Heart’s Desire - Al's Progressive Inventory of Fourth Steps
When I got sober, it was not my first instinct to move proactively toward the Steps. I am a procrastinator — top of the list of my defects — and unless I actually want to do something, it just sits there. But one of my home groups had a lot of newcomers, and people were already asking me to be their sponsor. I had to start working the Steps if I was going to continue to be helpful to them. And the thought did occur to me: “Why do I go to these meetings, which help a lot, and yet resist doing what they say will help a lot more?”
Within two weeks of getting a year, I picked a sponsor, and started the Steps, primarily to keep from messing up my “don’t drink and go to meetings” program. Going through the motions, it seems, is not a bad thing if not going through the motions is worse. I used a computer and a table with columns, and my Fourth Step was 11 pages long – not enormous. It was written in three weeks – 3 hours the first night, and 5 hours, three weeks later, on the night before my 5th Step meeting. I got no great relief from it but finishing it gave me a sense of being more connected to the program. I stayed sober using the Principles and saw real progress going forward in looking at my level of willingness as reflected in Step 6.
That, plus service work and sponsorship, kept me sober for well over a decade. But I made no progress in dealing with my underemployment — eventually, a new manager took over my Barnes & Noble, and first I got dead-ended, and then demoted. Neither did I deal with relationship challenges, a source of much disappointment and under-realization. The Principles kept me sober, but my resistance to change kept me arm’s length from the Steps as a process, procrastinating my way through one year after another.
In May 2017, my father passed away, and I instinctively knew I needed to hold close to the Program. I consciously moved toward the Steps, choosing a new sponsor for a fresh start. I used the same chart and broke the inventory down into sections that made sense to me. For a week, I was sitting in front of my computer, and a name would come to mind, and I would go the chart and put them in the appropriate section, or if necessary, add a section for them. Family, Relationships, Friends, Sexuality, Career, Spirituality, Buddhist practice, Twelve Step issues. It kept getting bigger.
As I moved toward this Inventory with gusto rather than reservations, I knew I was moving in the right direction. I worked on it in sections, and each section took about 2 or 3 hours to go over with my sponsor. It took five and a half months to go through all of it, and I finished the inventory almost exactly 15 years to the day when I finished the first one. Using the same chart, this time I had 64 pages, plus 10 more pages of insights about what I was learning about myself and how I have operated over that decade and a half. It was “fearless,” in the sense that I had embraced it rather than avoiding it.
My biggest insight was that I had blamed myself for every relationship that had failed. I had held onto old friends who were showing signs of not really wanting my friendship. I had low-grade, ongoing grief over jobs that failed or opportunities that went away or friendships that had petered out, thinking each one was a personal failure. I felt bad about everything, even my very existence, it seemed! My biggest job was letting go of past failures and my living amend was to stop hanging out with people, places, or things from the past that weren’t serving me. My sponsor would not let me make an amend unless I could name actual harm I had done. It was an amazing relief.
And as it happened, I finished just in time. In February of 2018, I was laid off from my job. And within a week, friends gave me two leads that led me to a completely different career. All I had to do was leave Atlanta, which was one of the hardest things I have ever done, but my home of 34 years and 11 months was in my rearview mirror in August, when I moved to Birmingham for a hospital chaplain residency in Birmingham. It was an enormous change and a rich gift — working with people to help them through difficult times. The adult education aspect of my Residency involved another round of deep introspection, masquerading as adult education, and it was like a warm hand-off from my sponsor to my Clinical Pastoral Education Supervisor, who was just as kind. To no one’s surprise but mine, I was very good at this and thriving. The professional development only added to my progressive inventory — and more importantly, to my growth and understanding.
The Steps clearly did not solve my problems, but they made me ready to make hard decisions when opportunities came up. And I have come to believe that if we commit to doing the work, the Universe rises to greet us with what we need to move forward. Just as my residency ended, the other career lead — Peer Support Specialist for Addiction and Recovery — came to fruition, and I immediately transitioned into another full-time job at the same hospital, this time working with people in Recovery.
With my mother’s death in February 2020 the time has come for another round of decisions. And now I am structuring another Fourth Step to prepare me for the next round of decisions. Do I stay here, or return to Atlanta, or maybe even go somewhere else? Which career do I focus on? Where is my true spiritual home? How do I relate with the boyfriend I acquired back in Atlanta while I was living here? (Yes, I had to move to Birmingham to get a boyfriend in Atlanta. Ah, the irony....) I will use these tools of the Program — the Steps and Principles, my meditation practice, my sponsor, to name four — to look at all the interlocking options and the dominos that fall when you make a choice about any one of them.
It seems to me that none of my Progressive Fourth Steps are going to look the same. It’s as if the practice of inventory accelerates them, one informing and enriching the next. Each will need to reflect the moment I am in, the questions life has posed for me, and especially the options that haven’t presented themselves yet. The gift I’ve gotten from looking at Twelve Step Recovery progressively is the flexibility to modify the Steps to fit the circumstance I find myself in. I can make my inventory “searching and fearless” when I use this tool to get at my deepest needs and desire. As I was writing this piece, an inspiration came — this inventory would have a title, “Heart’s Desire.” Since I came into Recovery, I had always worked the Steps from a position of scarcity — what life raft will I jump to next? Now that I have stabilized, could I actually trust that my needs would be met? Do I dare base my next set of decisions on what my heart wanted?
Having this focus has moved my Inventory forward quickly. I think I will be well-positioned to know both my mind and my heart when the Universe rises to greet me again with options for the future. As Hamlet says, on the threshold of making life-changing decisions, “The readiness is all.”