[align=justify]I remember the first time I did a fourth step. I had been sober from booze and other substances for about a month and a half. Before I actually started this step I remember that I wanted to drink so much and at the same time was in so much fear of doing so. I knew nothing of the steps prior to this (not that I know much now) but I knew something.

What I did know was that the alcoholics around me who had been working the steps for some time, new exactly what I felt, and they also claimed that that problem (the mental obsession) had been lifted. [oh let me backtrack for a second.] I heard about a 12 step workshop at the local hospital conference room. I heard that people were going through the steps and I might want to do the same if I wanted to stay sober. So I began attending. We met once a week, and since this was not AA -- there was (I guess you could say) a " group leader" (actually two)

They had experience going through the steps, called themselves Recovered alcoholics, were fairly happy and sane, and even though they had gone through the steps once officially, they did not rest there. They worked the steps over and over in there lives to stay current. They even still wrote their 10th steps out whenever they had time.

So, we all read along as a group and if any questions came up as we went through the Big Book from cover to page 164, they were open and willing and ready to help us out with the questions we had, and we did have many questions.

Each week we covered a good amount of information from the book and in (I'm guessing because this was about 8 years ago) 1 month we were at step four. Now, prior to the directions from them on how to do this step I wanted to drink real bad, and at the same time I didn't want to. I told this to one of the group leaders there and she told me, "then you need to get moving on this" I agreed.

Somewhere in between the pen hitting the paper for the first name on my resentment inventory and writing the first name on the inventory that awful obsession to drink had been removed. The 10th step promise of the problem being removed had happened. I had been in a neutral state state of mind around alcohol. I didn't know so at the time, but I was there.

Inventory was a wonderful experience. I had been unemployed at the time so I spent most of my time writing. It was just something that I knew had a real purpose to it... a real meaning. So I kept on writing. I was also living at a friends house who happened to be going through the very same process as I was at the time. He was a bit ahead of me, but I quickly caught up. [NOTE: Sometimes ego can get involved and as far as who can finish first, if we're honest in our writing I think go as fast as we're moved to go, if the only point is to finish in first place than we might be in a bit of trouble and visa versa: if we're just slowly wasting time using our HP as a reason to take as much time as we want so we don't have to actually do anything then that's not such a useful and healthy thing and at time then and today - there is a blend of both]

So back to instructions one: It says first in the Big Book: "We listed people, institutions or principle with who we were angry." So that was the first direction we received. Then we were told to go home and do that, and next week we would move on. I did so and had more people than institutions or principles. Today it is a bit different when I review my day at night. So, anyways, before each inventory session, I would say a prayer to my HP - something like, "please God, please help me see and list who or what I am resentful at so I may be thorough and thus free of it" Then I would write. I finished it within that week.

Direction two we received a week later: "We asked ourselves why we were angry." I did that

Direction three we received a week after that we were told why we were angry was because:
In most cases it was found that our self-esteem, our pocketbooks, our ambitions, our personal relationships, (including sex) [and] "pride" were hurt or threatened. So we were told to list next to each resentment: "each name our injuries. Was it our self-esteem, our security, our ambitions, our personal, or sex relations, which had been interfered with?"

At this point I was beginning to see that I was not to well. Something was very wrong. I just did not understand what it was.

The next week we were given the next set of directions: "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. We placed them before us in black and white. We admitted our wrongs honestly"

Now, this is where most of us stopped. We started the workshop with over 30 people and by the time we got to this part, we were down to about 10 people. I did not want to drink still and in the first time in years I actually hadn't obsessed about drinking for some time now.

We were told to follow those above directions and before every session I was to say a simple prayer: I realize that the people who wronged me were perhaps spiritually sick. Though I did not like their symptoms and the way these disturbed me, they, like myself, were sick too. I ask you God to help me show them the same tolerance, pity, and patience that I would cheerfully grant a sick friend. "This is a sick man. How can I be helpful to him? God save me from being angry. Thy will be done." And I was told to say this prayer before each and every resentment as I was writing. So I did.

Was I getting any great affect from writing any of this other than not obsessing about drinking? yes. As I was saying that prayer, I began to see that I WAS RESPONSIBLE FOR WHY I WAS RESENTFUL. I was not letting myself be free. They were not causing me to have such a twisted view towards them and myself and the world. It was me who had these problem. Heck, many of them were dead, but they were still very much alive in my head. As long as I was angry at them, then they owned me. There can be no true lasting peace with resentments. Some of the stuff I listed I had alot of trouble seeing how I caused it. things happened to me as a child that no child should ever have to experience.... no child should have to take a part in. And those type of resentments, my sponsor had reminded me is not about taking responsibility in what happened then per se, but rather, to take responsibility in why I was holding onto it in my mind today. Why did I want to carry it? What was the benefit that I thought I was receiving by being resentful? If I could stay resentful at so and so, then I have a valid reason I thought to be a victim, and as a victim, I could hide... I could avoid letting any one in. But a lot of that crap was not happening at all to me any longer, and all I got to receive from it was more loneliness and emptiness. See I was told, that drinking was not my problem, drinking was my solution. How true it was. Drinking made it a lot easier to hot have to deal with this crap fro the moment, but I would have to deal with it sometime or another, and meetings will not treat these problems alone. Most of us die just hanging around meetings. We must inventory, we must turn to our HP (whatever He/She/It may be) we must turn to qualified people to get real with ourselves. Or die drinking. or die dry.

I saw that a lot of the stuff I accused others of doing, in some way or another I had been doing to others. Then there was a fear inventory, and then a relations inventory, and then an ideal to write. I think the ideal is great. You can we write how you want your life to be with your self, your HP and others. The fifth step is where basically my sponsor helped me, basically as the Big Book says:

"We admitted our wrongs honestly and were willing to set these matters straight." [/align]