Skip to main content

Growing in God and Sobriety!

The Discipline of Self-Examination
The discipline of self-examination begins with Step 4, where we make a “searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.” While various terms are used to designate this discipline (including self-appraisal and self-survey), the Big Book’s emphasis on “inventory” is meant to highlight a practical, no-nonsense, business-like approach to this traditional spiritual practice. Our inventory is a “fact-finding and a fact-facing” enterprise. It is not an exercise in religious breast-beating, gnostic enlightenment, or psychoanalytical probes of our unconscious.

Juxtaposing “moral” with "inventory" further underscores the practical nature of our undertaking. For the facts that we set out to find and to face are the facts about the way we have lived and the kind of people we have become. A moral inventory takes stock of our character and how the defects that have warped it have also warped our emotions and our conduct, causing us to hurt ourselves as well as to harm others.

Practical and moral, our inventory is fundamentally spiritual. It is part and parcel of the spiritual awakening through which we change. It is designed to help us get rid of those items that “block” us from God and which keep us from the freedom and the flourishing that he intended for us. Hence the practicality of our inventory differs also from the kind of practicality associated with secular therapeutic approaches, which generally tend to deemphasize if not completely ignore the moral and the spiritual nature of our problems.

Though usually associated only with Steps 4 and 10, the 12&12 shows that self-examination is a continuous process that runs through the intervening Steps as well. In Step 4 we make a preliminary examination of our defects of character and emotion. In Step 5 we admit to their exact nature, but in doing so we don’t just engage in a mindless recitation of wrongs, but honestly and sincerely recall them to mind. Nor are mindlessness and formality characteristics of Steps 6 and 7. We need to take a look at those defects again if we are to become entirely willing to surrender them and humbly ask God to remove them.

In Step 8 we again take account of those defects, but this time in order to consider the specific ways in which, as a result of them, we have harmed others. If we are to make sincere and meaningful amends for those harms in Step 9 and not just some hollow apology, we have to go back and look at those defects again, considering not only what we did wrong, but the wrong that was festering in us. In each one of these subsequent Steps we look at our defects for a different purpose, seeing them from a different angle and in a different light. In some cases this may help us to see defects that we had missed in Step 4.

Step 10 repeats the entire process of the preceding six Steps. But unlike Step 4, which focuses primarily on our past life before we got sober (assuming it’s done in early sobriety as intended) and is therefore quite comprehensive, Step 10 spotlights our present and the more recent past and is therefore more focused and more limited. It takes two main forms: the spot-check inventory we do in the midst or immediate wake of a difficulty, and the nightly inventory at the end of each day. Two additional forms are the periodic inventory, where we review how we’ve done since the last inventory, and the special-issue inventory, where we focus on a particular area of life (such as work, sex, or finances) and examine what defects of character and emotion may account for our difficulties there.

Through all of these seven Steps, self-examination works together with a number of other principles, both disciplines and virtues. This interaction is readily apparent with the discipline of confession in Step 5, of surrender in Step 6, of prayer in Step 7, and of restitution in Step 9. But surrender and prayer, for instance, may be necessary from the very beginning of the process in Step 4, where they may also connect with a number of virtues. Thus we may have to ask God to help us let go of the fear, the unwillingness, and just the plain and ordinary sloth that often stands in the way of a really searching inventory. We may have to ask for the willingness to get started, to get honest with ourselves, to persevere in our search despite the arduousness of the task, and to humbly accept our findings.

Once we have worked through the 12 Steps the first time around, the lifeblood of our continuing growth in recovery is the self-examination that we conduct every day as part of our work with Step 11. That’s where self-examination is combined with prayer and meditation as we search for God’s will for us and the power to carry that out. When these three “are logically related and interwoven,” we read in the 12&12, “the result is an un shakeable foundation for life.”


“The moral inventory is a cool examination of the damages that occurred to us during life and a sincere effort to look at them in a true perspective.” – As Bill Sees It

 “We took stock honestly. First, we searched the flaws in our make-up which caused our failure. Being convinced that self, manifested in various ways, was what had defeated us, we considered its common manifestations.” – Big Book

 “For the wise have always known that no one can make much of his life until self-searching has become a regular habit, until he is able to admit and accept what he finds, and until he patiently and persistently tries to correct what is wrong." 
– Bill W. 

Just for today....
Today I will call myself out everytime I take someone else's inventory and ask God to show me what in me do I need to change
Today I will not take myself so seriously
Today I will go to a face to face meeting

Matthew 5:13-15 
13 Ye are the salt of the earth: but if the salt have lost his savour, wherewith shall it be salted? it is thenceforth good for nothing, but to be cast out, and to be trodden under foot of men.

14 Ye are the light of the world. A city that is set on an hill cannot be hid.

15 Neither do men light a candle, and put it under a bushel, but on a candlestick; and it giveth light unto all that are in the house.


"My sheep hear my voice, and I know them, and they follow me: And I give unto them eternal life; and they shall never perish, neither shall any man pluck them out of my hand. My Father, which gave them me, is greater than all; and no man is able to pluck them out of my Father's hand. I and my Father are one."
John 10:27-30