Sandy B. on Powerlessness, Character Defects, and the Fourth Step Inventory
About This Speaker Tape
Sandy B. provides a deep dive into the spiritual necessity of the first and fourth steps, emphasizing that total surrender is the only entry point into a successful recovery. He argues that powerlessness is not just about the act of drinking, but about the inability to tolerate being sober, describing alcohol as a tool the alcoholic used to solve the problem of existing in a world they found unbearable.
He explains the fourth step as a process of identifying the self-centered blockages—such as resentment, pride, and fear—that choke off a person's connection to a Higher Power. By using the metaphor of a steam engine, he illustrates how raw human instincts are necessary for life but destructive if not properly harnessed through spiritual growth.
Sandy B. concludes by addressing the resistance many feel toward the inventory process, noting that whether driven by guilt or arrogance, the goal is to shift from being self-centered to being Higher Power-centered. He stresses that while the fourth step is a solitary act of honesty, its true value is unlocked in the fifth step through sharing with another person.
Topics
Timestamps
Full Transcript
well good morning everybody and welcome to the Saturday morning live group of alcoholics
anonymous my name is sandy beach and I'm an alcoholic how y'all doing this morning well
it's good to see everybody in spite of the bad weather...
anonymous my name is sandy beach and I'm an alcoholic how y'all doing this morning well
it's good to see everybody in spite of the bad weather...
well good morning everybody and welcome to the Saturday morning live group of alcoholics
anonymous my name is sandy beach and I'm an alcoholic how y'all doing this morning well
it's good to see everybody in spite of the bad weather here we are just like we'd show up at
the bars we're showing up at the meetings and we would like to extend a very special welcome to
anybody who is at this meeting for the first time if you haven't been here before why we
certainly hope you get something out of it and hope you enjoy it and if you are new to aa if
you are just arriving in this fellowship why everybody in the room wants you to make it
they give you their best wishes they've all been in exactly the same spot you're in if you're just
arriving in AA probably have a lot of fears and not sure you want to be here wasn't your idea
what the hell are all these people so happy about you don't like the prospects of not drinking
and you just are sure that there's been a big mistake and you're hoping that somebody
will come up with an alternate plan to get the hell out of here and if that's sort of the feelings
that you have why everybody had those and we just urge you to stick around ignore your better
judgment and stick around here because there's a lot of wonderful things that are in store for you
if you will follow this path and there's a lot of awful things that are in store for you if you go
back to the drinking path so please stick around give yourself some more time and just sit back
and you are in charge of judging whether this works better than your old plan.
And we're convinced if you will just give it a try, you're going to have a wonderful year.
It's customary to start our meetings with our preamble.
Alcoholics Anonymous is a fellowship of men and women
who share their experience, strength, and hope with each other
that they may solve their common problem and help others to recover from alcoholism.
The only requirement for membership is the desire to stop drinking.
There are no dues or fees for AA membership.
We're self-supporting for our own contributions.
AA is not allied with any sect, denomination, politics, organization, or institution.
Does not wish to engage in any controversy.
Neither endorses nor opposes any causes.
Our primary purpose is to stay sober and help other alcoholics to achieve sobriety.
So what we're talking about today in the fourth step is we have two steps on inventory.
so inventory ends up being a very important spiritual principle,
made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.
So what are we inventorying for?
And what is the purpose of an inventory?
Well, the purpose of all of our steps comes from the first step,
where it said we're powerless over alcohol.
In order to understand the rest of the program,
we always go back to powerless.
that is the heart of the problem and it's the doorway in to a spiritual way of life is
powerlessness and alcoholics get a real extra benefit because powerlessness is portrayed for
us in spades we get to see what it's really like to be powerless when you're powerless over alcohol
and that is what is necessary in order for anything else to work is to totally accept
and admit to yourself that you're powerless not almost powerless not almost powerless but
powerless see a lot of people come in and they go well I have a problem with alcohol you know
what I mean and you start redefining things so that you're kind of semi-alcoholic compared to
the gal next to you who's obviously a complete alcoholic. You know what I'm talking about.
And your case is similar but different. And it's that difference that'll kill you.
Trying to hold out some claim to unique alcoholic ground is a sure way to not succeed.
And each one of us feels that we have a tremendously unique background. Maybe you
came from a normal home and it's driving you crazy because no one else did. There appears
to be no one from a normal family in the entire planet. They're all in some program because
of a unique problem. Rich Parents Anonymous or something like that. In any event, this
sense of being different is what has to be hammered down and powerlessness is what helps us
do that we finally ran into something that with all of our resources we're unable to do anything
about and that's staying sober that's being powerless over alcohol and when we say we're
powerless over alcohol we're talking about being powerless when we're sober it's not the fact that
when you drink, bad things happen. That's only a small part of the problem, because if that's all
it was, all you'd have to do is stop drinking and everything would be fine. But we all know,
as alcoholics, when we stop drinking is when things get bad. You know what happens when you
stop drinking? You're sober all the time. All the time. In the morning, in the afternoon, at night.
and you're going to be sober tomorrow
and you're going to be sober the next day
and suddenly it becomes too much
and you go, what's the matter?
I'm sober all the time.
I'm just, ah.
And you go into the bar
and you ask the bartender,
have you got anything back there for sobriety?
I mean, if a guy's sober,
could fix it?
Or you want to become un-sober?
You're damn right I want to become un-sober.
I need help.
And so we get alcohol in our system
to take care of some problem.
So you can see that the alcohol, it may cause problems, but its primary function is to solve a problem.
That's the primary function for this alcoholic.
I couldn't stand being sober.
Life was too much for me.
I needed help getting through life.
And for me, alcohol did it.
That's what makes me an alcoholic.
Other people, they try to use alcohol to help them with life, and it doesn't help them.
It doesn't change anything for them.
They are non-alcoholics.
For you and I, it was the answer.
It was like a magic bolt from heaven.
It gave me all kinds of resources.
It changed the entire world that I lived in.
It changed everything into a wonderful place.
And it changed me into a totally functioning person.
How do you learn how to dance?
Three drinks.
One, two, three, boom, you're on the dance floor.
How do you get rid of a depression?
How do you go to sleep?
How do you get energy in the morning?
How do you decide whether to go here or there?
Easy.
You just have a drink.
And it becomes a tremendous power in our lives.
And without it, we are incomplete as human beings.
And then we come to AA and people say, just don't drink.
And we say, you don't understand.
Drinking is my whole act.
you're taking away my entire lifestyle when you suggest that i don't drink so that's what being
powerless over alcohol is it means even when you're sober and you understand completely what
your problem is you're still going to pick up a drink and it's going to kill you that's that's
the irony and a lot of people miss that in the outside world they think that they only look at
the alcoholics while they're drinking and watch what happens. Look at their liver. Look, you're
having a blackout. Look, he's puking. Look, we're resting for drunk driving. But they never look at
the alcoholics when they're sober and they haven't had a drink in a month. And they walk into a bar
and have a discussion with the bartender and they say, you know, I'm an alcoholic. If I drink,
I'll probably go to jail tonight. I mean, I've learned this. I went through treatment and they
showed me all of this information about out could i have a beer and i'll tell you what else will
happen to me people just watch us they think we're crazy but we're going to we have no defense
against the first drink all of a sudden we need it and it's in there and then the rest of the rat
race starts so and then we go to psychiatrists and we talk to our friends and we go to a workout club
and we try different medicines,
and we do everything,
and we still keep drinking.
And so we come to AA as a last resort,
not believing that it could work for us,
and we are taught
that it'll be useless for you
to continue to find ways out there
to not drink,
because there's no way
that you will ever be able to stay sober on your own.
So the first thing you have to do is surrender.
You must give up the idea that you can ever, on your own, not drink.
And if that's the case, you're powerless over alcohol.
So the first step is how we get into the rest of the program
is absolutely essential to take 100%.
If we don't totally surrender, the first step is kind of frightening
because it's just saying it's absolutely hopeless.
there is no way that I can
that's the end of the first step
but if you aren't reduced to a state
of hopelessness
it's very unlikely you will
turn 100%
to the pursuit of a higher power
there will always be
reservations because the next
thing you're hit with in the program
is that we came to believe
in a power greater than ourselves
could restore us to sanity and then we made a
decision to turn our will over this higher
power and our eyes jump ahead to those two steps which have to do with god and we run back to the
first step and go i'm not totally powerless because if i am totally powerless i'm gonna
have to deal with all this god stuff and i don't want anything to do with that and so it's essential
that we we say in aa we don't try to prove the existence of god our specialty is convincing you
of the need for God.
That your situation is the same
as a person who fell out of a plane
without a parachute.
It's hopeless.
And somebody said,
the one shot you got in this situation
is to ask God to help you.
And it's amazing what our egos will do.
Well, I don't believe in God,
so I'm just going to splat.
There's an alternative.
On the way down, you could change your mind.
I used to not believe in God.
But under these conditions, what the hell have I got to lose?
That's the second step.
But in order for it to work, you have to see that you've already fallen out of the plane.
That's where you are if you're an alcoholic.
You've already fallen out.
It's just a question of when you're going to hit.
That's what being powerless is.
Once we understand that, then there's no debate about the rest of the program.
The program is easy.
It's the fact that you're going to debate every damn one of these with your sponsor.
I don't need to go searching in fearless moral inventory.
I don't need to make amends.
Go back and see those people.
That's the hard part of the program.
doing this stuff is relatively easy.
It's overcoming your reluctance
to do any of these things
because you want to stay in charge.
And you're in charge of your life
and I figure my life, blah, blah, blah.
And you don't want to follow another plan.
I don't. Nobody does.
That's what our ego wants to take back over.
And the things that save us,
this is why the first step is so important.
We just keep reminding each other,
Helen, you still don't have a parachute.
Ooh, yes, I see.
Maybe I better continue to rely on something other than myself.
And so we always go back to the fact that we're powerless over alcohol.
That's the wonderful advantage that alcoholics have.
They can totally surrender,
and alcohol is always there in case we decide not to move on,
and it just holds a gun to our head and says,
Oh, you're not planning on taking the 10th step?
Well, I'll...
And you go, well, maybe I'll change my mind.
So it's that wonderful threat of dying of alcohol
that keeps pushing us along this AA path.
And in the end, when we get there,
wherever that may be after you've been around a while
and you see that you are moving in a very wonderful direction
because alcohol is pushing you that way,
then you take credit for it.
Well, I decided to become spiritual,
and it's quite a wonderful life after all,
and I really have serenity now and peace of mind,
and a sponsor standing there threatening to choke me
if I don't keep on going,
and so that's more or less what's really happening,
but we don't like to portray it that way,
and in AA we will often say,
and I decided to take a searching and fearless moral inventory
as if it was an intellectual decision
rather than a save-your-ass decision.
You know what I'm talking about.
But if we want to pass it off that way, that's fine.
So the point of all of this is if we're powerless,
then we have to find a higher power.
That's the only antidote for being powerlessness.
There's no other way out of this.
And the steps are designed to do that.
That's the whole point of the 12 steps,
is to enable you to find a power that will keep you happy and sober.
That's the promise of Alcoholics Anonymous.
And it turns out we don't have to go anywhere to find this higher power.
We don't have to go to Tibet or any place like that.
It has been born inside of us, the fundamental idea of a higher power,
as Bill writes in the big book, was born deep down inside of us,
much like the idea of a friend.
The problem is we have, through our own free will,
the power to block out this power. We can, through willfulness and self-centeredness,
totally keep this off to the side and run our lives all by ourselves and just be me against
the world. Now, when we do that long enough, it feels like there is no such thing as a higher
power. I don't see any evidence in my life. I don't see anything. But we do have. I'll tell
you what the evidence for a lot of us alcoholics is. At least I think it is. You're living this
life and your people are saying, well, why don't you straighten out? Why don't you stop? Hey,
I'm having a good time. You know, I'm out there. I'm moving around. It's my life. I'm doing what
I want and I'm having this wonderful time. And you say all these words, that's to keep everybody
away. And then it comes late at night, and you're sitting on the bed, and there's part of you that
is thinking of committing suicide. There's part of you that can't stand the way things are.
And the question is, what is that part of you? What is that within you that keeps causing
this pain when it looks at the way that you're living? What is that part of you?
You can call it a million different things, your soul, your conscience, your better side,
the God inside of you, whatever you want to call it, but it's a rare person who doesn't know what
we're talking about when we say there's a part of me that feels something is missing. There's a part
of me that feels I'm still not on the right track. There's part of me that just can't stand the way
I'm living. I remember that extremely well, and I'll tell you what I was trying to do about it.
Now, I don't know if any of you went this far in insanity, but I saw that this part of me
was never going to shut up, and that my way of life, because I was an alcoholic, couldn't be
changed. I sort of caved into the fact that I was going to be the way I was for the rest of my life,
always in conflict with this other part of me, and I was trying to figure out a way to kill
my conscience. If I could just quiet that little part inside of me that wanted me to be a good
person and to straighten out and do all these things, then I could have peace of mind. That
was the only way I saw since I knew I couldn't change that I could ever be comfortable as a
human being if I could just kill my soul then I could be happy now if that is an insanity but I
remember it if I could just do that and we come in here and we are what AA does and what this
whole program does it goes after that part of you that wants to be a better person that part of us
that just wasn't satisfied with the way we were,
that part of us that said there's something missing.
And this is where the higher power is.
That whole area has been blocked by our way of life
and by our character defects,
which we're going to inventory in the fourth step.
Fourth step said,
made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.
And what we're inventorying is our standard issue
human character defects.
coming from human emotions,
coming from the raw instinctual drives
that make us human beings.
This is handed out to everybody
when they arrive here
on this planet as babies.
Raw instinctual drives.
The drives for survival,
the drives for food,
the drives for a place in society,
the drive for security.
I need security.
And the drive for sex.
And all these forces are just placed in there.
Everybody has them.
So there's nobody who escapes this
because those raw forces give us the energy
to propel us ahead as human beings.
That's what causes us to get out of bed in the morning
and to go take risks and to go out and do things.
And those instinctual drives are like the steam,
the fire under a steam engine,
the locomotives that used to run by steam.
you'd build up the fire to give it the raw energy to produce the steam and then they harnessed the
steam and it took the train on a trip and it could pull a tremendous load and it could not operate
without that raw energy could not operate but if that energy wasn't properly controlled it could
destroy the engine and you had they had a gauge on there now watch it you know you can't let the
pressure build up this much, and if you just disregarded that and allowed the raw energy of
the fire to heat the steam up too much, it just exploded. So the very energy that was necessary
to run the train could also destroy it. And the same thing with us human beings. The raw energy
of our human instinctual drives, which are absolutely essential to propel us through life,
if not controlled can destroy us and certainly they were destroying us as alcoholics
when you think about it the whole deal of putting in balance the instinctual drives inside of us
so that we can be comfortable with them and have them in their proper perspective
is a very complicated process
that's extremely foreign to alcoholics.
It is called growing up.
It is a very, very complicated process.
AA is not, people who study AA,
I've never seen anybody who said,
well, I went to a lot of AA meetings
and one thing that really impressed me there,
everyone seemed so grown up.
No, no, no, no, no.
That's not what they say.
We're trying to move in that direction,
but that is not the adjective that describes alcoholics.
Grown up.
So we start this thing from an extremely self-centered position as a baby.
Think about babies.
They have these instinctual things that hit them.
Their diapers are dirty, and they're hungry,
and they're lying on the wrong side,
and they've got to go over here and they've got to do that.
And their way of living is to scream that something's wrong
and wait for a grown-up to fix it.
I've seen some of us at 43 that are still basically operating from that perspective.
We run home, find our wife, and go,
What's wrong?
i don't know but i'm hurting and we want someone to fix this and our problem or our main function
is to communicate what the problem was i thought communication was telling people more about me
you see what i'm saying with the hope that eventually they could understand and adjust
to me or straighten the world out so it could adjust to me and i saw communication as a very
one-way thing you ever go in relationships and they go we got to communicate more okay i'll tell
you more about me i need my eggs cooked this way and i need to and i thought that was you know
communication well that is communication from a purely self-centered perspective and when we start
looking at our literature and the fourth step made a searching and fearless moral inventory we see
that self-centeredness
was the root of our problems.
That we saw everything
from a self-centered perspective
and it causes
what we call our number one offender
in Alcoholics Anonymous,
resentments.
Because from a self-centered perspective,
we look out,
we're still the baby,
we have these problems,
we're yelling and screaming
to the world,
I've got these problems
and nobody's adjusting.
Nobody is changing, and it's causing a lot of resentments.
And when this person isn't there, the person at work isn't behaving properly,
the people in traffic aren't behaving properly,
I've got tickets to the show, and I'm going to be late,
and this jerk is blocking me, and this isn't happening correctly,
and I'm in a lot of pain, and when I'm in a lot of pain,
somebody must be doing something wrong.
And that's the way I saw the world from a self-centered perspective.
And so these character defects were what made me self-centered.
They were driven from a self-centered perspective.
I think we talked about this last time.
How do you become unself-centered?
If you come here to AA and you go, you know, now that I listen and go to meetings,
I start agreeing, I am self-centered.
I really see that.
And you know what a self-centered person says?
I'm going to fix that.
I'm going to fix that self-centeredness.
I am going to, and then there you are,
fixing self-centeredness all by yourself.
And when you think about it, that's pretty hard to do.
So you go, well, how do you get out of self-centeredness?
How can we do it?
How can we become un-self-centered?
And it turns out we become higher power-centered.
That's how we get out of being self-centered.
And there's an amazing thing that happens
when we go from self-centered
to higher power-centered or God-centered.
Turns out, that's the real center.
We aren't the center of the planet Earth
or of Washington, D.C.
or of the universe or anything.
And when we look at everything
from us being the center,
nothing looks right
because that isn't the real center.
It was probably like way back when astronomers were trying to understand the universe
and they started with the assumption that the world was at the center.
And the more they studied it, the more it didn't make sense
because the movement of certain things couldn't be that way if the earth was at the center
and it caused a lot of confusion.
And when I look at the world with me as the center, it doesn't make sense.
but when I learn how to look at it
with a higher power as the center
it starts looking wonderful
because that is the way it really is
so the problem that we have in sobriety
is getting a higher power
getting this power to flow into our lives
and it's blocked
that's the deal
these character defects
these instinctual drives
that we have been trying to live with in our lives
are totally blocking anything from coming into our lives.
We have the power through our self-will
to block out our friends, our family.
I don't know about the rest of you drunks,
but I didn't want people contacting me.
My family, I wouldn't even give them my phone number sometimes.
I just didn't want them because they bothered me.
And they were always mentioning,
why don't you stop drinking?
And I didn't need that.
And so I blocked them out.
And true friends, if they got too close, cut them off.
So we have the power with our free will to block out friends,
love of friends, the concern of the community,
the concern of our neighborhood, and a higher power.
We can block all that out.
The problem is we go beyond that,
and we claim when we block all this out
that it doesn't exist.
And that's why we get so cynical.
There's no love in the world.
I never saw any in here.
There's no such thing as good people.
I never saw any in here.
There's no such thing as God.
I never saw him in here.
Where was God when I crashed into the tree drunk?
You know what I'm saying?
And so just since we don't have any evidence of it,
we claim it doesn't exist.
And there is no such thing as nice people
and all of that.
And we come in here, alcohol forces us to come in here and reconsider all this.
And let's inventory our lives and see if, in fact, our real problem is self-centeredness, fear, resentments.
We are totally choked up.
I love that word, emotions.
It just chokes off any supply.
If you could choke hard enough, you can choke off your oxygen supply.
And when we choke off the supply of love, the supply of friends, the supply of a higher power, we start dying.
I mean, that's what the worst part of alcoholism is, is to choke off the spiritual lifeline that all human beings need.
So inventory is, you know, when we say immoral inventory, people get uptight about it.
They go, well, what did I do wrong?
And this makes me a bad person.
and we end up with two types of people
who are trying to come up to this inventory,
made a list of all these character defects,
whatever things we want to list them as,
pride, greed, envy.
We can use the big book,
I'm resentful at, I'm fearful at.
And we look at various things
that are choking us up or blocking us
and we don't have to make it
that I'm a bad person.
I am simply being blocked out
from a lot of good things that are waiting to come into my life,
and if I don't remove these blockages, I'm a stupid person.
But I'm neither bad nor good.
It's just, why would I leave these, stay here?
But I remember just feeling that I couldn't take an inventory.
There's two types of people that generally arrive here.
You're either driven by pride, it's much more powerful,
or guilt is much more powerful.
And the guilt person says, inventory me?
No way.
I've never inventoried, and I'll tell you why.
I'm not going to go in there and take a look.
It's going to be so horrible, it'll get me drunk.
I am so uniquely bad.
This is that guilt thing.
I caused the hurricane in Los Angeles last week
by not living right.
You know, I am responsible.
I mean, this is what the self-centered guilt will just get.
And we're absolutely terrified to see what might really be there.
On the flip side of that is the arrogance and pride.
We come in here and we just go,
inventory, what could be wrong with me?
Why inventory now?
I've stopped drinking.
All of my problems were caused by drinking.
Now that I'm not drinking, I'm wonderful again.
And then we call the family in and say,
tell us about Mr. Wonderful.
That son of a bitch is worse now
than he was when he was drinking.
We're secretly praying he goes back to drinking.
He's obnoxious and rah, rah, rah.
So we find out there's no Mr. Wonderful's
and there's none of those things.
There are simply people,
and that's where we are.
We are deprived of a lot of wonderful things
because we are reluctant to let go
and ask for help.
Our egos insist that we can figure this out.
And it'll just carry us right to our grave.
And so the fourth step is just saying,
let's look at the standard character defects that human beings have
so that you can see these blockages in yourself
and the disharmony that they're causing in your relations with other people
and in the world about you
so that we can set about to get them removed.
And the main reason for getting them removed
is so this higher power can flow in.
It doesn't that when they're removed we don't suddenly become a better person,
but we have this wonderful force that comes in
and changes our perspective on the world.
The spiritual solution is very similar to the alcohol solution.
Nothing really changes out there
except when you look around, everything looks wonderful.
The power to see things as they really are.
And so in our fourth step,
when it says make a searching and fearless moral inventory,
This is a very emotion-disturbing activity
because Bill has a line in the 12 and 12
where it says,
instincts balk at investigation.
They don't really want to be inventoried.
You're going to find tremendous resistance
as you sit down and say,
well, I think I really will look at
what's wrong, what's blocking in me.
And our intellect just goes,
don't do that.
go back and look at what's wrong with the world that's smark and then you almost get comfortable
with that because that's what we specialize in don't take your inventory take his inventory
you know that sort of feeling because we don't want the spotlight on us because we've maintained
this illusion to ourselves that basically i'm a pretty good person and i'm a victim and a lot of
Things have happened to me.
And we just maintain that.
And this thing is actually a very simple process.
All we have to do is go,
I am going to go ahead with this.
I'm going to get a pencil and a piece of paper.
I'm going to follow the suggestion in the big book.
If you look in the big book under chapter 4,
it says, list all the things you resent,
all the people, principles, and institutions that you resent,
and just list them down there
so that we start acknowledging these forces.
More people come in here and claim they're not angry.
A lot of alcoholics in their class,
we almost deny the rage that we have inside of us.
We deny, I'm not resentful.
If you don't stop bugging me,
and to acknowledge this is a very hard thing.
But once we start, we start getting free from it.
It's a wonderful process, this inventory.
And so all that's required is a decision to do it.
There's no great deal.
It's not a very complicated thing.
If you get your 12 and 12 and your big book,
you just sit down,
and you're going to be listing the same thing
the person across the street's listing.
That's the funny thing.
There aren't unique character defects.
We just have to see them in ourselves.
That's all we have to do in the fourth step.
Finally see, oh, this is what the deal is.
It's not that China won't trade with us,
that's causing me my problems.
My problem is a resentment.
I mean, we finally start bringing
the true reality of the situation
and what's blocking us
from some wonderful things.
The last thing I'll make,
because I notice it's five after,
is this is done by ourselves.
And when we get to the end of this,
we've done the best thing we can.
We took a searching and fearless
moral inventory of ourselves,
worked real hard on it.
We have this piece of paper
with all this information
that we've put down, best of our ability.
And at the top of the list, on many of us,
is character defect of rationalization.
Rationalization.
We tend to come up with all kinds of explanations
and fool ourselves and do all that.
Well, if rationalization is at the top of your list,
how do you know the list is worth anything?
How do you know it has any value whatsoever?
And that's where the fifth step comes in,
which we'll be talking about next week.
where we take this and share it with another human being.
And this is what really puts the fourth step in.
So if you do a fourth step and you really don't feel that you've made much progress
in terms of change as far as the human being is concerned,
there's not supposed to be many results there.
The results come in the fifth step.
And that's the one we're going to talk about next week.
We're at the end of the time.
We have a great way to wrap this meeting up with the Lord's Prayer.
hi how you doing this morning
who art in heaven hallowed be thy name thy kingdom come thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven
give us this day our daily bread and forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass
against us and lead us
not into temptation
but deliver us from evil
for thine is the kingdom, the power
and the glory
forever and ever. Amen.
Keep coming back. It works if you work it.
anonymous my name is sandy beach and I'm an alcoholic how y'all doing this morning well
it's good to see everybody in spite of the bad weather here we are just like we'd show up at
the bars we're showing up at the meetings and we would like to extend a very special welcome to
anybody who is at this meeting for the first time if you haven't been here before why we
certainly hope you get something out of it and hope you enjoy it and if you are new to aa if
you are just arriving in this fellowship why everybody in the room wants you to make it
they give you their best wishes they've all been in exactly the same spot you're in if you're just
arriving in AA probably have a lot of fears and not sure you want to be here wasn't your idea
what the hell are all these people so happy about you don't like the prospects of not drinking
and you just are sure that there's been a big mistake and you're hoping that somebody
will come up with an alternate plan to get the hell out of here and if that's sort of the feelings
that you have why everybody had those and we just urge you to stick around ignore your better
judgment and stick around here because there's a lot of wonderful things that are in store for you
if you will follow this path and there's a lot of awful things that are in store for you if you go
back to the drinking path so please stick around give yourself some more time and just sit back
and you are in charge of judging whether this works better than your old plan.
And we're convinced if you will just give it a try, you're going to have a wonderful year.
It's customary to start our meetings with our preamble.
Alcoholics Anonymous is a fellowship of men and women
who share their experience, strength, and hope with each other
that they may solve their common problem and help others to recover from alcoholism.
The only requirement for membership is the desire to stop drinking.
There are no dues or fees for AA membership.
We're self-supporting for our own contributions.
AA is not allied with any sect, denomination, politics, organization, or institution.
Does not wish to engage in any controversy.
Neither endorses nor opposes any causes.
Our primary purpose is to stay sober and help other alcoholics to achieve sobriety.
So what we're talking about today in the fourth step is we have two steps on inventory.
so inventory ends up being a very important spiritual principle,
made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.
So what are we inventorying for?
And what is the purpose of an inventory?
Well, the purpose of all of our steps comes from the first step,
where it said we're powerless over alcohol.
In order to understand the rest of the program,
we always go back to powerless.
that is the heart of the problem and it's the doorway in to a spiritual way of life is
powerlessness and alcoholics get a real extra benefit because powerlessness is portrayed for
us in spades we get to see what it's really like to be powerless when you're powerless over alcohol
and that is what is necessary in order for anything else to work is to totally accept
and admit to yourself that you're powerless not almost powerless not almost powerless but
powerless see a lot of people come in and they go well I have a problem with alcohol you know
what I mean and you start redefining things so that you're kind of semi-alcoholic compared to
the gal next to you who's obviously a complete alcoholic. You know what I'm talking about.
And your case is similar but different. And it's that difference that'll kill you.
Trying to hold out some claim to unique alcoholic ground is a sure way to not succeed.
And each one of us feels that we have a tremendously unique background. Maybe you
came from a normal home and it's driving you crazy because no one else did. There appears
to be no one from a normal family in the entire planet. They're all in some program because
of a unique problem. Rich Parents Anonymous or something like that. In any event, this
sense of being different is what has to be hammered down and powerlessness is what helps us
do that we finally ran into something that with all of our resources we're unable to do anything
about and that's staying sober that's being powerless over alcohol and when we say we're
powerless over alcohol we're talking about being powerless when we're sober it's not the fact that
when you drink, bad things happen. That's only a small part of the problem, because if that's all
it was, all you'd have to do is stop drinking and everything would be fine. But we all know,
as alcoholics, when we stop drinking is when things get bad. You know what happens when you
stop drinking? You're sober all the time. All the time. In the morning, in the afternoon, at night.
and you're going to be sober tomorrow
and you're going to be sober the next day
and suddenly it becomes too much
and you go, what's the matter?
I'm sober all the time.
I'm just, ah.
And you go into the bar
and you ask the bartender,
have you got anything back there for sobriety?
I mean, if a guy's sober,
could fix it?
Or you want to become un-sober?
You're damn right I want to become un-sober.
I need help.
And so we get alcohol in our system
to take care of some problem.
So you can see that the alcohol, it may cause problems, but its primary function is to solve a problem.
That's the primary function for this alcoholic.
I couldn't stand being sober.
Life was too much for me.
I needed help getting through life.
And for me, alcohol did it.
That's what makes me an alcoholic.
Other people, they try to use alcohol to help them with life, and it doesn't help them.
It doesn't change anything for them.
They are non-alcoholics.
For you and I, it was the answer.
It was like a magic bolt from heaven.
It gave me all kinds of resources.
It changed the entire world that I lived in.
It changed everything into a wonderful place.
And it changed me into a totally functioning person.
How do you learn how to dance?
Three drinks.
One, two, three, boom, you're on the dance floor.
How do you get rid of a depression?
How do you go to sleep?
How do you get energy in the morning?
How do you decide whether to go here or there?
Easy.
You just have a drink.
And it becomes a tremendous power in our lives.
And without it, we are incomplete as human beings.
And then we come to AA and people say, just don't drink.
And we say, you don't understand.
Drinking is my whole act.
you're taking away my entire lifestyle when you suggest that i don't drink so that's what being
powerless over alcohol is it means even when you're sober and you understand completely what
your problem is you're still going to pick up a drink and it's going to kill you that's that's
the irony and a lot of people miss that in the outside world they think that they only look at
the alcoholics while they're drinking and watch what happens. Look at their liver. Look, you're
having a blackout. Look, he's puking. Look, we're resting for drunk driving. But they never look at
the alcoholics when they're sober and they haven't had a drink in a month. And they walk into a bar
and have a discussion with the bartender and they say, you know, I'm an alcoholic. If I drink,
I'll probably go to jail tonight. I mean, I've learned this. I went through treatment and they
showed me all of this information about out could i have a beer and i'll tell you what else will
happen to me people just watch us they think we're crazy but we're going to we have no defense
against the first drink all of a sudden we need it and it's in there and then the rest of the rat
race starts so and then we go to psychiatrists and we talk to our friends and we go to a workout club
and we try different medicines,
and we do everything,
and we still keep drinking.
And so we come to AA as a last resort,
not believing that it could work for us,
and we are taught
that it'll be useless for you
to continue to find ways out there
to not drink,
because there's no way
that you will ever be able to stay sober on your own.
So the first thing you have to do is surrender.
You must give up the idea that you can ever, on your own, not drink.
And if that's the case, you're powerless over alcohol.
So the first step is how we get into the rest of the program
is absolutely essential to take 100%.
If we don't totally surrender, the first step is kind of frightening
because it's just saying it's absolutely hopeless.
there is no way that I can
that's the end of the first step
but if you aren't reduced to a state
of hopelessness
it's very unlikely you will
turn 100%
to the pursuit of a higher power
there will always be
reservations because the next
thing you're hit with in the program
is that we came to believe
in a power greater than ourselves
could restore us to sanity and then we made a
decision to turn our will over this higher
power and our eyes jump ahead to those two steps which have to do with god and we run back to the
first step and go i'm not totally powerless because if i am totally powerless i'm gonna
have to deal with all this god stuff and i don't want anything to do with that and so it's essential
that we we say in aa we don't try to prove the existence of god our specialty is convincing you
of the need for God.
That your situation is the same
as a person who fell out of a plane
without a parachute.
It's hopeless.
And somebody said,
the one shot you got in this situation
is to ask God to help you.
And it's amazing what our egos will do.
Well, I don't believe in God,
so I'm just going to splat.
There's an alternative.
On the way down, you could change your mind.
I used to not believe in God.
But under these conditions, what the hell have I got to lose?
That's the second step.
But in order for it to work, you have to see that you've already fallen out of the plane.
That's where you are if you're an alcoholic.
You've already fallen out.
It's just a question of when you're going to hit.
That's what being powerless is.
Once we understand that, then there's no debate about the rest of the program.
The program is easy.
It's the fact that you're going to debate every damn one of these with your sponsor.
I don't need to go searching in fearless moral inventory.
I don't need to make amends.
Go back and see those people.
That's the hard part of the program.
doing this stuff is relatively easy.
It's overcoming your reluctance
to do any of these things
because you want to stay in charge.
And you're in charge of your life
and I figure my life, blah, blah, blah.
And you don't want to follow another plan.
I don't. Nobody does.
That's what our ego wants to take back over.
And the things that save us,
this is why the first step is so important.
We just keep reminding each other,
Helen, you still don't have a parachute.
Ooh, yes, I see.
Maybe I better continue to rely on something other than myself.
And so we always go back to the fact that we're powerless over alcohol.
That's the wonderful advantage that alcoholics have.
They can totally surrender,
and alcohol is always there in case we decide not to move on,
and it just holds a gun to our head and says,
Oh, you're not planning on taking the 10th step?
Well, I'll...
And you go, well, maybe I'll change my mind.
So it's that wonderful threat of dying of alcohol
that keeps pushing us along this AA path.
And in the end, when we get there,
wherever that may be after you've been around a while
and you see that you are moving in a very wonderful direction
because alcohol is pushing you that way,
then you take credit for it.
Well, I decided to become spiritual,
and it's quite a wonderful life after all,
and I really have serenity now and peace of mind,
and a sponsor standing there threatening to choke me
if I don't keep on going,
and so that's more or less what's really happening,
but we don't like to portray it that way,
and in AA we will often say,
and I decided to take a searching and fearless moral inventory
as if it was an intellectual decision
rather than a save-your-ass decision.
You know what I'm talking about.
But if we want to pass it off that way, that's fine.
So the point of all of this is if we're powerless,
then we have to find a higher power.
That's the only antidote for being powerlessness.
There's no other way out of this.
And the steps are designed to do that.
That's the whole point of the 12 steps,
is to enable you to find a power that will keep you happy and sober.
That's the promise of Alcoholics Anonymous.
And it turns out we don't have to go anywhere to find this higher power.
We don't have to go to Tibet or any place like that.
It has been born inside of us, the fundamental idea of a higher power,
as Bill writes in the big book, was born deep down inside of us,
much like the idea of a friend.
The problem is we have, through our own free will,
the power to block out this power. We can, through willfulness and self-centeredness,
totally keep this off to the side and run our lives all by ourselves and just be me against
the world. Now, when we do that long enough, it feels like there is no such thing as a higher
power. I don't see any evidence in my life. I don't see anything. But we do have. I'll tell
you what the evidence for a lot of us alcoholics is. At least I think it is. You're living this
life and your people are saying, well, why don't you straighten out? Why don't you stop? Hey,
I'm having a good time. You know, I'm out there. I'm moving around. It's my life. I'm doing what
I want and I'm having this wonderful time. And you say all these words, that's to keep everybody
away. And then it comes late at night, and you're sitting on the bed, and there's part of you that
is thinking of committing suicide. There's part of you that can't stand the way things are.
And the question is, what is that part of you? What is that within you that keeps causing
this pain when it looks at the way that you're living? What is that part of you?
You can call it a million different things, your soul, your conscience, your better side,
the God inside of you, whatever you want to call it, but it's a rare person who doesn't know what
we're talking about when we say there's a part of me that feels something is missing. There's a part
of me that feels I'm still not on the right track. There's part of me that just can't stand the way
I'm living. I remember that extremely well, and I'll tell you what I was trying to do about it.
Now, I don't know if any of you went this far in insanity, but I saw that this part of me
was never going to shut up, and that my way of life, because I was an alcoholic, couldn't be
changed. I sort of caved into the fact that I was going to be the way I was for the rest of my life,
always in conflict with this other part of me, and I was trying to figure out a way to kill
my conscience. If I could just quiet that little part inside of me that wanted me to be a good
person and to straighten out and do all these things, then I could have peace of mind. That
was the only way I saw since I knew I couldn't change that I could ever be comfortable as a
human being if I could just kill my soul then I could be happy now if that is an insanity but I
remember it if I could just do that and we come in here and we are what AA does and what this
whole program does it goes after that part of you that wants to be a better person that part of us
that just wasn't satisfied with the way we were,
that part of us that said there's something missing.
And this is where the higher power is.
That whole area has been blocked by our way of life
and by our character defects,
which we're going to inventory in the fourth step.
Fourth step said,
made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.
And what we're inventorying is our standard issue
human character defects.
coming from human emotions,
coming from the raw instinctual drives
that make us human beings.
This is handed out to everybody
when they arrive here
on this planet as babies.
Raw instinctual drives.
The drives for survival,
the drives for food,
the drives for a place in society,
the drive for security.
I need security.
And the drive for sex.
And all these forces are just placed in there.
Everybody has them.
So there's nobody who escapes this
because those raw forces give us the energy
to propel us ahead as human beings.
That's what causes us to get out of bed in the morning
and to go take risks and to go out and do things.
And those instinctual drives are like the steam,
the fire under a steam engine,
the locomotives that used to run by steam.
you'd build up the fire to give it the raw energy to produce the steam and then they harnessed the
steam and it took the train on a trip and it could pull a tremendous load and it could not operate
without that raw energy could not operate but if that energy wasn't properly controlled it could
destroy the engine and you had they had a gauge on there now watch it you know you can't let the
pressure build up this much, and if you just disregarded that and allowed the raw energy of
the fire to heat the steam up too much, it just exploded. So the very energy that was necessary
to run the train could also destroy it. And the same thing with us human beings. The raw energy
of our human instinctual drives, which are absolutely essential to propel us through life,
if not controlled can destroy us and certainly they were destroying us as alcoholics
when you think about it the whole deal of putting in balance the instinctual drives inside of us
so that we can be comfortable with them and have them in their proper perspective
is a very complicated process
that's extremely foreign to alcoholics.
It is called growing up.
It is a very, very complicated process.
AA is not, people who study AA,
I've never seen anybody who said,
well, I went to a lot of AA meetings
and one thing that really impressed me there,
everyone seemed so grown up.
No, no, no, no, no.
That's not what they say.
We're trying to move in that direction,
but that is not the adjective that describes alcoholics.
Grown up.
So we start this thing from an extremely self-centered position as a baby.
Think about babies.
They have these instinctual things that hit them.
Their diapers are dirty, and they're hungry,
and they're lying on the wrong side,
and they've got to go over here and they've got to do that.
And their way of living is to scream that something's wrong
and wait for a grown-up to fix it.
I've seen some of us at 43 that are still basically operating from that perspective.
We run home, find our wife, and go,
What's wrong?
i don't know but i'm hurting and we want someone to fix this and our problem or our main function
is to communicate what the problem was i thought communication was telling people more about me
you see what i'm saying with the hope that eventually they could understand and adjust
to me or straighten the world out so it could adjust to me and i saw communication as a very
one-way thing you ever go in relationships and they go we got to communicate more okay i'll tell
you more about me i need my eggs cooked this way and i need to and i thought that was you know
communication well that is communication from a purely self-centered perspective and when we start
looking at our literature and the fourth step made a searching and fearless moral inventory we see
that self-centeredness
was the root of our problems.
That we saw everything
from a self-centered perspective
and it causes
what we call our number one offender
in Alcoholics Anonymous,
resentments.
Because from a self-centered perspective,
we look out,
we're still the baby,
we have these problems,
we're yelling and screaming
to the world,
I've got these problems
and nobody's adjusting.
Nobody is changing, and it's causing a lot of resentments.
And when this person isn't there, the person at work isn't behaving properly,
the people in traffic aren't behaving properly,
I've got tickets to the show, and I'm going to be late,
and this jerk is blocking me, and this isn't happening correctly,
and I'm in a lot of pain, and when I'm in a lot of pain,
somebody must be doing something wrong.
And that's the way I saw the world from a self-centered perspective.
And so these character defects were what made me self-centered.
They were driven from a self-centered perspective.
I think we talked about this last time.
How do you become unself-centered?
If you come here to AA and you go, you know, now that I listen and go to meetings,
I start agreeing, I am self-centered.
I really see that.
And you know what a self-centered person says?
I'm going to fix that.
I'm going to fix that self-centeredness.
I am going to, and then there you are,
fixing self-centeredness all by yourself.
And when you think about it, that's pretty hard to do.
So you go, well, how do you get out of self-centeredness?
How can we do it?
How can we become un-self-centered?
And it turns out we become higher power-centered.
That's how we get out of being self-centered.
And there's an amazing thing that happens
when we go from self-centered
to higher power-centered or God-centered.
Turns out, that's the real center.
We aren't the center of the planet Earth
or of Washington, D.C.
or of the universe or anything.
And when we look at everything
from us being the center,
nothing looks right
because that isn't the real center.
It was probably like way back when astronomers were trying to understand the universe
and they started with the assumption that the world was at the center.
And the more they studied it, the more it didn't make sense
because the movement of certain things couldn't be that way if the earth was at the center
and it caused a lot of confusion.
And when I look at the world with me as the center, it doesn't make sense.
but when I learn how to look at it
with a higher power as the center
it starts looking wonderful
because that is the way it really is
so the problem that we have in sobriety
is getting a higher power
getting this power to flow into our lives
and it's blocked
that's the deal
these character defects
these instinctual drives
that we have been trying to live with in our lives
are totally blocking anything from coming into our lives.
We have the power through our self-will
to block out our friends, our family.
I don't know about the rest of you drunks,
but I didn't want people contacting me.
My family, I wouldn't even give them my phone number sometimes.
I just didn't want them because they bothered me.
And they were always mentioning,
why don't you stop drinking?
And I didn't need that.
And so I blocked them out.
And true friends, if they got too close, cut them off.
So we have the power with our free will to block out friends,
love of friends, the concern of the community,
the concern of our neighborhood, and a higher power.
We can block all that out.
The problem is we go beyond that,
and we claim when we block all this out
that it doesn't exist.
And that's why we get so cynical.
There's no love in the world.
I never saw any in here.
There's no such thing as good people.
I never saw any in here.
There's no such thing as God.
I never saw him in here.
Where was God when I crashed into the tree drunk?
You know what I'm saying?
And so just since we don't have any evidence of it,
we claim it doesn't exist.
And there is no such thing as nice people
and all of that.
And we come in here, alcohol forces us to come in here and reconsider all this.
And let's inventory our lives and see if, in fact, our real problem is self-centeredness, fear, resentments.
We are totally choked up.
I love that word, emotions.
It just chokes off any supply.
If you could choke hard enough, you can choke off your oxygen supply.
And when we choke off the supply of love, the supply of friends, the supply of a higher power, we start dying.
I mean, that's what the worst part of alcoholism is, is to choke off the spiritual lifeline that all human beings need.
So inventory is, you know, when we say immoral inventory, people get uptight about it.
They go, well, what did I do wrong?
And this makes me a bad person.
and we end up with two types of people
who are trying to come up to this inventory,
made a list of all these character defects,
whatever things we want to list them as,
pride, greed, envy.
We can use the big book,
I'm resentful at, I'm fearful at.
And we look at various things
that are choking us up or blocking us
and we don't have to make it
that I'm a bad person.
I am simply being blocked out
from a lot of good things that are waiting to come into my life,
and if I don't remove these blockages, I'm a stupid person.
But I'm neither bad nor good.
It's just, why would I leave these, stay here?
But I remember just feeling that I couldn't take an inventory.
There's two types of people that generally arrive here.
You're either driven by pride, it's much more powerful,
or guilt is much more powerful.
And the guilt person says, inventory me?
No way.
I've never inventoried, and I'll tell you why.
I'm not going to go in there and take a look.
It's going to be so horrible, it'll get me drunk.
I am so uniquely bad.
This is that guilt thing.
I caused the hurricane in Los Angeles last week
by not living right.
You know, I am responsible.
I mean, this is what the self-centered guilt will just get.
And we're absolutely terrified to see what might really be there.
On the flip side of that is the arrogance and pride.
We come in here and we just go,
inventory, what could be wrong with me?
Why inventory now?
I've stopped drinking.
All of my problems were caused by drinking.
Now that I'm not drinking, I'm wonderful again.
And then we call the family in and say,
tell us about Mr. Wonderful.
That son of a bitch is worse now
than he was when he was drinking.
We're secretly praying he goes back to drinking.
He's obnoxious and rah, rah, rah.
So we find out there's no Mr. Wonderful's
and there's none of those things.
There are simply people,
and that's where we are.
We are deprived of a lot of wonderful things
because we are reluctant to let go
and ask for help.
Our egos insist that we can figure this out.
And it'll just carry us right to our grave.
And so the fourth step is just saying,
let's look at the standard character defects that human beings have
so that you can see these blockages in yourself
and the disharmony that they're causing in your relations with other people
and in the world about you
so that we can set about to get them removed.
And the main reason for getting them removed
is so this higher power can flow in.
It doesn't that when they're removed we don't suddenly become a better person,
but we have this wonderful force that comes in
and changes our perspective on the world.
The spiritual solution is very similar to the alcohol solution.
Nothing really changes out there
except when you look around, everything looks wonderful.
The power to see things as they really are.
And so in our fourth step,
when it says make a searching and fearless moral inventory,
This is a very emotion-disturbing activity
because Bill has a line in the 12 and 12
where it says,
instincts balk at investigation.
They don't really want to be inventoried.
You're going to find tremendous resistance
as you sit down and say,
well, I think I really will look at
what's wrong, what's blocking in me.
And our intellect just goes,
don't do that.
go back and look at what's wrong with the world that's smark and then you almost get comfortable
with that because that's what we specialize in don't take your inventory take his inventory
you know that sort of feeling because we don't want the spotlight on us because we've maintained
this illusion to ourselves that basically i'm a pretty good person and i'm a victim and a lot of
Things have happened to me.
And we just maintain that.
And this thing is actually a very simple process.
All we have to do is go,
I am going to go ahead with this.
I'm going to get a pencil and a piece of paper.
I'm going to follow the suggestion in the big book.
If you look in the big book under chapter 4,
it says, list all the things you resent,
all the people, principles, and institutions that you resent,
and just list them down there
so that we start acknowledging these forces.
More people come in here and claim they're not angry.
A lot of alcoholics in their class,
we almost deny the rage that we have inside of us.
We deny, I'm not resentful.
If you don't stop bugging me,
and to acknowledge this is a very hard thing.
But once we start, we start getting free from it.
It's a wonderful process, this inventory.
And so all that's required is a decision to do it.
There's no great deal.
It's not a very complicated thing.
If you get your 12 and 12 and your big book,
you just sit down,
and you're going to be listing the same thing
the person across the street's listing.
That's the funny thing.
There aren't unique character defects.
We just have to see them in ourselves.
That's all we have to do in the fourth step.
Finally see, oh, this is what the deal is.
It's not that China won't trade with us,
that's causing me my problems.
My problem is a resentment.
I mean, we finally start bringing
the true reality of the situation
and what's blocking us
from some wonderful things.
The last thing I'll make,
because I notice it's five after,
is this is done by ourselves.
And when we get to the end of this,
we've done the best thing we can.
We took a searching and fearless
moral inventory of ourselves,
worked real hard on it.
We have this piece of paper
with all this information
that we've put down, best of our ability.
And at the top of the list, on many of us,
is character defect of rationalization.
Rationalization.
We tend to come up with all kinds of explanations
and fool ourselves and do all that.
Well, if rationalization is at the top of your list,
how do you know the list is worth anything?
How do you know it has any value whatsoever?
And that's where the fifth step comes in,
which we'll be talking about next week.
where we take this and share it with another human being.
And this is what really puts the fourth step in.
So if you do a fourth step and you really don't feel that you've made much progress
in terms of change as far as the human being is concerned,
there's not supposed to be many results there.
The results come in the fifth step.
And that's the one we're going to talk about next week.
We're at the end of the time.
We have a great way to wrap this meeting up with the Lord's Prayer.
hi how you doing this morning
who art in heaven hallowed be thy name thy kingdom come thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven
give us this day our daily bread and forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass
against us and lead us
not into temptation
but deliver us from evil
for thine is the kingdom, the power
and the glory
forever and ever. Amen.
Keep coming back. It works if you work it.
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