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Now at least I can see how I react and can take steps to deal with it. The most beautiful thing about me most days is the fruits of my recovery. My step 4 showed me this is the unhealthy fruit of my greed, gluttony, my lust, my sloth. Honesty is the heart of recovery and I am being honest. The years of recovery reveal many different things, some of them not so palatable.
For example, false pride, intolerance, impatience, arrogance, shame, lust, gluttony, greed. Otherwise we have not really completely treated our alcoholism. We have a sea change in how we think and feel about ourselves and the world around us.
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On page 62 the text explains that“Selfishness-self-centeredness! Our recovery from alcoholism through the Steps must be a three-fold process. In Step 4 we seek to discover what these liabilities are, the ways in which, under the relentless drive of distorted instinct, self becomes manifest in our lives. We seek to make a survey of our conduct with regard to our primary instincts, which using a handy mnemonic formula the 12&12 broadly identifies as our instincts for “sex, security, and society” (p. 50). This provides the conceptual and organizational framework in which to build our inventory.
I would contend that grandiosity is a part of emotional immaturity. I also contend that our “maladjustment to life” is based on emotional immaturity which is in itself a function of emotion regulation and processing deficits. I contend that alcoholism is an emotional disorder which results in chemical dependency on the substance of alcohol. However in order to treat it we have to first contend with the symptomatic manifestation of this disorder, chronic alcohol use, as it is the most life threatening aspect of this disorder when we present our selves at AA.
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Seldom do we discuss it in the context of the rest of the text. We therefore miss all that it might teach us if only we would dig a little bit deeper. If we mention it at all when we talk about how we did our own inventory, it is only to stress that we did spiritual malady it “the way it says in the Big Book.” This points to another impression many of us appear to have. And this is that the Big Book and the 12&12 offer us two different ways of doing Step 4. In the next chapter we will show that this impression is mistaken.”