[Sheryl85]

I have a friend that leads a great Step Study. The first thing he says about Step Four is that you can’t change your future if you don’t first learn from your past.

I found that the Fourth Step is a “Fact Finding” mission for me. I need to know why I react the way I do to situations and what are the results when I do that. When I put these things down in black and white I begin to see the pattern emerge in each instance. I do the Step in the manner as put forth in the Big Book. (When in doubt, read the instructions.) On my first Fourth Step I did like most people do and listed my resentments first. (I put them into two categories one of which I would tackle first; the ankle biters and the *ss eaters. I deal with the latter first. I still must do the ankle biters before I’m finished with the Step because they can change into the other variety after a period of time if not dealt with.) And I do this as thoroughly as I can because I learned that more will be revealed anyway after being sober for awhile. It just happens that way I’ve found.

Now this is going to be the baseline that I draw most of my information from and will be used again and again in several of the later steps. (That’s the reason I didn’t burn mine as some folks did…it will come in real handy and I’m lazy and I hate repeating work if I don’t have to!) I used the columns as listed in the book, but you can add as many columns as you wish. When I have covered as much territory as I can using the method described in the book (and remembering that more will be revealed later), I get with my sponsor and we do the next step.

Okay, once you’ve started you will see this process has been streamlined because I really feel you need to get some face to face input as you proceed and you need to cover it with your sponsor if you have one. I also tell you that once I had done this step that I didn’t feel an overwhelming relief, but there were those “Ah Ha!” moments when I saw that pattern emerge just as plain as day and I was able to catch myself the next time I was about to repeat the same old action. It was amazing! (For once, I didn’t do the same thing over again expecting different results. Wha Hoo!)

Let me take this moment to remind you that anything said by me is my opinion as of now and does not speak for AA as a whole. There is going to be a lot of different ways to do this Step that you will learn about. If you wonder which the correct one for you is, it will be the one you use that gives you contented sobriety and gives you the gut level feeling of correctness. “Your “knower” knows,” as Bob White used to say. But most of all just do it.

Good luck!