Step 4 Resentment Inventory – BB Workshop – Part 3 of 14 – Bill L.

I don't know if... I think Mike had said this at one time, but I thought it was very cool that the first column deals with physical stuff, the physical world around us. It's in the tips. The second column deals with our thinking, the mental aspect of how we sort of mentally look at these things. The third column deals with our emotions, how our emotions were offended. And the fourth column deals with the spirit and the truth and the spiritual aspect of what's going on here. So it's interesting because again, these inventories are very thorough and very to the root of our problem and deal with all aspects of us the physical, the mental, the emotional and the spiritual so it's kind of interesting another statement that we thought we'd impress you with that would be tip number 14 too late yeah that was when he was snorting coffee grounds we went back through our lives nothing counted but thoroughness and honesty when we were finished we considered it the first three columns carefully homework assignment including myself make a list of all the people institutions or principals that you're currently pissed off at or resentful or whatever. That little tweak that happens inside. They're not doing what I want them to be doing on and on and On. Something Mike also said, I thought, that I've stolen. Some people are like, well, I haven't seen that person in 10 years. I don't even know if I'm pissed at them anymore. A good question to ask is, let's say you were walking down the street and you ran into them, would you get that tweak of I'm really uncomfortable about seeing them? Then you'd probably have resentment put it down. So that's a good barometer so to speak. Sorry to interrupt. And then take a look at the second column and write down exactly what they have done or it's hard for me sometimes it's hard for me to explain inventory like i would to a newcomer because i know the truth about this deal so what i want to say now and what i will say now is that the second column is for me to write down what i think they did to me to piss me off and i even find out later on that that becomes a lot but nonetheless if we can do and you know unless this is like if you're like me um my second for me i guess the first three or four four steps i did and again bill and i shoot from the angle of we like to go through the first nine steps while living in 10 11 and 12 and I like to go through the steps on an annual or semi-annual basis. And I've been doing that ever since I was, I don't know, three or four years sober. But about two and a half years lapse from my first inventory to my second inventory. So the size of the inventory increased. Plus I was pretty much brain dead when I did my first one anyway. So a lot of names in the second one popped up that could have been or possibly should have been. I don't want to say that. They could have Been on the first inventory. I was just not awake enough to see it. And luckily, in the meantime, those resentments didn't drag my butt out and kill me. So what happened to me the first three or four times writing inventory was that the list increased. So I know a lot of people, their first inventory have like 100 names or 50 names or whatever. So maybe you're only going to be able to complete the first two columns within the next week. The important thing is to make a beginning and to make an effort. And when I'm inventorying, discipline is extremely important for me because I am an extremely undisciplined person, especially when it comes to inventory writing. And I need to set a certain amount of time per day, and I usually like to try to take an hour. And lately the mornings just work better for me. And this is just my own personal thing. And if I wait until the end of the night, I always have the excuse that Melrose Place or something is on or I'm just tired. Tonight would be a good night to pick a fight with the wife. And my ego wants to really do things to get me out of writing inventory. And it's interesting to watch that. So when I'm in this phase of our development, And I like to include this as part of my morning prayer and meditation. And then the third column on these particular sheets, we just have check marks if you're doing it in a notebook. You can write out the seven areas of self that are affected. I usually find now on average, and again, I've been doing this for a while, I find that on average 5 out of the 7 areas of self are usually affected for each resentment I usually hit 5 out of 7 and a friend of ours calls that a full monty or a wipe out you know and quite often that happens as well are there any questions great we must have explained it pretty well until Herb had a question after we do this what's the format going forward with the meetings here are we just going to keep reading chapters or are we going to not necessarily expose what this is in front of the group how are we gonna check ourselves we're gonna I would say within two weeks three weeks tops we'll have our four steps completed and then hopefully the same week that we wrap up inventory in the book as far as direction wise, we can touch on the directions for the fifth step and then that'll give you ammunition to go ahead and share your fifth step with your sponsor or members of the group or however you want to do it. Whether it be a one-on-one fifth step or multiple fifth steps where you do several one-ons. And then we like to suggest six and seven and even eight in the same evening as your fifth step and then start amends from there once we get past inventory I see as far as weeks go five, six and seven I was just concentrating on four on four I don't know better I've written but I've never gone through the experience so I may be a little bit behind you asked before whether anybody had written what I have written but I'm here to start from scratch to rewrite it so I've got a question about how do I check myself in terms of what I'm I don't get it, you've never done a fifth step? no I'm a first time except I wrote everything before I got here ok he's just wondering what's expected right well if you choose to as far as far as I think it's what's going to happen is that for anyone who wants the right inventory in the group they're going to do that you know and if you feel you're current and you don't need to do that I came here to learn more than what I did so I'll go through the exercise but I'm just for me because it's the first time never having really explained it to anybody You know, I'm just looking about how do I check, you know, what I'm doing here. Because, I mean, today I understand what you're having us do with the format, but, I meantime, the next time we sit down, I don't know if we go through any examples or what do we do? Yeah, well, Bill and I will probably give a couple of examples and maybe even take a few from the floor. Next week, I see what you are saying. And so you want to know if you can come with some juicy stuff for an example? No, I'm just trying to check myself to make sure I'm doing it. In other words, part of the problem when we go through analyzing self is that we're in the way of ourselves. You're trying to get us out of the way. So how do I know when I'm out of what? Do I just know? or do I have to, like, share something in order to, you know, get through and understand whether I'm still blocking myself. How about we address this after the meeting? That's fine. Yeah. I was just wondering if there was a group dynamic here. So that's all I was trying to figure out was in the next couple of weeks when we're doing this, you now, is there a group dynamite? If not, then that's fine too. Do you have an answer for that? I'm not sure that I'm 100% clear on your question. I don't think he's going to share it in a fifth step with his sponsor, whomever. There shouldn't be a group dynamic related to what he writes. Right. Or if there's something that's not too risky that maybe you would want to throw out to the group because you want to see some deeper insight, somebody could do that. If you don't do that, that's – I mean, I wasn't expecting that to happen, but if somebody's having difficulty with a certain thing. But that's the kind of thing that you would share in your first step and then who you're doing your fifth step with would help you draw out perhaps other things or see a deeper truth or whatever. And if you don't have someone outside the meeting who's taking you through this, I think you're in big, big trouble. So if that's what you mean by checking yourself, I think it's real important for us to be working with a sponsor or someone who's taken us through the steps, whether it be someone from this group or Bill and I or whatever. Just because we're kind of playing leader of the group or whatever because the book's not talking for itself. I think it's also important that you're working really close with someone if you have any questions. And again, we have those phone lists, don't we? And you can call me up. I'm sure you can call Bill or what have you. I'm just remembering back when I did it the first time with my sponsor that I had a lot of questions while I was doing the inventory. The whole fourth step, I had questions, and I worked on it for maybe six weeks. I thought I was ready. I'd call him up, and he said, You're not ready. And he corrected me, and they said, you know, you've not gone deep enough and have you thought of this and thought of that. And I just had questions and I didn't know how to do it completely. We didn't do it together. I still did it and he was very careful to say, you know this is your work here. But then when he considered that I was finally ready and I of course thought I'd been ready a long time we took almost the whole day like six hours and sat down and then I went through the in the fifth step so you had feedback I had feedback and that was useful and I think you either have a sponsor now that you can do that with or you pick somebody here that you decide to do it with so you know again we'll try to do the first first three columns between this week and next and then next week maybe we'll take a couple examples and then we'll get into the direction unless you have a huge inventory but I'm pretty sure unless I'm in delusion that I can get through the first three column but again if you can't then that's fine we'll cover directions for the fourth column next week and I think we'll have enough time to get into fears and I don't know if we want to it kind of depends on the flow of the group if we get into sex and harms inventory next week but we'll definitely cover the fourth column of resentment inventory and we'll get into directions for fear inventory next week. And you know this is a process that will transform our lives so there needs to be a certain commitment and a certain motivation that what I'd like to suggest is to ride every day Mike had said about the night thing I encourage people to do it at night because sometimes we get up in the morning and we're late and we can't do it we can do it as soon as we get home until the kids go to sleep and just before we go to bed we can usually put out 20 minutes or half an hour so we need to make this a priority and set aside time every day to try to do some writing, or else the writing will fall behind. Yeah, I don't have to be at work until 11 o'clock in the morning, so I sometimes forget that there are actually nine of fivers out there. But that's all I have to share for this week. God, thank you for yesterday. Thank you for today. Thank you tomorrow. thank you for keeping us sober and please help me please help us to do your will Amen Hi everybody, my name is Barefoot Bill I'm a Native American alcoholic that's a joke somebody had said that to a friend of mine this girl that I know said something about me and they said, I think I know who you're talking about and she said to him, well what's your name or what's his name and they said it's some Indian name and she goes you mean Barefoot Bill and she says yeah that's it and then a couple weeks ago somebody called me Footless Bill so that's new too we're on page 64 where the four step starts we had gotten into three columns of the resentment inventory and I just want to kind of quickly cover that and then we're going to cover the fourth column and then give some examples or maybe I'll cover the three columns for those of you that weren't here last week and then we'll give an example and then do the fourth volume I think that would sit better with me Like I said, we're on page 64. I guess the first full paragraph starts with, therefore we start upon a personal inventory. This was step four. And then down toward, I guess in the middle of the page, or let me just do the whole thing. It talks about a business inventory, kind of gives an example of a business directory. and then it says one object is to disclose damage or unsaleable goods and to get rid of it promptly and without regret which is a good way of looking at the fourth and fifth step as well as the middle six steps there if the owner of the business is to be successful he cannot fool himself about value so we need to be fearless and thorough in doing this we did exactly the same thing with our lives we took stock honestly first we searched out the flaws in our makeup which caused our failure being convinced that self, not alcohol but self manifested in various ways was what had defeated us we considered its common manifestations like we saw in the third step where it said any life run on self will could hardly be a success it talked about turning our will and our life over to the care of a higher power and this is reiterating it again saying that self is what had defended us then it gets into the resentment inventory down toward the bottom of the page it says we listed people, institutions or principles with whom we are angry if you look in your packet the resentment inventory starts on page 9 on page 8 there's a resentment inventory prompt sheet that lists people, institutions and principles just to kind of give you an idea in case you're not familiar with and maybe some other ideas that you might not have thought of on your own and the page before that 7 it gives definitions for words used in step 4 so both of those would be useful tools in going through the inventory especially the definitions part when we get to the third column would be good to have out as we do each of those columns so that's the first column then the next line is the second column we ask ourselves why we are angry and then the third volume starts In most cases, it was found that our self-esteem, our pocketbooks, our ambitions, our personal relationships, including sex, were hurt or threatened. So we were sore, we were burned up on our grudge list. We said opposite each name, our injuries, was it our self esteem, our security, our ambitions are personal or sexual relations which have been interfered with. So it talks about in the third column what was hurt, threatened, or interfered with. And all those that I just mentioned in those few sentences are in the third column. And there's even a seventh item which says pride on your inventory. And pride is given in the example in the middle of page 65 toward the bottom on the right. One of the words there says pride, so that's included in the first column as well. Then it gives us an example of the first three columns. And then there's almost a full two-page pause that occurs that for me is one of the keys to the third step. It says, and I'm going to personalize this, after doing the first three columns, which we'll give an example of in a minute, it says, I went back through my life, nothing counted but thoroughness and honesty. When I was finished, I considered it carefully. The first thing apparent was that this world and its people were often quite wrong, and that's describing the first two columns of the Resentment Inventory. To conclude that others were wrong was as far as I ever got. which is talking about column two. The usual outcome was that the people continued to wrong me, column one and two, and I stayed sore, which was column three. Sometimes it was remorse, and then I was sore at myself. So you'll notice there that part of the first column underneath the bold, I am resentful at, includes regrets because as we said last week, the word resentment means to feel again or to re-feel. The word resent comes from the word sentiri, which means to feel. And you put re in front of the word, it means again. So the word resentment means to feels again, which is a little bit of a different definition than the average person probably thinks of a resentment as just anger. But if it's something that we're continually running through our mind that's bringing up some emotions, that would be a resentment. So that's why there are other words like being annoyed with, people that let us down. as we re-feel it that's a resentment when we first feel it that's just kind of maybe anger or disappointment or frustration but then over a period of time when we keep re-feling it that's resentment and not only can we get free and process you know angers or hatreds or rages toward people we can also inventory minor disruptions toward people and we can be free of all that um it says uh but the more I fought and tried to have my own way the worse matters got as in war the victor only seemed to win my moments of triumph were short lived something we also mentioned last week was that very often especially something that I've seen in the resentment inventory is that very oftens the things that frustrate us about other people are the things we struggle with ourselves and very often they are simply being a mirror for ourselves also I've heard this really great description of resentment that resentment is like taking poison and expecting the other person to get sick very often we have resentment toward people for years sometimes even after they're dead these people are no longer thinking about us in that situation and we're carrying around all this negative venom and this frustration and this anger for years and years and years and years and years and who's losing there you know what I mean my forgiving that person helps me my working through that resentment toward the other person helps me I'm not doing it necessarily for them I'm doing it for me so I can get free of it because like it said back on page 64 it says resentment is the number one offender it destroys more alcoholics than anything else so it's not painting a happy picture of resentment. It's painting a picture of resentment that if we continue to carry resentment, we will never really go back to drinking because alcohol helps us with that. And over the last bunch of months, we've been discussing all that. It says my moments of triumph were short-lived. It is plain that a life which includes deep resentment leads only to futility and unhappiness. To the precise extent that we permit these, do we squander the hours that may have been worthwhile? And then it continues painting eight or nine or ten pretty ugly pictures of what resentment does to us. And again, we try to work through this and get free of this stuff for ourselves. You know, a lot of people sometimes can't get with that whole concept of, well, they deserve for me to be angry at them. Well, again, who's the person that's suffering through that? I'm suffering through it because I've got this negative emotion bouncing around. In many cases, that person is no longer even thinking about me. And maybe they are just a little bit or whatever, But, you know, it's the kind of thing where I need to be free of that because the more resentment I have going on, the more I'm headed back toward the next strength. Then at the bottom of the page it says we turn back to the list for it held the key to the future. So it sounds like these last columns of the resentment inventory are pretty important if they hold the keyto our future. It says we were prepared to look at it from an entirely different angle. And in the original manuscript that said we must be prepared to looked at itfrom an entirelydifferent angle. We began to see that the world and its people, column one, really dominated us, column three. In that state, the wrongdoing of others, column two, fancied or real, had the power to actually kill again, not painting a very happy picture of keeping resentments. How could we escape? We saw that these resentments must be mastered, but how? We could not wish them away any more than alcohol. This was our course. We realized that the people who wronged us, volume one, were perhaps spiritually sick. though we did not like the symptoms, column 2 the way they treated us and the way they disturbed us, column 3 they, like ourselves, were sick too so again it's pointing out that when a person does something that harms somebody else just like when I do something that harms someone else I'm spiritually blocked off I don't like that expression spiritually sick if you excuse me to changing a little bit of this I don' t think our spirit can be sick I think our Spirit can be blocked off I think that's why the 12 steps says having had a spiritual awakening it's always been there but now we awaken to the awareness of it but that any person who causes harm is spiritually blocked off they're not reacting out of love they're reacting outof selfishness they're acting out of fear and a multitude of things based around fear but that they like ourselves and the more we see in this inventory especially when we get to the harms inventory about the ways that we harm people the more we have an appreciation for the ways that we were blocked off and the things that we did to other people and we begin to have a little bit more tolerance for people who are perhaps responding out of fear or selfishness or whatever that harm us because we can see that you know what in many cases I did things a whole lot worse than some of the things that people have done to me another thing that's kind of interesting that I don't think was mentioned last week was that the one relationship that I harmed the most was my relationship with my higher power because every single time i ever harmed somebody i harmed my relationship with my higher power there's no one person that i harmed as much as my relationship of my higherpower um i guess you could say yourself but it's kind of uh the same thing that you know uh uh it's kinda interesting because um again in in doing a bunch of uh fourth and fifth steps over the last few years and in working with a lot of people you gain a real appreciation for the way our inner workings get us to do certain things to other people probably the greatest appreciation is listening to someone's fifth step and you get to hear the way people harm that person that's sitting in front of you and we haven't gotten to the ninth step yet but I have a deeper appreciation and a deeper respect and a cheaper commitment toward wanting to make amends the more I listen to how people screwed people that have told fifth steps to me or harmed them or affected them in a negative way it's an amazing thing I'm not a big fan of putting off amends I'mnotabigfanofgettingintomends before you do the steps before it but in using amends a lot and in seeing the ways that I've harmed people and the way other people have harmed people that I put fifth steps with I'm a bigfanof getting right into making amends and making all of them wow I really went off there I'm sorry they like ourselves were sick too again it's almost like Mark was saying last Thursday that we're humans we're limited beings it's Almost Like expecting a deaf person to hear when you talk to them certain people are not capable of acting in a way that I want them to, that's not going to harm me. And the more that I go through life, the more I see that, you know, again, like myself, there's certain things, you know I'm expecting somebody to do something that perhaps they're just not capable of. It's almost like I'm expected to get blood from a stone. You know, these people that are descript violators, that they're not acting the way I want him to. And again, the more we get into inventory, the more than we really see this very clearly. That in some cases these people were not capable of treating me the way that I wanted them to. Nor did they even know how I wanted them to treat me. And here's a little prayer. It says, I ask God to help me show them the same tolerance, pity and patience that I would cheerfully grant a sick friend. And again in the original manuscript that said that I was that I wouldn't cheerfully grant a friend who has cancer. When a person offended we said to ourselves this is a sick man. You know, like myself like I said earlier. This is someone who's spiritually blocked off. How can I be helpful to him? God save me from being angry, thy will be done so there's a couple prayers there and you don't have to turn there but on page 552 it talks about that another tool we can use to get over people that we resent is to pray that they get the happiness and the joy and the success and the peace that we would want for ourselves that we pray that those kind of things happen for the other person that we resentment and by using those two tools to pray for them that they find happiness and peace and joy and to also pray for ourselves to have a better attitude toward these people, that's how we start moving away from softening our heart, seeing the situation a little bit differently, perhaps forgiving them and just moving away form this resentment and not having it anymore. So again, there's a really big two-page pause between the third column and the fourth column that I think is really important in doing this inventory that after we finish doing the first three columns, we need to take that pause and perhaps pray for each of these people or just review what's going on here, see them a littlebit differently start heading toward the fourth column which is what's my part in all this disregarding them entirely and we can move toward having a whole lot more freedom it says we avoid retaliation or argument do we want to treat we wouldn't treat sick people that way if we do, we destroy our chance of being helpful we cannot be helpful to all people but at least God will show us and again, we have to ask God to help us with this to have God show us how we can take a tolerant and kindly view of each and every one So that's the first three columns. We're going to take a couple examples just to kind of walk everybody through the first three columns, then we'll look at the fourth column and then do examples of that as well. Hi everyone, I'm Mike, I am an alcoholic. For those that weren't here last week or maybe knew entirely, last week when we went over the first three columns of the Resentment Inventory we did it, we gave a very detailed explanation probably even more detailed than I've ever heard either one of us ever do but if you're new here and you're wondering why Bill kind of went through it quickly, it's because as far as the directions for the first 3 columns are concerned we had covered that last week and he was just doing a review until we got to the top of bottom of 65, top of 66 which is where we left off last week. One thing I just want to touch on is something that Bill had covered but about, it was probably about a year or two ago it became so clear to me that the prayers on page 67 are not the same as the prayer on page 552 that that woman from Freedom From Bondage is talking about. Again, like Bill said, the prayer that she's talking about, which is a very effective prayer, but I need to see the difference. The prayer that he's talking abut is I'm praying for other people. And the prayer of that 67 is talking abot is that I am to ask God to help me show other people, these people that I resent, the same patience, pity, tolerance. And I like to add the word compassion because I don't really care much for the word pity today. But this is a prayer. I'm to ask, Dear God, please show me how I can show the people that are resent the same patience, tolerance, and compassion that I would show a friend who's in the hospital with cancer. You know, I wouldn't... If I was visiting a friend who was dying in the Hospital and this person, if you pardon the expression, lashed out on me just because he or she wasn't having a good day or was in a lot of physical or emotional pain, And knowing that, I wouldn't really think much of that. I would just kind of process it as they're really hurting today and forgive them, Lord. They know not what they do. But my entire life has been the direct opposite when it comes to this thing. I never considered that. and this prayer is asking me to consider that. It's telling me to do the exact opposite of what I've done my whole life. And that's how, that's the vision. Again, when we were talking about the first two steps we referred to the word vision a lot and we're going to refer to it a lot more when we get to 1011 but that's division that I like to get in my head when I'm doing the work, and there is work between the third and the fourth column. And having done this, having written a lot of inventory in the past few years, I might say the work... And I might be going out on a limb by saying this, but the work or the prayers or the considerations that I need to be working with between the 3rd and the 4th column are probably just as, if not, more important than the writing that's gone on the paper already. In the beginning, I skimped over this stuff in the middle, so to speak, and it's really important. Again, like we did with the first three steps, I take the words, sentences, and paragraphs from the bottom of 65 over to 67 and I turn as many statements as I can into questions and ask them if they apply to me. Or, in this case, if I'm currently having this type of attitude. Do you want to get into examples? Yeah, why don't we do some examples. I'm going to take one from the book on page 65. I'm gonna take one for my past, and Mike has one. and then we'll ask if it's not clear on how this goes so far and then, we'll do the fourth column. The one example I want to take from on page 65, the one example there is my employer and it says, like we had said last week, each of these columns including each individual column in the third column you go top to bottom you do not go across You'll read it across when you do your fifth step, but we go top to bottom. So my employer is in the first column. I have a resentment for my past, which I no longer have, but I want to use it because it's a really good example. I had a resentment toward the police, and Mike has a resentment, which is? It's actually not a resentment. Again, we talked about last week how at least when I do this today, I take a look at any resentments, angers, hurts, judgments towards myself and others, regrets, dislikes or grudges or annoyances, however you want to call it. So I have a dislike in regards to being overweight. So if you need to label the first column, it would be a resentment or a dislike towards myself. And then, again, top to bottom, first column. Second column, the example in the inventory, it says friends are firing me for drinking and padding my expense account. I had a resentment toward the police because they were locking me up and preventing me from doing whatever I wanted to do. And how about with the resentment toward yourself? The second column is for being overweight. and when we do these columns especially the second and fourth column of the resentment inventory, we just do bullet statements we don't have to expand on a whole story you can't fit all that in a box just do a bullet statement remember when you're going to do your fifth step you can expand upon it all you want during the fifth step but just do short bullet statements as a matter of fact, a gentleman who I hooked up with down in Philly recommended in the second column to just use one word because then it makes you think about it, and very often you can pretty much boil it down to one word. And I'm not necessarily saying you have to do that, but I think it's just important to just use bullet statements just to refresh your memory so when you do your fifth step you can rattle it off. And, you know, again in the fourth column there too. All right, now third column. They only give a couple. It's funny because you might notice on page 65, he kind of gives us two examples of how to do this. The first example is with Mr. Brown, where with the second column, it gives second column has a third column associated with each one. And then as he goes along, I don't know if he got lazy or if he was trying to give us two samples, but after a while, he lists a bunch of things in column two, but only gives us one or two things in column three. So I don't know if he was giving us two different examples or if he just got lazy as he was doing this. But the one that I recommend is sort of the first one where you have something in the second column and stuff in the third column associated with it. Because like we were saying last week, you know, in some cases you might have more than one resentment toward a certain person. As a matter of fact, usually we do toward people that are very close to us. And we would put the name and then have a few things in column two. And then, you know, a couple lines in column one might be empty because it continues the first name. Like toward my mom, if I have three resentments toward her, I would just have my mom in the first column and then two columns blank. And then the second column would be three things that I have resentments towards her for. And believe me, it was more than three. But then the third column, again, top to bottom, each of those individual columns in column three. So do you think that this person, that was just an example of an inventory. That's not necessarily any specific person's inventory. But do you think that when the employer threatens to fire the person for drinking and padding their expense account that it affects their self-esteem? It affects how they feel about themselves? Probably does. And again the third column would be just check marks because it says was this affected? It's a yes or no So a check means that it was affected. No check means that it wasn't. Now how about with the police? It certainly affected my self-esteem, them locking me up all the time. And how about with your being overweight? Does that affect your self-esteem? Yes. One, two, three. Yes. Okay, now how about the pocketbook? Again, if you stay with the definitions, a couple pages before the resentment inventory, it's very helpful when doing this third column. But with the pocket book, It's of a financial or material nature. And do you think threatening to fire this person would affect their pocketbook? Yes. I'm sure they weren't getting a raise anytime soon, besides the fact that they're probably not going to have a job. Them locking me up affects my pocketbook because I might not have a job because I'll be in the joint. How about with you being overweight, does that affect your pocketbook No. Were there times when you over-aid and you weren't very motivated to work when you were going back to work? No, not that I recall. All right, and with security, there's two kinds of security. There's emotional security and financial security. What's interesting, I don't know why I keep jumping ahead to the ninth step, but what's interesting about the ninth steps is that I again have a new appreciation for amends because what I started seeing in the ways that I harmed people was that the people that were closest to me, especially like my family, my parents, people like that, my ex-wives, plural, one of the things that I stole from them was their emotional security because they weren't sure when they were going to get a phone call about me dead or what kind of condition I'd be in when I'd show up at family functions. It still hurts me on some level to think about the ways that I emotionally affected my parents and the people that were close to me. The people that loved me and that I loved, that was the way that I treated them. And again, that's why I'm a big fan of making amends. But okay, financial and emotional security, I'm sure it did with him, with his job, with the police. It especially affected my emotional security because I was always really nervous if there was a policeman around because I knew that they were there for me. How about with being overweight? Yes. okay ambitions is at the time when the resentment the occurrence happened did it affect what I wanted in the future like our ambitions is something that we want in the future so certainly this person wanted to have this job so the boss possibly firing him for paying the account for drinking is affecting their ambitions because and also very often our ambition is that we don't want the person to act the way they're acting. So most often ambitions is checked off here, as well as personal relations, because obviously if the boss is going to threaten me for paying my expense account, that's going to affect my relationship with that person. So those two are very often affected most of the time through these inventories. And with the police, did it affect my ambitions? Certainly it did. I didn't want to be in jail. Can't speak for anybody else. How about your ambitions with being overweight? Yes. And with pride, do you think this person's pride was affected with their job perhaps being lost? Yes. I think it was. Certainly with the police deal and with yourself being overweight? Yes. And with personal relations, again, I'm sure this person has personal relations especially with the boss and maybe even with other people like their co-workers or even with the wife because now they might be about to lose the job again and things aren't going too well. So I think the personal relations were affected. Personal relations with the police thing, another way of looking at the police thing was that something that you don't know about me was that very often if I was out and I found out that you were a policeman I had a problem with you without even talking to you. So it certainly affected personal relations. How about with your being overweight? Yeah. And sex relations, with the threatening to be fired for paying an expensive counter for drinking. I think it's possible that their sex relations would be affected because I'm sure the wifey-poo wasn't too happy about the fact that he might be losing another job and they might have to go work or something like that. So that's kind of iffy. Does the group think that it would apply in this situation? The voice of the group. The voice is in the corner. Thank you. No, no, that's all right. I appreciate you speaking up. Cool. And with the police, I don't believe that sex relations was involved. I really at that period of time wasn't dating anymore. I was having a lot of sex but it wasn't with anybody else. And I had also done a study one time and somebody said that if I had gotten locked up I might be having more sex but I'm not going to go there. And in my case that didn't apply so I'm going to check that off. And how about with your being overweight? Does that affect your sex relations? Okay. So you'll see there that in one case, everybody was checked off. In another case, one was missing. In another box was missing, but they were different. So in a lot of cases, all those areas are going to be affected, but not in all cases. So does anybody have any questions? Yeah. When I did my fifth step, was I supposed to read all right well James I'm still list the asshole apology you know what I mean and what the asshole did to him and then what part of self did it affect um it's not supposed to be playing so it's great it's very funny um and I and I and I started to read off some of these things but then I didn't read them off anymore are you supposed to read off every part that affected you read them out loud again too like yeah well my self-esteem was affected because it was like kept on coming up all these things were constantly affecting every person every one of them were affected in one way or another are you supposed to constantly read them over and over again as a person listening to the fifth step once we begin to see a pattern as you had talked about the repetitiveness of it I don't necessarily make them read it over and over again they're kind of as long as they're able sometimes what i do with people i don't do this with everyone but i'll crack the toughest one first usually it's like towards mom or towards dad and again you can't do that with everyone it i just kind of go with my intuition nowadays and it depends on you on the other person and usually when you crack the biggie one wide open did i just say biggie one and use it appropriately and if they're able to see the truth which we're going to get to in the fourth column then sometimes all i have them do is just read the first column the second column and then jump right to the to the fourth column because what we're after is the exact nature of the wrong so once they see the pattern and it begins to get really repetitive i don't i don' t make them sit there and just read it over and over again What I try to do in here in fifth steps is make sure that the person has an understanding of those columns. So maybe for the first page, maybe the first two pages, I'll have them go through that. But then when I see that they really are getting those columns, like you said, it's just kind of redundant. Yeah. So I might have them start by doing that and Mike kind of said that, but what I look for Or is, you know, do they have an understanding of each one of those? If they do, they probably filled it out correctly. And then we don't have to necessarily go along. And, you Know, in some cases I might like look to see if one of them is checked off because I think definitely one applies. And if they don't has it, I'll ask them about it and we'll talk about it. In some cases they'll check it off. In some case they'll take a check off because they were... I would say, You know, you had sexualizing checked off. Why? And, You Know, you kind of get into it. I had actually literally write every single one of these things down I didn't just check them off I really wrote sex relationship, pride, ambition I wrote every single on that and that's fine it's just another way of doing it I like this really it's sort of a time saver I've even been I've seen sheets where you explain all of those but my understanding of the way the book says it says were these things affected it doesn't say how are they affected it says were they affected so I try to be a purist with what is the book saying and you'll see in some of the other inventories I try to be a purists in what the book is saying and how to do an inventory and there's other ways of doing it I don't know if one is good or one is bad but like I said last week I saw it was an inventory that only had the first three columns it didn't have the fourth column I'd like to suggest that that's a bad inventory but I've never seen And, you know, I haven't seen too many bad inventories. In some way it's just someone's perspective of what it's saying and it still draws out what's necessary. Over the years I've become, I guess, a little less pure than Bill when it comes to this. Yeah, still superior. i've kind of gone a little bit deeper than than the essence of what the book talks about just with the third column someone showed me how to write the third column out or if you will um an extended third column and i don't like to throw that term around because people get confused by it but all it is is exactly like Bill said to write out how each of these seven areas of self or how my ego caught a hold of it and what that sounds like and that's how I write inventory today and just so you get a clear idea of what I'm talking about I'm just going to read mine again as I did the third column so again I dislike myself or I dislike the fact that I'm overweight and what it affects is my self esteem which is who I think I am and this is the high part of self esteem that it affects the third column is where I get to take a look at the committee that's in my head when you do something to me automatically the chatter starts going on up here you know the committee starts to get together and they take a vote and automatically you get voted out so this is what the committee sounds like in my head towards this uh dislike or resentment if you will of being overweight and this is the high self-esteem aspect this iswhat the ego says i'm a recovered alcoholic i'm spiritual spiritual men aren't overweight. This is the low self-esteem aspect. I am a fraud in AA because I'm overweight and there's a fear attached to that. See, as you guys can probably tell right now, none of this stuff is true, but this is what my ego tells me. This isthe lie that I have to believe in order to fall into the delusion of a regret or resentment. It affects my ambitions, what I want. I want to be liked, respected and looked up to I don't want to look bad And again a fear attached to that Emotional security What I need to be okay I need a physically fit body To be okay I need others to see me differently than I am Personal relationships My friends shouldn't see me unfit Fear of looking bad Sex relations My wife should be physically attracted to me I need an emotional security a fit body to be attractive to my wife for her to love me and pride who you think I am remember self-esteem is who I think I am or what I think about myself and pride is who you think I or what i think you're thinking about me god forbid i think your thinking about me okay pride goes on pretty much and again like we said last week that's That's not necessarily a genuine definition of the word pride, but most often for an alcoholic we get our pride from what other people think of us. If you like me then I feel better about myself. If you don't like me, then usually I don't have a lot of pride. Pride. No one should think I'm not spiritually fit because I'm not physically fit. What I like explaining to people is that just say, for example, let's take a round number of 100 resentments. You know, a hundred different things listed in column two. And let's say on an average we have five things in column three that are affected. Five out of seven areas of self on an averagethat are hurt, threatened or interfered with. So you take five times a hundred and you get five hundred. and you wonder why the heck we shoot ourselves in the head and not in the foot because of all the voices that are going on in our head. If I have all this stuff that I read to you or that I just read to You, if I had that going on 500-fold, God, you wonder Why the Heck They Lock Us Up. So that's why for me, and again, I wrote a bunch of inventory. I wrote inventory several times before I wrote it like this. but when I finally and I do not show this to new people I think the majority of people in this room if not all the people in these rooms have written four column resentment inventory before so I do not share this with a person who's never been through the steps before and in most cases I don't even get into this with them until they've written inventory at least two or three times before but this has been very effective for me to uh to just see the the voices the the lies to see the you know mark calls it the the chatter of a thousand monkeys you know and uh it's that it's a whole committee system that dr paul who who is the author of dr attic alcoholic who passed away a couple years ago he used to talk about how the committee would wake him up in the morning and man that that is so true for me you know it's It's all true. And that's why if we can process it, see and get a different look at this and have some forgiveness and kind of soften our heart toward the person and also see what our part in it is, which most often brought about it in the first place, we're now free of all this, and we don't have the 500 characters rattling around in our head all day. And these inventories are just so powerful in bringing about a lot of freedom and brought a lot of peace because we don't have a lot of this stuff right on our end. So again, does anybody have any questions or something that's not clear? Do they think something doesn't apply that maybe we can chew up and spit out maybe? Is everything clear? I'm afraid to put it back and I don't want to miss it. I think I got it back. All right, so now the fourth column. Middle of page 57 or 67. Okay, it says referring to our list again. And this is a very important statement. Putting out of our minds the wrongs others had done, we resolutely look for our own mistakes. So we're going to cover up the first three columns, if you will. We don't care about what the other person did anymore. Or hopefully by this time we've gotten some forgiveness in our heart and we're able to see the other person as a spiritually blocked off person as myself. Because guess what? If I wasn't spiritually blocked of, I wouldn't have to be writing this inventory. I like to think of myself today as a little less spiritually blocked up as I was a couple of years ago. Hence, the inventories that I write today are nowhere near as big as they used to be. But it's that whole thing of if I could spot it, I got it. If I see it,I could be it. If I'm pointing a finger at you,it's the whole spiritual mirror thing. It's coming right back at me. If I think you're sick,then automatically that's a judgment. I must be spiritually sick or blocked off too. What's kind of interesting is in the first three columns, this is all information we've always known you know I knew who else pissed at and why and how it affected me none of this is new information but then this last column is a perspective that I rarely if ever considered and that's for me the beauty of this last colon is in most cases and especially the more you replay it in your head over the years you completely separate yourself from the situation they're the evil one you are pure as a driven No. You're the most wonderful person. It's hard to believe they could do that to somebody like me. And we start to see it a little bit differently. And like Mike said, this is the column of truth. This third column, you can rattle off all this stuff. The second column, you can rattel off all the stuff. But when you get to that last column, that's when we shine the light of God's truth finally on it. Yeah, I really believe that we don't really begin to grow spiritually until we get to this fourth column. because I think as we had made reference to last week is that the first column is just dealing with the physical aspect. It's just dealingwith the body, so to speak, another person, institution, or principle. And the second column is dealing with my mind. and the third column the things that the resentment affects within me is dealing with my emotions so remember we have four dimensions Bill said on page 8 and on page 25 he referred to it as the fourth dimension of existence on one page he said that we're going to we're going to be catapulted into the fourth dimension of existence so from the third column to the fourth column this is where we get to be catapalted into the forth dimension of existence which is the spiritual dimension or as we're gonna find out in an intense step it's the world of the spirit this is were truth is found so again we we set aside the first three columns and we resolutely look for our own mistakes. Do you have a good definition for resolutely? No, but I'll go to my big book dictionary. Alright. Someone want to hum the Jeopardy music? Resolutely means faithfully marked by firm determination and without doubt. Good definition. We resolutely look for our own mistake. And that can also be termed as what my thinking was. Again, the main problem centers in the mind. So my mistake usually comes from my thought process. So if you could, in conjunction, look at page 9 of the handout packet, fourth column. It says, 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 Again, he's repeating himself Where were we to blame? And that's a hard deal for alcoholics to look at Where am I to blame I always like pointing the blame at you Instead this asks me to go within and touch truth And see where I'm to blame in this The inventory was ours, not the other man's When we saw our faults, what I did, we listed them. We placed them before us in black and white. We admitted our wrongs honestly and were willing to set these matters straight. So again, if you look at your sheet in the fourth column, it just simply repeats the same thing that's found on page 67, paragraph 2. There's really four words that I like to focus on in the fourth column because I think they, if I can find where I had been selfish, dishonest, self-seeking and frightened, I think it answers all the rest of the questions. If I can fine, and this is something that I didn't discover right away or wasn't told to me right away, but it says, where had we been selfish, dishonest, self-seeking, or frightened. It doesn't say were we. The first inventory sheets that I came into contact with, the fourth column was just like the third column and it was just a checkmark box. That's okay for seeing patterns, but it doesn't give me much information from my eight-step list. And it doesn'T really smash home to me the truth of the fact that with 99.9% of all my resentments I, and I don't like to use the word played a part but for lack of a better way of saying it for 99.5% 99.99% of all my resentions I played a party with every single one and I actually got the ball rolling with most of them I don' t know if we talked about this last week but in the case of a child or a person who's been abused or sexually abused I don't play a part in that at least in the physical act of it but what I do play a part in is what I do with that resentment today okay or later on in life right if something happened in that area of my life to me, let's say 25 years ago why have I been carrying on to this for 25 years? Why am I unwilling to let this go and forgive the other person? I must be using it for a reason. So again if I'm working with a person that's been abused or sexually molested I get very clear with them that you were not at fault for that. You are not to blame. You're not a bad person. And chances are you did absolutely nothing to bring that about. But let's get free of that today. Let's see why you're still holding on to it. Something that's really kind of strange, but in hearing a lot of fifth steps, you hear about people who were molested as children and as they became adults they started molesting people and that's hard for me to relate to because you would think having been through it themselves that they would never want to expose that to somebody or do the same to another person perhaps but for some reason perhaps it's just that because that's all they've ever known that for some reasons it perpetuates and in other instances It's like of, you know, very often perhaps someone was molested as a child and then when they grow up, they use that as an excuse to abuse the opposite sex in their sex life in going forward. You know, I can just treat men any way I want to because, you Know, my uncle did this when I was 10 years old, you Now, and that's the part that we play in it. We use it as an Excuse for behavior later on in life. So that's The part that We Play. Like Mike said, it's very important to realize we did not play a part in it when we were a child. But how are we using that now and going forward? Sometimes we use it as an excuse to not go to school. Sometimes we Use It As An Excuse To Go To Job, The Job,The Job, THE Job. You know, there's ways that it manifests later on in life. It's sort of like Howard uses a really cool example of like a phone number that, you know, you meet some cute girl and you get her phone number and you start calling her and you don't need to look at the paper anymore. You just have it memorized. and then six months later you guys got kind of not interested in them anymore and a year goes by and you want to call them, you don't have it in your head anymore because you're not using it anymore. Sometimes with resentment, as time goes by, we're using it as an excuse later on in life and if we weren't using it, it wouldn't be in our system anymore. So later on In Life, we do use that as an Excuse for certain behavior and certain things. All right, now the fourth column. Mike just read it. Again, you know, it's all pretty much right there word for word. We disregard the other person entirely. Again, there's a two-page pause. We've now prayed for these people. We've tried to get a better attitude toward these people and perhaps started to feel a sense of forgiveness. And then now we look at this last column, Disregarding the Other Person Entirely. Where was I to blame? What was my part in this? So obviously for drinking on the job job and pay it in the expense account, that's very selfish. I'm sure they had to cover up some things and lie in order to be able to do that with the expense account. That was dishonest. Certainly some self-seeking there. Very often there's fear behind, you know, when you're doing something like that, you have fear being found out. But also something that might have set the ball rolling to begin with was that the reason why I was taking the money to begin with was because I had a fear of not having enough money. So now I have to steal it in order together. So that's kind of where we start setting the ball wrong And that's kind of, you know, I'm not going to write all that down, but that's how we look at the fourth column here. With the police, I always had something illegal in my pocket. I was always ripping people off. I was also involved with bikers and people of perhaps reputation where the police would be needed. And, you now, yada, yadda, yaddah. And there was fear involved in that because, you know, I was afraid that they weren't going to let me do whatever I wanted to do. And I just always just did whatever I want to do and if you had a problem with that, you just weren't around much. How about with the fourth column with the resentment toward yourself for being overweight? Selfish, relying on self rather than God and others for help. Unwillingness to go to OA and playing God. I think I can lose weight on my own power. You don't have to write all that down. Wait a minute, can you repeat that? No, I'm just kidding. Get the tape. So what's interesting about this is that it doesn't matter who did these things because in some cases, let's say I have resentment toward Paul because he stole money from me. If Steve stole money for me, I had a resentment toward him so it wasn't the person, it was what they did which was the second column that I had resentment toward. Then in the third column, I found out that it wasn t what they did and it wasn T the person. And what it was, was how I chose to internalize and personalize what they did. Now, let me give you a good example of that. I'm sure we've all experienced this. Let's say it's Monday. I had kind of a bad weekend. I'm running a little bit late for work. I'm in traffic and somebody cuts me off. I freak. And now I have resentment toward this person. Now, a couple months go by. And it's a Friday. I'm not running late. I'm a little more on a spiritual theme. might have a Friday attitude going, you know what I mean? I'm in traffic. The same person cuts me off. Same situation. I don't even think twice about it. Now, how is it possible the exact same thing happened but the explanation is that because in the first case I chose to personalize and internalize what had happened in a certain way and in the second case I choose not to. So it wasn't even what they did or who did it. It was how I chose to internalize it that brought this about. And then the fourth column takes it even further. You know, in the case of the employer, if this guy wasn't drinking on the job and petting and stealing and dishonest and all of that, they wouldn't have had this resentment to begin with. So in the first example, that person set the ball rolling to begin With. If they weren't doing what they were doing, the rest of this would have never occurred and they wouldn�t have this resentment. Same thing with the police thing. If I wasn�t doing things that were always illegal and I wasn�T involved with people that were doing illegal things and I wasn�т just doing whatever I wanted to do, the police wouldn�T have been locking me up. I wouldn�т have to resentment toward him and the same thing with the case with mike um he wouldn't have a resentment toward himself because he'd be doing something positive in bringing about changing what the situation was uh it wasn't it didn't have anything to do with anything else but the fact that he contributed to it happening to begin with if he was taking the actions that's something that i i was someone had come to me and they were having a bad time they were Having problems finding the job this and that and my first question to him was well what are you doing about finding a job Well, you know, I'm not really doing that much. Well, I talked to him about, you know, that's where this is coming from. That's where this problem that you're having with yourself is coming from, is that you are not doing anything about it. It's not that you don't have a job. It is that your not doing any thing about it and what that person did was they started, they worked out a resume, they started sending them, they started feeling good because they were finally doing something about it, they saw that the situation was out of their control about whether anything responded to a resume or not but they were probably doing something about it and they weren't beating themselves up over it anymore so uh you know it's as interesting how we play the part and just as importantly but sometimes a little bit less importantly how we choose to internalize and personalize it that's the part that we play in it and again you know mike was talking about how um you know it says that our troubles of our own making sometimes we don't necessarily contribute to it directly but how we chose to look at the situation is causing the trouble ourselves because there's other ways of looking at it. I can look at somebody as maybe their wife just left them, maybe their mother just died. I don't know what somebody's situation is when they blast past me in traffic. I can Look at them and say, oh, they're jerks and they're out to get me and they've disrespected me. Or I can say, you know what, maybe they're having a bad day. Maybe they're on the way to the hospital because somebody loved a child or something. You know what I mean? I don' t know what happened, but I can have a different perspective toward it and then all of a sudden I'm not creating this problem and I'll have this resentment all day, all month, all year. You know what I mean? In a lot of cases, I know that's the way I was. I'm sure nobody here can relate. But again, all our troubles are we're making either because of something we contributed to it or because of the way we choose to look at the situation and we can get a different perspective and this tool really helps with all that and to see the truth and to say what's really going on here and it's a beautiful thing. It's an incredible thing. You know, again, intellectually sometimes it just doesn't necessarily make sense. But then when we participate and have an experience and take some action, it's unbelievable the kind of freedom that we could have in doing something like this. Again, is there any questions or anything? I think maybe a situation doesn't apply or something that maybe is just not clear.