Pathwaytofree

I love the 12 step program and it changed my life. However, I wanted to start a new thread to save others from making the really bad mistakes I made.

I'm not a therapist so if you have any questions about what I wrote here, please discuss with your therapist or doctor. All I have is my experience, which may or may not be other people's experience.

I'm going to list in bold what I should have done, and what I did instead.

1) Write for 30 minutes a day, preferably first thing in the morning, and then put the book away and continue your day. I got very sick because I got caught up in not doing this. I either procrastinated and drove myself completely nuts full of fear about writing (for weeks or months at a time), or I obsessively thought and thought and thought about what I was writing--replaying and reliving the memories. This was very harmful and I don't recommend it.

Additionally, my sponsor said if I wanted to, I could write more than 30 minutes a day. I don't recommend that, especially if you're the type to replay things in your mind and think a lot.

2) Keep column 2 to 10 words or less.This is really important, too. I found that I "couldn't" keep it to 10 words or less. B.s., that was just a lie I was telling myself. I'm sure if I really pushed myself and stomped out the negative feelings, I could have.

When I was writing more than 10 words, I was in so much fear, anxiety, depression, drama, whatever word you want to use. I was reliving the feelings as if the resentment was happening right now. It was a very bad place to be.

3) Group resentments into one general resentment I was too full of anxiety, fear, depression, when I started my new 4th step to fully grasp what this meant. The instructions were not clear to me. So instead, I wrote every single memory I had that fell under one type of resentment. Because I did that, I relived every single memory from the past as if it was happening in the present. Not good.

4) Call your therapist/doctor if you're feeling suicidal while writing your 4th step. The 4th step should feel a little uncomfortable, but should not make you suicidal. If you are suicidal, very depressed, angry, thinking too much/reliving the past, etc., stop immediately.

5) What your therapist says takes precedence over what your sponsor saysHere's an extra one I learned from working with one of my sponsees. Being "factual" in column 2, as in "taking an business inventory", "staying out of your feelings/emotion", "being objective instead of subjective", etc., does not mean we are supposed to dissociate from our feelings or shut our feelings down. My sponsee asked me if she could still journal like her therapist said to. I said absolutely.

I think in that way, she was able to be factual with her column 2, and if feelings came up and she needed to journal, she did so. It seemed to work for her because she's moved on well and is finishing up column 3 without any issues.

Sponsors are not mental health professionals. They're just one alcoholic helping another. Their role is to take you through the 12 steps. That's it. Sponsors can cause harm if they project their experience onto yours, use the sponsor role as a therapist, or get into a power struggle between what your therapist tells you and what they tell you.

6) Don't write down every little thing This one goes against what I was taught, but in hindsight, I see how doing my 4th step completely insanely thorough, caused me a lot of issues. I was told to write down whatever God was feeding me, but in hindsight I see that being told to a "first and final, thorough and fearless inventory" fed into my OCD and made me very sick.

I would've done a lot better had I just stuck to "the boulders", I think the literature calls it, this time around, and maybe dug a little deeper into "the rocks" next time around.

7) Don't let anyone in AA tell you therapy and/or meds means you're not really sober, or that they're ridiculous. Listening to this from my home group caused me a great deal of harm. I was told by my sponsor that I was "immature" for still going to therapy, and "hadn't I outgrown my therapist yet?" I was also told that "people go on meds as 'happy pills'" and that wasn't taken seriously.

My home group meeting leader often tells the same story about the first time he saw a therapist, and how he knew he'd never go back, it was a joke to him and he didn't feel it needed it. Just because someone else's experience is that they felt they needed AA but not therapy or meds., does not mean that is everyone's experience!! Therapy and medications are outside issues meaning no one representing AA should have an opinion about them.

I learned a lot about myself and other people from doing a proper 4th step. But in hindsight, how I did it made me very sick and caused a lot of harm. I hope sharing my experience will help others avoid what I went through.

Also, if your therapist offers to help you do your 4th step in your sessions, as well as hear your 5th step, take them up on it, whether or not they're in AA. I wish I had.

I also see now in hindsight why sometimes therapy seems so slow. The brain can handle dealing with and seeing so much at once.

All that said, I do wish you all the best in your step work. It truly is an amazing program of awareness, new perspectives, growth, and change. But it isn't the be all end all.

Pathwaytofree

I'm curious if anyone here has had a similar experience, heard about a similar experience, or wants to share any thoughts about it.

Gottalife

Be aware that if you take your fifth with a therapist, they may be obliged to report certain things you might disclose. No one, other than a minister of religion, has any legal protection around confidentiality.

I have taken advantage of therapy on two occasions in my sobriety, both in later sobriety. I found it very helpful, and very different to AA.

AA has a solution to alcoholism, and claims nothing else. Therapy has a solution for almost everything else, except alcoholism.

Pathwaytofree

Thanks Mike. I didn't know that. That's an important point to bring up.

And this is where things confuse me due to my former home group. They don't only see alcoholism as a physical allergy with a mental obsession to drink, and a spiritual malady that we're blocked from God. They see it as so much more--alcoholism is how we think, perceive people and situations, carry resentments, how we behave, how we react to life, take things personally, act out, etc., with or without alcohol and before we even started to drink.

My former home group seemed to think that everything went back to alcoholism.

I like your statement better because it just focuses on the alcoholism regarding alcohol and nothing else. But I'm still confused based on what I was taught in AA.

Gottalife

PTF, to summarise a bit, in your description of how a therapist sees alcoholism, you described exactly how AA sees it. The whole point of the steps is to bring on a profound change in our reaction to life, a complete psychic change, a change of personality sufficient to recover from alcoholism. The reason aa exists is that for the type of alcoholic that aa caters for, there is still no known therapy or medication that will do this.

Other problems, say ptsd or mental illness are not caused by alcoholism but can be made a lot worse by it. The AA solution here is to make use of the abundance of professionals to treat those things.

If a non alcoholic therapist could successfully take an alcoholic of my type through the steps, the rehabs would have a one hundred percent recovery rate. But it doesn’t seem to work out that way. Two reasons I guess, the therapist has no experience of the illness and therefore has no spiritual stake in helping others. Their motive is at least partly financial, and the twelve steps are not bought and sold they are given freely.

Finally, in the same way that therapy is not the preserve of AA the reverse is also true. Experts can give comprehensive opinions about how aa works, but they are incomplete. There is no scope in science for the mystical experiences, nor is there any explanation of why AA works so quickly. There just are mystical experiences, and it just does work quickly. “What is accomplished in a few weeks or months would normally take years of therapy”

In terms of what trumps the sponsor in respect of the spiritual practice of the program, that ought to be the big book, not the therapist. The book contains the experience that makes the program work. It has track record and street cred. If the sponsor or therapist are claiming to be practicing AA and introduce new ideas and opinions, you might just hold them a little suspect.

marenea

Extremely helpful. Very close to completing my 4th. I can relate to much that was said.thanks, again

sugarbear1

When is your 5th step scheduled? I didn't write my 4th step until I knew exactly when I would have my 5th step discussion as my sponsor knew the gravity of completing steps 4-7 and that they are crucial to one's sobriety....