee quiet too…at least long enough to finish. Sometimes even long enough that I can fall asleep. As Jordan Peterson says, that’s not nothing. Slightly less crazy, one day at a time–that’s recovery!

How do you do your Step Ten? Share with us in the comments.

Keep coming back!