The Difference Between Truth and Feelings in the Inventory – George G.

I'm sitting here thinking of the journey I had into my fourth step before this meeting and thinking of a lot of things about the fourth step. I like to do things with stories, I like to talk about my experiences but I love to read out of literature. You know in the first step I admitted I was powerless over alcohol and that my life was unmanageable. I don't only know that in my head, I finally got that to my heart and because of that I came in here and I started believing in the power that moved in these rooms through the people in the rooms and a loving second tradition that got me to my second step I got to that third step my decision was to turn my will in life over to care of the rest of the steps as it talks about in the twelve and twelve but still having a major God problem when I got two step four and as I went on I understand why today we talked about the third step prayer I talked about the incident I had last week, the event. I like to call it my event on my third step. And I only had to do that once, I was told, but I had to recommit to that every day. That was the way it was given to me. So I recommit my third set on a daily basis. Then it says, we found that it is very desirable to take this step with a friend or spiritual advisor, but it is better to meet God alone than with someone who might not understand. The wording was, of course, quite optional so long as we expressed the idea, voicing it without reservation. This was only a beginning, though if honestly and humbly made an effect, sometimes a great effect was felt at once. The effect I felt when I did my third step was I knew I did a first step. That's the effect I thought. I knew it had surrendered. I didn't know anything more than that. And then it tells us right after we do the third step, it says, next, we launched out on a course of vigorous action, which is the first step, which is a personal house cleaning which many of us never attempted though the decision was a vital and crucial step. It could have little permanent effect unless at once followed by a strenuous effect to face be rid of those things in ourselves which had been blocking us. Our liquor was but a symptom. We had to get down to causes and conditions. My experience is I had a sponsor that said to me, you've got to start writing. And I said, okay. He said, go out and get a spiral notebook and every day I want you to sit down and write a little something in it. And he'd always ask me how I was doing. And I would tell him, great. We used to meet every Tuesday and we used to sit and read the big book over at Denny's down on next cross from the Veritas building, 10th Street. And every Tuesday night, that's where I went. He'd pick me up from the halfway house I lived in and we'd sit and read the big book or the 12 and 12, and I'd be doing step work with him. And then one day he says to me, how are you doing on your four-step? Oh, I'm doing great. You know, typical I because I didn't want to let him know I hadn't picked up the pen yet. And he said to me okay bring it next week and we'll talk about it. Came next week and he said where's your fourth step? I said oh I forgot it. He said all right you got three choices here now. You can either go back and revisit your third step. You can tell me what's really going on or you can find another sponsor. That was what was put out in front of me. I said okay, I'll tell you, I will have it for you next week. He said you can do something else. You could go home and write whatever it is that's not letting you write and put it on paper and then burn it. I thought about it and I lived in a halfway house and this one incident, this is what I consider my, the fourth step was my spiritual enema is a nice way of me putting it because I had this blockage from the sunlight and this block age that I had was when I was seven years old I was raped by two men dressed as women and took me a long time in aid even talk about it took me long time talking about it with professional help as well it's my big secret my family didn't know about it no one was ever going to know about it was gonna go to the grave with me and my sponsor wasn't gonna know about it cuz then he was gonna judge me and say look at him so I was keeping that secret and I went home and I told him I wrote it down and I burnt it which I hadn't and following week we met and he said to me okay let me see where you've gotten now that you said you did all this writing and I had nothing because I didn't do anything so he said alright I'm leaving and he got up and he started to walk away and I said Larry I need you to come back I need to talk to you and I sat down and told him this story about when I was young I took these packages home for these two women and I'm going back into 1956. Most of you guys weren't even around, a couple of you may have been, and in 1956 we never locked doors and we always helped the old people. If we were fighting in the streets if an older person came by we actually stopped and then after they passed us by we'd get back into our fight whatever fight it was or whatever we were doing on the streets. Stoop ball stop, punch ball stop everything stopped for the people that walked down the street. And you know, if your parents didn't beat you, your neighbors could, and you wouldn't go to jail. It was really that simple. If you were out of line, they had a right to wrap you. So we were always told to help old people. So these two people were coming out of a Bohack's in Brooklyn, it was, and I helped them carry their packages to the house. They said, do you want some milk and cookies? I said yes. I walked into the house, they locked the door, I was seven years old, and there were two men dressed as women and I was raped. Now, I kept that and it changed my world. It discolored my world for a very long time to come. And no one was ever going to know that. I will tell you that I sat down with Larry as he got up and I told him that story. And Larry said, oh, that happened to you too? And that too was not to placate what I went through, something similar but different happened to him. And then that spiritual block was gone. And he suggested that I go home and pray for five minutes every night and pick up a pen and paper and write whatever came out. Well, of course, now that I got that out of the way, I wanted to do a perfect four-step. So every meeting I went to is I asked how to do a four- step. Now, I will tell you there is many opinions on how to doing a four step or there are people sitting in this room which must be about 40 people in here at least. So I kept asking how to a four steps. Well, they say you've got to do it out of a big book or you're going to drink. I don't find that to be true. When I came around and there's someone in this room who's been around longer than I have who will probably remember this. This is the very first four-step guide from Hazleton. It's a great four-stepp. Hazleton then came out with this four-sep guide. Later on, they came out with this three-four-steppe guide. When I got in here, the general directions for making a four-step. I call this one the inventory from hell. It's got 256 questions that have nothing to do with recovery or taking an inventory. We were talking before the meeting, we talked about feelings. There's a feelings inventory for people who believe this program is based on my feelings. What's the feeling of the day? There's resentment inventory prompt sheet. There's affair prompt sheet, there's smiling faces prompt sheets. What are you feeling today? All kinds of prompt sheets that tell me how I was feeling. I didn't know how I was feeling when I did my fourth step. I was miserable, that's all I knew. Then I went and I started searching out the people who were into the big book. You have the fourth step guide. This is out of one of our approved literatures in it. It's one of the days of how to take a fourth step, talks about the resentments out of the big-book pages, and that's a one, two, three, four column fourth step guy. Then there's a five-column four-step guide. Then there is a four-stepped guide that talks about resentments, and it tells you what you're resentful of, what the cause was, and in the third column, it talks about what it affects and how it affects it. This is a very old one also. Then you have one on writing down what things mean to you. It's an inventory. Then you had my, one of my favorites when I got here, the long one. It has resentful, well, we'll talk about resentment. A list of people and institutions who you resented and why they made you angry. What did it affect your social, your security, your sex or your ambitions, which is what the inventory is really about. And what was your responsibility in that one, which is a 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. There's another five. There's the inventory process, which is from Joe and Charlie. There's the Big Book Seminar from 2008, now 2009. All of these inventories work. There's only one wrong inventory, the one you don't write. One of my favorite inventories is the 34 questions in the 12 and 12. You guys find the questions. They are in there. That's another inventory. Each one of these inventory works. The question is I go into a meeting now and I'm asking these questions and I don't know what to do. I'm more confused now than I was when I started. So my sponsor made it real simple. He says, go to the big book and look at page 64. Now if you were like me when you got there and you looked at page 65 when they talk about the three columns there's no way I understood those three columns. When they talk I was resentful at Mr. Brown and the cause and it affects my No matter how I tried to read down I kept reading across, so it made no sense to me. So I was really confused about that list. And I kept trying to do it out of the big book and that's not the way I did my inventory. I kind of did it a little bit out of The Big Book, a little out of 12 and 12, more out of TheBigBook, but mostly I did it by my sponsor's direction. There's a guy I know, Father Bob Hanley who used to be at the Fort Lauderdale's Men Group, he used to sit down with the guys and sit down with a napkin and say, write the 10 worst things you ever wrote, did in your life, and we'll talk about it. That's a way of doing a four step. There's no wrong way. As I said, everybody's got their own thing. Do you do one? You know, I hear people say, I only did one four step, I make it up at my 10th step. I don't know. I do one a year. That's just what I do. I do a personal house cleaning annually. That's the way I was taught to do it. So there's many different ways of looking at the four step there's only like I said one wrong one, not picking up the pen. The big book says this, where it's definite it's this example. So what this is telling me, this is an example. This is not the only way. So I was very grateful for the sponsor that I had. He said, George, I want you to write a grudge list or resentment list, whatever you want to call it. And I want you to right the name of whatever it is that you have a grudged resentment against and underneath underneath whatever that is, I want you to list what your grudges and resentments were. So an example was my father he was never around, he never spoke of his feelings, he showed little or no affection, at least to my perception, this is whether it's fancy, like the big book says, whether it is true or not, whether its fancy or real, I put it on paper. And I made a whole list of things my mom was a pal, not a mom, my sisters, my ex-wife because she had my children and I couldn't see them. I had a whole list of resentments. God, a lot of resentment against myself because I should have been better than I was and I was never as good as I thought I was. All that nonsense that went on between my ears. And I put all this on paper. So now I have this long 28 page list of resentments and grudges that I have against the whole world including myself, God, institutions, police departments, jobs. You name it, it was on there. And then he suggested that I go to page 48 in the 12 and 12 and find out what the seven deadly sins were. I had a big problem with the word sin because I knew you were talking about religion again. And he told me whenever I hear the word Sin for me, and this is the way I look at the word SIN, is just think of anything that is selfish in nature. S-I-N, selfish in Nature. One of those things that I like to hold on to because if it's of selfish of nature, it's not of God to me. So I did my pride, my greed, my lust, my anger and I made a nice long checklist. I have a couple of sponsors in the room. Some have done it. Some are going to be doing it and I did this checklist. Now having that part done, I got to go back to the big book and I didn't do it. I did the checklist from the 12 and 12 and the big books and now I'm in this place and I'm really confused. And he told me to take the seven deadly sins now and list my part in where I had these things. And if you go to the big book, and I am going to go to it, it says referring to our list again putting out of the minds the wrongs others have done we resultantly look for our own mistakes. Had we been selfish, dishonest, self-seeking and frightened? Though the situation had not been entirely our fault, we tried to disregard the other person involved entirely. Where were we to blame? The inventory was now ours, not the other man's. When we saw our faults, we listed them, we placed them before us in black and white, we admitted the wrongs honestly, and were willing to set these matters straight. Well, my laziness, my procrastination, my envy, I made a list of those things without what anybody else did to me of where it applied in my life. And certain things have their own pattern in this, like money, relationships, sex. It follows throughout my gluttony. It falls throughout my life without anybody else's doing anything to me. So I stopped having to blame others. After I had that, we went back to page 65 and we did it out of the big book, taking that list that I have of the things that I did that had nothing to do with anybody else, I went down and I wrote, for example, laziness at work. What did it cause? Well, I didn't want to be there. I was tardy. I took credit for work I didnít do. I over-exaggerated the job I was doing. I told everybody what a great job I Was doing. I did minimal tasks and I didnít follow the rules. All right? And I went Down the list for all the things with my laziness about change, where I was lazy in change, where I'm lazy in relationships. And after I got that second column of what it caused me, I had to find the results. The result for me in being lazy at work is it caused my pain because I was threatened by higher-ups to be fired because I wasn't doing what I was supposed to. What a concept, a consequence for what I Was constantly under the higher-up's eyes because they were writing me up for being tardy and I wanted to know why they were picking on me, the nerve of them. Didn't they know who I was? I was forcefully discharged and then I was reinstated because I won a case and that's a whole story in itself. But I found out in certain ones of my defects out of the seven deadly sins there was a pretty constant pattern. Resentment to me there was always a lot of pain. When I'm in resentment I'm in pain. And you know the way I look at resentment today is something I heard a long time ago. I'll take poison and I want you to die. that's what resentment is, you go home you don't know what's going on in my head but I carry it all day long, all night long and I sit there and I steam and I churn and you don t even know what s going on and by the time I get home I m ready to kill you and you didn t even know I m angry at you so that's one of those things that I learned about my resentments envy it causes me resentment when I m envious I resent somebody because they have something I think I want or deserve and that'sone of those things. But if I cut down each one of them, low self-esteem, affair, not being accepted, that comes up. My anger is a big issue with me with a lot of feelings and we're back to those feelings. Anger is a feeling that today I know is something different than it was when I got here. When I was angry when I Got Here, I picked up my fist and swung at you. That's just the way I was. I went into rage. Today when I'm angry, I know something is wrong. I've been around long enough to know whatever is wrong has nothing to do with you, but everything to do with me. And that was hard for me to get to, to deal with my anger and anger I was taught as a resentment turned inward and that's what gets me angry when I start beating myself up because I'm mad at you. And it all has to do with fear. It's all fear-based and being a selfish and self-centered person, I had a lot of problems with fear. I was fear-based my whole life, and I wanted to show you how tough I was. Having those things going on in me and coming in here and trying to expose that to someone else is a very uncomfortable place for me to be. So I needed the guidance of a loving sponsor who just told me to write every day, and he told me not to worry about it. I don't want to talk about step five at all if I can help it, but it's really because that's next week. We looked at the example and I have all this stuff going on and the more I write, the more miserable I'm getting because now I'm starting to choke with my own feelings. And the one thing I've learned is feelings aren't facts. They may be my truth, but they're not the truth. And that's why I have a sponsor to help me sort out what is the real truth. The only truth I was told I ever needed to know in Alcoholics Anonymous is step one, 100%, that I can't drink safely. The rest are ideals I strive for. And that's a really important statement for someone like me because now you're telling me I'm not perfect and don't you know who I am. And it talks about this. It's plain to see that a life which includes deep resentment leads to fertility and unhappiness. To the precise extent we permit these, we squander the hours we might have been worthwhile resentment is infinite infinitely grave we find that it is fatal fatal for harboring such feelings we shut ourselves off from the sunlight of the spirit the insanity of alcohol returns and we drink again and with us to drink is to die i may pick up a drink but i may not die not in the sense of physically dying but i'm not willing to pay that price to the death spiritually from the gifts that were given to me since I've done the work that was laid out before me. That's real important for me to remember on a daily basis because if I drink, I don't know if I'll come back and you know what? This is not a revolving door. My inventory shows me the things I gave away. I lost nothing from my alcoholism. I gave it all away because of my behaviors and my consequences. tells us when we turn back to the list though we did not like and there's a great thing because resentment I was loaded with. I resent my mother I resent to my father, I resent God I resented everybody in the rooms of Alcoholics Anonymous because I thought you were all a bunch of jerks that's just how I looked at you when I got here now I always joke around, I became one of those people I didn't like when I Got Here that's a scary place for me to be I came in here not liking anybody and I became One of Those People that I didn't like because I found the serenity and tranquility that you guys gave me by your example, not by what you told me. It says, you know, on page 66 and 67, it says, though we didn't let other people send them, they, like ourselves, were sick too. And we pray that we ask God we would give the same kindness and cheerfulness we would gratefully give a sick friend. When someone offended, we said, this is a sick man. how can I be helpful? God saved me from being angry. If you're like me, I had a resentment prayer that went on for 14 years for my ex-wife. In year 15, we started talking and there is no more resentment. It's amazing. It took a long time, sometimes quickly, sometimes slowly, but there was prayers that I said for my first 14 years of my recovery. And you know what? When God's ready to remove those things, he will. Not because I pray for him, but I had to keep taking the action on a daily basis to get down and pray for those people that annoyed the hell out of me which was mostly everybody it tells us we avoid retaliation in argument we don't treat sick people that way so when somebody in these rooms didn't like me instead of me trying to prove I was right I had to try to start being happy and let you accept me just where I was at that moment in my recovery whether you liked it or not and I do my best to try and teach my sponsees and the people around me to behave that way. I may not believe a sponsee may be moving fast enough. Who am I to make that judgment? I'm not God. All I can do is tell him to take an inventory on where he's at, and say, it's like I was told, you can get well as fast as you want, or you can stay sick as long as you wanted. It's your process. It' s your process I don't have a right to judge your process, but I do have a right when I see you acting in an appropriate manner to tell you so. And I have a responsibility for that, especially if you're hurting someone else in this room. I was taught that early on. It tells us putting out of the minds the wrongs others have done us, we look at ourselves. You know, when I look at myself and I put the mind out of everything, all the wrongs everybody done me, I was not a very nice person when I got in here. I thought I was the greatest thing since sliced bread, and you guys just didn't understand me but when I got honest and truthful and real with my behaviors I realized that there was a lot of work that I needed and it had nothing to do with what anybody else did but it had to do everything to do with what I did in my whole life, my behaviors. Me thinking my father didn't love me because he wasn't there. He wasn't there because he had a whole three jobs to support a family. I didn't see it that way but I heard it that way when I finally sobered up enough and got clear enough to see the real truth, and that was a big waking up for me. My mother being ill and on medication, she was not avoiding me. She was sick, physically sick, and my sister is who my sister is. I love her to death, but she doesn't understand this program, and she doesn' t have to. It doesn' T matter what she does. It matters what I do, And that's what my inventory taught me. It tells us in the 12 and 12, it is from our twisted relationships with family, friends, and society at large that many of us suffered the most. We have been especially stupid and stubborn about them. The primary fact we fail to recognize is a total inability to form a true partnership with another human being. Either we insist on dominating the people we know or we depend far too heavy on them. Faulty relationships with other human beings has always been my problem. It had nothing to do with anything else. I either wanted a rule by iron or I would have them... I was either a victim or a hostage taker. That's what it was, as simple as that. You're going to do it my way? Or I sat and cried until I got your sympathy so you would do it mine way. and that's not a pretty place to come from and that was my inventory it says therefore thoroughness ought to be the watchword when taking inventory in this connection it is wise to write down our questions and answers it will be an aid to clear thinking and honest appraisal it will become the first tangible evidence of our complete willingness to move forward and that is out of the 12 and 12 I didn't know if I wanted to move forward the fourth step has got a lot to do with my first step. I had faulty judgment, war perception and lack of awareness. I get into the fourth step with that as my guide for me to write about me. That's not a good clear picture of who I am by now. That is why I have a sponsor who sat down with me and helped me. In Bill's story it says my friend and I made a list. I love that on page 13. My sponsor was kind enough to sit down and make a list with me of some of the things that were more glaring that I didn't think it, and I used to say I'm getting nuts, and nuts means I wasn't using the steps. I was definitely not using steps one, two, and three when I was writing four. I was whirling in self-will run riot. I was running, I was not letting God be in control of any of this. I was telling God how he should help me write this without me taking the appropriate action. One of the things I like to call the fourth step is a couple of things I believe about the fourth step. One is it's a step of discovery. First, we discover something. As we discover it, we uncover more about ourselves. We discard what we don't need anymore and then we start recovering. That's the gift of the four-step to me. It's a penlight step, I was told when I got here. If I don't pick up the pen, I'll never see the light. Those little cliches meant a lot to me at the beginning and they still mean a lot because I still write and I write on a pretty regular basis inventories. I do a daily inventory, most of the time written, not all of the times. And it says if you're thorough about your personal inventory, you've written down a lot. You've written done a lot! We have listed and analyzed our resentments. We have begun to comprehend the futility and their fatality. We have commenced to see their terrible destructiveness. We have began to learn tolerance, patience, and goodwill toward all men, even our enemies. For we look at them as sick people. We have listed the people we have hurt by our conduct and are willing to strain out the past if we can. That's pretty much talking to you about your A-step, if you don't realize that. We hope you're convinced that God can now remove whatever self-will has blocked you off from him. If you have already made a decision and an inventory of your grosser handicaps, you made a good beginning. That being so, you swallowed and digested a great amount of palatable truth about yourself. The truth about myself in my inventory I love this is principles that I live by unhappiness, obsessions, misery reclusive, disillusionment hopeless, power driven, unreasonable inconsiderate, full of anger jealousy, revenge self-will, domination revolting, fearful look for prestige I was frustrated, I was depressed I was guilty, I Was power driven I had self-loathing I believed in morbidity I was melancholy I loved wallowing in my own stuff I smothered people I was full of failure I was vengeful, I had self-pity going on I was victimized, I blamed people I was maladjusted to every relationship I had I was immoral I was demanding, I was perverted I looked at justification and excuses and fear I coveted things, I rejected people I had despair going on I would live for oblivion on a regular basis I was full of pride, false pride that is I was self-righteous, I had grandiosity I avoided important things in my life. I had indignation. I had excesses. I had alibis galore when I got here. But you don't understand. I'm different. I was dominating. I was dependent. I was insecure. I was manipulative. I was willful. I was revolting. I had resistance. I was hurtful. I had a lot of retaliation and control. I was suffering. I was self-centered. I was objecting to everything going on. I was stuffing my feelings. I wasn't letting anything out. I was full of worry. I had anxiety. I was bitter at everything going on in my life at the time. I was stubborn. I had unreasonable demands on everybody and everything. I was an egomaniac. I was evading. I was griping. I was weightful. I was unprincipled. I was extravagant. I was cheap. I looked for shortcuts. I gambled a lot. I had a lot of promiscuity full of conflict there was a lot of financial instability I was inadequate I was lying I felt inferior there was lack of confidence there was bluffing there was cheating all that was going on when I that's who I was when I walked in here now I took this inventory and I felt miserable and I'm grateful for good sponsorship my sponsor said okay now that you saw the bad parts there's a positive side I want you to make a list of your assets in this inventory and those qualities in your life which you find I couldn't find any so I had an assignment again sponsors always have the right answers he says George I want you to go to everybody you don't like in a a and ask them what qualities they see in you that you may not see well my asset list is not as long as my defect list was at that time but the positive things that came out of my inventory was that I was secure, I liked companionship, I started talking about God in the rooms of Alcoholics Anonymous. I had a willingness, I had persistence, I was content at being sober. What a concept. I'd made the effort, I was searching, I was getting moral, I fearless, I faithful, I security, I dependence, I looked for guidance, I was getting responsible. I was happy. I was peaceful. I was not afraid to take my inventory and anybody else's. I was calm. I was realistic. I had reassurance. I actually had assets that I didn't know. I was learning something about balance. I learned about quiet and disclosure and perspective and progress and sobriety. What a gift that was, learning that I had sobriete. I was thorough. I was coping. I was confident. I was practicing. I had peace of mind to some degree, I had patience to some degree, I had some judgment. I had determination to go forward. I was practising the discipline of writing every day. I was taking the action necessary to stay. I felt useful again. I was trying to get close to the people in here by making coffee and doing this service stuff that we talk about. So I was getting brotherhood, I was some clarity in my brain, I was gettin' some comprehension, I was learning a lot about honesty finally. I was learnin' to reflect, I was learned to be considerate and most important I was learning about self-discipline. That's what I got just from writing it. I will tell you that it doesn't come easy when you put it down on paper because you really get a chance to look at yourself as you think you are But through the process of writing it, I knew that there was a relief coming out of that. As scared as I was of what was coming next, because I knew something was coming next, it was called Step 5. And that, I think, scared me more than writing. And what I tell my sponsors is don't worry about Step 5, just write Step 4. That's the action necessary before we get to Step 5 We'll talk about the prayers in the fourth step are on page 67, page 68, 69. There are two prayers and page 70. There are five prayers in The Big Book on step four. So if you're doing a fourth step, seek out those prayers. They help. They help, and they really do. I will tell you next week what the experience was with step five, and thank you for letting me share on step three.