Thread: Resentments
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Old 03-26-2011, 12:02 PM
  # 11 (permalink)  
FrothyJay
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Join Date: Jan 2011
Location: New Jersey
Posts: 581
The directions for doing the Fourth Step are very clear in the AA Big Book. Any other way of doing them, I've come to understand, is just something else, and I will likely have a harder time trying to get the same results.

It says, "We made a list of people, institutions and principles with whom we were angry." It does not say to list why, how we were harmed, or what our role was in it. Yet.

I was told to segment my life into columns: 0-5, grammar school, high school, college, 20s, 30s, etc.

I then spent the better part of a week filling those columns as instructed. Because it said "were angry," that meant it didn't matter if I was over the resentment. I put it down. The idea was not necessarily to fix just my current angers, but to understand how I operated throughout my whole life-- to see the patterns of alcoholic thinking that have plagued me.

And, as some have said here, I needed to understand that "anger" might mean discomfort for me. I was not an angry person, by nature, but when I considered people who made me internally uncomfortable, the list exploded.

I wrote the list, went through it with my sponsor, and then transcribed it into a notebook in the first column. I only wrote top to bottom, never across.

The second column (the nature of the anger) and third column (what was effected) followed. Only top to bottom.

Since the Big Book makes no mention of a Fourth Column, we did a separate page on each resentment called my "turn-arounds." This is where I put my finger on how I was selfish, dishonest, self-seeking and frightened in each case.

I did all this because my sponsor told me I could be doing the last fourth step I would ever do. That I did not need to keep doing it over and over again, that I had steps 10-12 to live my daily life.
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