Step 4 - Help Me See What I Am Not Seeing w/ Bill K

In this episode of the Pathway to Recovery podcast, host Justin B., a recovering sex addict, discusses Step Four of the 12-step recovery program with guest Bill K. Bill shares his personal journey, exploring his struggles with sex addiction, his family’s history with alcoholism, and the impact of past traumas. He recounts his experiences working on a searching and fearless moral inventory, revealing both his weaknesses and strengths. Bill emphasizes the importance of honesty, forgiveness, and letting go of fears, illustrating how Step Four helped him uncover his sins and grace-filled moments, ultimately leading to a deeper understanding of God's love and a path toward redemption. Key announcements include the virtual SAL conference and the podcast's sponsorship by Circles of Grace.

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00:00 Introduction and Announcements

01:49 Introduction to Step Four

02:33 Bill K's Background and Journey

03:21 The Impact of Addiction

05:16 Facing the Past and Finding Recovery

08:00 Understanding Step Four

14:24 The Role of a Sponsor

16:02 Identifying Character Defects and Strengths

22:42 The Importance of Honesty and Vulnerability

29:44 Working Through Resentments and Fears

41:14 Addressing Harms and Making Amends

45:45 Final Thoughts and Encouragement

Transcript

Step 4 - Bill K - Help Me to See What I am Not Seeing

[00:00:00] Justin B: Welcome to the Pathway to Recovery podcast. My name is Justin B, and I am a grateful recovering sex addict, grateful to be here today and be one of the hosts of the Pathway to Recovery podcast. Before we get started in today's conversation that I'm having with Bill K about step four, I've got a couple of very important things that I need to bring up about a sponsor that we have here on the Pathway to Recovery podcast, it's Circles of Grace.

And Circles of Grace is a fantastic partner. I would highly recommend that you go and check out Circles of Grace to see how they may be able to help you or one of your loved ones. You can find information on them in the show notes of the podcast and we're just grateful to have them sponsor us.

All right. The next announcement I need to make is that the SAL Conference that we do every year will be held this year from September 26th through September 28th. It will all be virtual on Zoom. One day will be focused on addiction, another day will be focused on betrayal trauma, and the final day will be focused on healing families.

And we're grateful to have a whole bunch of fantastic speakers coming to speak to us. We have a discussion panel, and a Q & A panel that will be also recorded and shared with those who register for the event. So, if you have not yet registered for the SAL Conference, please go do so. You can do that at salifeline.org under the events tab. It's a very reasonable cost and you will have full access to the conference held over those three days. And when it becomes available in a recorded format, you will have full access to that also by registering.

All right, now let's jump right into this conversation that we are going to have. As you are aware, I have been doing a series on each of the steps, speaking with an addict or a betrayed partner of an addict on each of the 12 steps. We are now on step four. And as I put the word out there that I was looking for somebody to have a conversation with about Step 4, Bill sent me a message immediately and said, “I would love to speak on Step 4.”

So I'm really excited to get his experience, strength and hope on his working of Step 4, on how he's done it, on how he worked Step 4 with others. and how that has changed and affected his own life and his own walk and recovery. So, let's jump into this. Bill, why don't you introduce yourself, give us just a little bit of background on yourself before we jump into talking about step four.

[00:02:41] Bill K: Thank you, Justin. I'm Bill K. I'm a grateful recovering sexaholic. My date of sobriety was January 26th, 2024. I'm 70 years old and it took me a long time to get to this point and step four took me a long time because I have a lot of history. But by the grace of God I am sober one day at a time.

[00:03:04] Justin B: Thank you for sharing that. You said that you're 70 years old and that it's been a long process to get to this point. Without going into a step one inventory type situation, do you want to share any of that history that led up to bringing you into the 12 step rooms? 

[00:03:21] Bill K: Actually, I was in SA 25 years ago through an experience and it brought me closer and I understood the 12 steps. I'm an adult child of alcoholics. I grew up in Utah and my mother and my father both struggled with alcohol. And so alcoholism has been a part of my life. 

Well, how does this relate to my sexual addiction? Well, part of my problem was I grew up in a very active alcoholic family, and I even lost my mother at 13 when she died from cirrhosis. My father was also a sex addict, and how I know this is when I was maybe six or seven, I stumbled on his magazines, and they were every issue of Playboy up to, this is in 1959, so several years of all that. 

My parents would work. They were both strong people that were smart and intelligent. But they would come home and they would start drinking and they would go into the same argument every night. And it was like listening to two heavyweight boxers fighting back and forth. And I could not deal with that. And my way of dealing with it was to go watch TV.

Well, my first fantasy was just literally locking into a TV and not being able to get out of it. So when I found my father's magazines, it became another outlet for my fantasies to go in a different direction. So it has driven me my whole life. It's been part of my psyche, part of who I am. I've tried to push it down, but it always kept coming back and it affected my marriage. It affected my family. I never was arrested for it, but it definitely propped me into some dark places. And by the grace of God, He was always there helping me get out of scrapes, get out of problems.

But what I really found was that I became so desperate, it's like “God, take this away from me.” And my conversion was in January, and it was after going down a very dark path of compulsive masturbation. I went to what is called an ACTS retreat, and in that ACTS retreat was the opportunity to go to confession, and in that confession, I found the grace to surrender, to absolutely surrender this. And after that, I said, “I will do anything and I mean anything to get rid of this.” It wasn't about it being taken away from me. It was about my willingness to surrender and to work the steps. 

Well when asked to do the steps and I looked at step four, it was pretty scary. There's an analogy, I don't know if I can go this far, but  I want to talk about it. When I was in Alaska, before I went in the navy, I had a 1959 Apache pickup truck and when I would go to the gas station, I would check the oil and fill the gas because it burned oil.

Well, I think of my addiction as like that truck. I would be cruising down the road thinking everything's fine and everybody sees the smoke of my sins trailing after me. And I'm afraid to look under the hood because it is frightening, right? It's making noise and it just won't stop. And to me the surrender is when I pulled it over to the side of the road and said, “I'm going to look under the hood. I'm not gonna avoid it.”

And so my fourth inventory was literally stopping a truck, opening the hood, and looking inside. Because I know that what I've been running from my whole life, is all the anger, the resentment, the fears, and the moral depravity of my life. And I just, I've got to look inside.

And it's frightening, but in the book it talks about how pride says “You may not pass this way,” and fear says “You dare not look.” But I have to because I can't run from this anymore. In the book it talks about the wild elephant. Well, mine was the Apache pickup. 

Well, the point is that when I open the hood and I'm looking at it, God sends messengers. He sends my brothers in recovery and they all tell me, “Hey, I've done this before. I know what it's like. You have to take the manifold off. You have to do a ring job.” I mean, they take me step by step. They don't do the work, but they tell me what I need to do.  

[00:07:58] Justin B: I love that analogy, Bill. That's really good. What I'd like to do here is, as we dive into that, I want to go back and remind all of our listeners what step four is. And, I'm going to do that by leading up and reading each of the first four steps as they appear in the SAL book. 

Step one, “We admitted we're powerless over sexual addiction, that our lives had become unmanageable.” I think you shared a little bit about that, about how your own powerlessness and unmanageability was catching up to you and was killing you.

Step two, “Came to believe that a power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.” And you talked about that surrender moment in the conference you went to, in the confessional that you experienced there. And that's really powerful. Step three, “Made a decision to turn our will and lives over to the care of God as we understood Him.” And you shared a little bit about that. 

Step four reads, “Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.” And I love the imagery that you said, “Hey, I didn't want to open the hood. Everybody else could see the smoke coming out and could smell the burning, a lot of people were aware. As much as I would like to think that I can hide my addiction, it stinks. And people that are conscious can pick it out pretty quick. A searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.

So, Bill, is there anything else on that “searching and fearless moral inventory” that you want to dive into? Maybe even going along with that same analogy of the oil burning truck that you had. 

[00:09:33] Bill K: Well, one of the things that I was afraid of. You know, as an addict, we always look back on our lives and you look at the promiscuity, you look at the adultery, you look at all the things that drove you further and further away from God. And it's frightening. I mean, when you're an addict, you fantasize about it. You go back to those times. And that's a point of like, “Oh, this is a conquering moment.” And it's not. 

Well, when I went to do it, it was like, I have to go back there and I have to look at it through a new lens. God gave me a new pair of glasses and He gave me a new way to look at what my life was.

But the one thing that my sponsor and my spiritual advisor both said is, “Don't just look at the bad, look at the good, because there's something good that brought you to this point. It's not all bad. So don't just focus on all the things you did wrong. Look at those grace filled moments when God was there with you, holding you up, giving you that grace to move on.”

And so, when I did that, I found that it was so liberating, because I'm willing to look at the good and the bad, and I'm willing to deal with the bad, and I'm willing to cherish the good, and thank God for those moments. And that really helped me.

So, when I started I started journaling, and it turned out to be 40 pages, and my hand was so exhausted when I got to the end. I didn't do it all in one fell swoop, but what I did find is that I was driven to do it. And in that process, it revealed to me how much God loves me, how much He, even though in my darkest hours when I was living in darkness, He was always that light trying to show me a way out.

Because darkness is what holds us back, and I've been in darkness. I understand it. I mean, I felt like the old famous Jekyll and Hyde. I could live in the world in the light during the day, and to all appearances, everybody thought I was fine. I had my act together. I had a good career. I had a beautiful family.

But in the darkness, it was anything but. And so when I went through the inventory and when I started writing all the things that I had done, I saw the same pattern over and over and over again. I was running from myself. I was running from what's inside. And this was a grace filled moment because I realized that's the insanity that drives us into this addiction deeper and deeper. It’s thinking that if we just get one more fix, we'll be fine, and it's not. 

So when writing the inventory, I found God teaching me about who was in charge, that it wasn't me, and that I had to surrender all those things and allow His grace through step three to enter in. And so it's that fearless. The word fearless is I had to put aside my fears, my resentments, my anger, and I had to write it down and get real. And it was healthy and it was liberating. And at first it was scary, but then it became a pursuit of the truth. And that's what it's after, the pursuit of the truth. Where is God in my life? 

[00:12:58] Justin B: Yeah, I love that and I love how you shared that your sponsor and your spiritual advisor both said,  “Hey, let's look at your strengths too in addition to being searching and fearless about your weaknesses, about the resentments, the fears, the harms that you've done to others. Let's also look at those strengths and the grace that God has given you throughout your life.”

I'm going to read just a little bit from the SAL book on page 326. This is where in the SAL book it just gives a few paragraphs about step four. It reads in part, “An honest effort in working step four will open a window to our souls. Here we take a personal moral inventory and it shines a light on key facets of our character. We seek to identify our weaknesses without minimization while keeping in mind that this is not an opportunity for self contempt at our human failings. We carefully consider our defects, resentments, and fears and any habitual problems relating to others with equal candidness, we also examine our strengths and talents. In step four, we go beyond our addiction influenced or trauma influenced thoughts, feelings, and behaviors, and strive to identify the underlying negative emotions and beliefs that drive our unhealthy attitudes and behaviors.”

So, you shared a lot of that, and I just read that to reiterate it. Bill, as you worked your step four with your sponsor, well, let me back up there. Do you think you could have done a thorough step four without a sponsor and spiritual advisor to help you shine lights on those things? 

[00:14:32] Bill K: No, simply because I would have avoided it. I would have had the overwhelming fear or I would have gotten lost in the resentments and it would have turned into a complaining session or excuse the word, bitching session about what everybody else is doing to me.

And in getting the advice and saying you've got to get real, you've got to get this down, but I also got the grace filled moment of their wisdom because had I not heard the goodness, I would have gotten lost in the darkness again and that would have been counterproductive. So I always need a second opinion. I always need to bounce my ideas off of somebody else because otherwise my twisted thinking will come back to play every time and I have found that my sponsor is so key to my success. 

[00:15:31] Justin B: Yeah. You know, I've heard a few different phrases like this in the rooms of recovery. “It takes two to see one.” If I'm just trying to see my own defects, massive blind spots are going to hide them. Or like you said, I'm going to minimize them and say, yeah, I'm not really like that. Well, yes, I am. And, also another phrase is, “More light comes through two windows than through one and can illuminate those dark spots.”

So Bill, a couple of questions for you. One, share with us a character defect or a weakness that was revealed to you that you had no idea you had until you did this inventory. Then we'll get to a strength that you didn't know, but let's go with the defect first. 

[00:16:16] Bill K: So I was a people pleaser, I was always trying to please other people, and one of my abused character defects is affirmation. So I was trying to find ways to fill up my ego. And in that process, I realized self justification. I was not aware that I was hurting others. I thought I was just helping myself. 

And then going back through my inventory especially when I turned 16, my promiscuity took me in paths where I really hurt people and I could have really ruined my whole life. I had no clue the harm I was causing to others simply because I was blind to it. My self centeredness, my self justification, it was all about me. 

And when I saw that pattern over and over again, and I realized the trail of destruction behind me, I weeped. I wept because I hurt people in ways that I never thought possible. We all think our sin is only about us. And then when we get the light of God's grace shining on us, we realize sin is not done in isolation and there's always somebody that's harmed by it. And, that harm can be very destructive, and so that was one of my greatest weaknesses, my self justification. I thought I was oK, and I was not, and that drove me to despair because I realized I hurt some innocent people along the way, and that was never my intent, but that's what happened.

[00:17:56] Justin B: Yeah, and I think that's important to say out loud. It wasn't my intent, but it is what happened. And then we own that and move through that using the process that we have combined with the 12 step process, our religious practices and so on and so forth to help clear up that past. 

Now let's talk a little bit about what's a strength or a grace that you never realized was there, that was uncovered as you worked your step four?

[00:18:25] Bill K: So being an adult child of an alcoholic and having suffered a lot of trauma, losing my mother at 13 and my father at 24, I had a lot of empathy. I felt other people's pain, I saw other people's pain, I tried to help fix other people's problems. But one of the things that writing these down showed me was that God still gave me this compassionate, empathetic heart toward others.

And I saw several times in my life where I reached out to help somebody. When I was in grade school, there was a bully and everybody was afraid of him. And he terrorized everybody. And one of the guys that I knew, he picked on the wrong person and he punched this guy in the nose and his name was Billy. And he collapsed on the playground and was crying and everybody went inside from recess and everybody said, “Where's Billy?” 

I looked out there and he was just weeping and weeping and my heart was stirred and I befriended him. I went to his house, he went to mine and my mother said, “You can't save everybody,” I went by Willie, she said, “You can't save everybody Willie,” and I'm like, “But I can help him.” And in the end I didn't help him but I felt that that grace filled moment that God put him on my heart and said, “You know, you have to reach out, you have to try.”

And so there were other people in my life that God brought and that I helped. And, it was simply because God did give me that empathy and gave me that strength and it has served me well. There were times when I not only helped other people, but I realized that I was harming others. And I made amends and I asked for forgiveness. And so, I learned early on, at an early age to allow God to give me those strengths and to nourish them and help them grow. And that has helped me in my life. 

[00:20:27] Justin B: Thank you, Bill. Before we get into the nuts and bolts of how step four has worked, at least how you worked step four, I'd like to ask you a little bit about your 12 step experience. You said earlier that you went into the rooms SA about 25 years ago for the first time. You've referenced Adult Children of Alcoholics, have you attended that 12 step fellowship also? Tell me a little bit about that. 

[00:20:50] Bill K: I did not and I probably should have, but what I did do is my sister was in AA for 35 years, and whenever I would visit her we would go to AA meetings and they were open meetings, and that was probably the first time when I admitted that I was a sexaholic.

Everybody else was talking about alcoholism and I was talking about my lust and I was listening to the words and they resonated with me. I understood the powerlessness and the drive to go further into the darkness. And, this was a grace filled moment where I could share with others my struggles.

When I was in SA, I was in a small group, five of us that would meet and it was very graceful and I embraced it. But I didn't work the steps. I didn't have a sponsor and so I struggled and when I moved away, that group fell away and I didn't go back and that took me a long time. One of the men that was there kept calling me and saying, “You need to go, you need to go to a meeting,
and I just didn't. 

So, I don't know if that answers the question, but I did deal with my adult child of alcoholics, through my sister, because she went through therapy, and she did what they call a reenactment. And so it was parts of her life where she felt why she was driven to alcohol and what was going on in her life. And I was asked to be a part of that. And I played both the part, my part, as well as my maternal grandfather. And in that, I learned a lot about myself, a lot about the healing and that helped bring me some closure on issues with my family. 

[00:22:40] Justin B: Well, thank you for sharing that. And I really appreciate that. And I don't want to look back with longing or with regret, but let's look at your first foray into your own 12 step experience with that SA group, the small group you talked about. You said there was a lot of grace in there. You gained a lot of strength, but when you moved, you didn't return to the meetings. What do you think you gained from that first experience that eventually made you say, “You know what, I need to give this 12 step thing another shot later on in life,”?

[00:23:14] Bill K: The willingness and honesty. There was such brutal honesty. We could reveal what was going on in our hearts. We could talk about the issues, our acting out, what was going on. The prayer, the methodology by which we said the serenity prayer, the vision for you. I mean, I still have memories of all those. And I just felt like I was surrounded by Christ and in a setting that made me feel safe and made me vulnerable and willing to share. And I love that.

And to this day that was the first thing that happened when I got into SAL. I wanted an in person meeting as well as the Zoom, the online meetings. So I kept praying and we actually were able to. There's still only three of us in the group but we meet every Sunday. And I still feel that vulnerability and that willingness to share. So that was something that kept driving me more and made me more wanting to connect. It's that connection that brings about rigorous honesty and a willingness to open my mind and open my heart to the grace of God. 

[00:24:31] Justin B: Thank you for sharing that, Bill. Were you surprised at how powerfully you felt the presence of God in those rooms with other degenerates? I'll just say, like yourself, like me. Where you were like, “Why would God be hanging out with people like us and helping lift this room?” Did you find surprise in that or what's your experience with that? 

[00:24:53] Bill K: Oh, I did not find any surprise in it because after reading the Bible a lot and listening to His words, He came after the sinners. He came after those who were in darkness, and He was always willing to lend a hand. 

I mean, I think of Zacchaeus in the tree, and He's like, “Come down, Zacchaeus. I want to go to your room. I want to go to your house. We're having dinner with you tonight.” You think about Mary Magdalene and the devils in her and how God gave her that grace, gave her that ability to remove that sin.

So when I'm in those meetings, it's amazing. I think the more we're surrounded by sinners and the more willing those sinners are willing to reveal what's going on in their lives, the more God enters our hearts. 

I think of our heart as being surrounded by all the brambles and the thorns of our sins. It's all our resentments, our angers, our fears that prevent God from coming in. He wants to come in, but He can't get in because we've got all these scars. And when I'm in those meetings, I feel it's like....If you've ever had a boo boo and you're pulling that band aid away and exposing the wound, it's like the honesty and the rigorous willingness to pull away those thorns and allow God to enter in.

And in that process, it's like our heart is turned to stone because of all of our sins and our anger and our resentments, and when we start taking those away, God can start our heart pumping again. So, through that fellowship and through honesty, we can allow God to remold our hearts into something that's filled with love and filled with hope.

And that is what I find. It's not hard because in that weakness, we're all in the same boat. We're all there. 

[00:26:53] Justin B: Beautiful. Thank you for sharing it that way, Bill. And I love that you went there, you know, our hearts are surrendered by brambles and thorns and briars and all sorts of just things that we think block us off from God. Honestly, if I'm looking at it from my perspective, it does because I'm turning away from God because of those things.

But let's talk a little bit about the nuts and bolts of step four and tearing out, removing, killing some of those briars and brambles and thorns. So talk to me, Bill, about the first step of the process of doing your step four. How did your sponsor lead you into doing your step four?

[00:27:38] Bill K: Interesting. He gave me the alcoholic workbook. It's the 12 step workbook, and it's a four hour workbook. You don't do it in four hours, but it's designed to go through the whole 12 steps. Well, we literally go through this day by day, step by step, and when you read the fourth step, it's all about that willingness to go down that path.

And so we went through this and he encouraged me, “You've got to write it down and then we'll talk about it.” And so I did. And when I did it, it opened up my whole world because it allowed me to go to step five and to step six and through seven, through eight and through nine, it opened up.

It was like Pandora's box, right? When we went inside, it allowed me to look inside and instead of the resentments toward my wife that I'd held on for years like a crutch, I let it go and I realized it wasn't her, it was me that was holding me back. It was my attitude, my twisted vision of what my reality was.

So in exploring step 4, I realized that it's not the world that's at fault. It's my problems. It's my issues. And so it made me realize I've got to deal with these in a way, in a positive way. And that's what Step 4 does for me, is it opened up the possibility of Step 5. and it gave me the foundation by which I could take every one of those one at a time and deal with them.

And, it led directly to the harms, I could see exactly how many people I have hurt, and allowed me to go through that rigorous process of identifying the resentments, the fears, and the harms. But until I did step four, I would not have had the enlightenment that it gave me.

[00:29:43] Justin B: Yeah. Thank you. Let's start at the resentments. Were there any surprises to you as you itemized resentments towards people, organizations, principles that that you were like, “Oh, I didn't realize I had that resentment or that negative emotion and how much it affected me.” Was there anything like that? Any revelations that happened? 

[00:30:04] Bill K: Well, the biggest was my family. I saw that my resentments and my expectations were so unrealistic, nobody could have lived up to it. And in that enlightenment, I realized that I was my own stumbling block. I kept stumbling over my own resentment.

My wife and I had struggled. We've been married 46 years, and the one thing that kept me from any grace was that my expectations were not realistic and I expected something from her that was not humanly possible.

And, and so it was a really hard moment for me, but it was a real realization that I have to let this go. Because it was pulling me down and it was drowning me in my own self pity and my own victimization. It was all about what I wasn't getting and instead it was what I was doing to others because I had that attitude.

[00:31:12] Justin B: Yeah, and I totally identify with what you shared. Those unrealistic expectations of others and of myself really brought a lot of resentment into my life in places that were completely blind.

A little bit of inside baseball here. I am currently working step four with my sponsor again. I've worked step four, I don't know, five or six times in the past 11 years that I've been in the rooms of recovery and each time it's a little bit different. But that's where I'm at right now is that resentments, negative emotions part. And once again, I'm not going back to all the stuff that I've already inventoried before, I'm doing things that are either new or things that my eyes are being opened to for the first time. Even though I've done this many times, it's a really powerful exercise to do. 

Now I want to jump over to the next section of step four. And this is one that has always just surprised me. The fears section. When I first worked the steps, my sponsor said, “Ok, now I want you to list,” I can't remember how many, “fears.” And I was like, “I don't have fears. I'm a red blooded American. I'm afraid of nothing. I’ve got short man syndrome. I'll stand up to anybody, anytime, anywhere. I don't have fears.”

Man, the fears inventory now, as I'm more honest and willing to see things, that's really what's killing me. Talk to me a little bit about your experience with identifying fears and your role in those. 

[00:32:47] Bill K: Oh man, fears. I've hidden in my fears for so long, fears about work not being enough. Fears about not being good enough for God. Fears about .... just afraid of everything and anything.

You know, I look at my addiction as a crutch, as a binky. As you know, if you have a baby, a binky, my pacifier because I didn't want to deal with the fears that were inside. I'm afraid that I'm never enough. I'm afraid that I cannot be good enough for anyone. I was extremely successful at work and yet the whole time I thought, “I'm a fraud. Everybody, if they just looked at me, they'd know I'm a fraud. I really don't know everything they expect me to know.”

So I was afraid of being found out and I would hide. I would hide in my bravado. I would hide in my pride, “Well, I would just work harder than anybody else.” I was not successful as a student. Growing up, I didn't really care. Recess was more important to me than studying. And, it wasn't until many failures in my life and I had multiple ones, that I came to realize that there was something I needed in my life. 

And that was when I joined the Navy. It was discipline, something I could use to earn money and a GI Bill. I really wanted to become a geophysicist, and I looked at all that and I said, “I've got to do those things.” Well, when I did it, I worked extra hard. I worked harder than anybody and my wife was always saying, “You're worried about a grade?” And I'm like, “Yeah, I'm going to fail.” And I got an A on the test. And she's like, “Yeah, right.”

It was simply because that fear was driving me. I was afraid of failure. I had failed so many times. I was afraid. I had an incident. After my mom died, they sent me to a prep school. And I was at this prep school and I did great the first year.

And then in my second year the seventies hit and I was smoking, and then my sister came and I was drinking and I got drunk and I got kicked out of school because of drinking. Well, I'm not an alcoholic, but at that point I acted like an alcoholic, and that was the first time in my life that I'd ever been held accountable for my actions. And that failure was one of my greatest fears, that I would fall back into again, that I would be a failure. 

So, when I started looking back to this, I realized all those fears that I was running away from was just being unwilling to look at myself, being willing to accept that I'm not perfect, that I'm filled with foibles and flaws. And in that process, I realized God loves me. He still loves me despite all those things. And maybe because of those things, because some of my greatest strengths were my failures. And, and you're like, “What? What do you mean?” because I learned that rigorous honesty is important. 

I got separated from school because I was honest. I went and told the teacher, “What I told you was wrong and I'm sorry, but I was drunk.” It was the wrong teacher at the right time and I got kicked out. But, I'm not unhappy that I was honest. I was unhappy that I had done what I had done. And so I didn't hold him against him. I held it against me because I shouldn't have done it. 

So fear has driven me to not be open and honest. And, when I finally was able to embrace that fear, I realized it was just, it was something that I had put up to avoid looking inside. 

[00:36:46] Justin B: Thank you for sharing that. So I'm going to read another paragraph, and this is out of the big book of Alcoholics Anonymous on page 68. This is the instructions in the big book on how to work the fear portion of the inventory. And there's a question and a statement in here that I have found extremely enlightening to me about fears. 

“We reviewed our fears thoroughly. We put them on paper even though we may have had no resentment in connection with them.”

And here's where we are. “We asked ourselves why we had them, why we had these fears. Wasn't it because self reliance failed us? Self reliance was good as far as it went, but it didn't go far enough.”

And I'm going to skip down to the next paragraph. “Perhaps there is a better way. We think so, for we are now on a different basis. The basis of trusting and relying upon God. We trust infinite God rather than our finite selves.”

When I read this and understood this, it opened my eyes to why I have fears. It's because I'm trying to do things myself. I'm not trusting in that power greater than myself.

That's step three. I make a decision to turn my will and my life over to the care of God. Well, if I'm still feeling fear, guess who I'm not turning my will in my life over to? I'm still trying to do it myself. And that's an eye opening insight for me. What are your thoughts on that, Bill? 

[00:38:07] Bill K: Well, one of the things, I know we're talking about step four. But in step five, one of the things that kept blocking me was my inability to forgive myself. I was afraid. I was afraid that I wasn't worthy, and I was reminded, “God forgave me. Who are you to think that you're God? Because if God can forgive you, why can't you forgive yourself?”

That was one of my greatest fears, that I wasn't good enough. You know, I look at my list of my fears and a lot of them were that I wasn't worthy or lovable, that my behavior caused my parents to drink. I wasn't a good son, I was not a good brother or a good friend and I realized that my fears were preventing and blocking my ability to feel the love of God. And when I learned to forgive myself, which is part of step four, is just writing it all down and letting it all hang out. It's all there. It's in black and white. It's 40 pages of my life. 

And I realized it wasn't all bad. It wasn't all good. It's a mixture, right? I mean, life is gray, it's not black or white. And I realized my fears had driven me into places that I didn't have to go. And so I realized that my fears are real. And some of them are based on my past. 

One of my biggest issues with my wife was trust. And I had a fear of trust because of being an adult child of alcoholics. Trust is a big issue, right? Because you hear one thing and they do another. And, you never really trust. It feels like Charlie Brown. Every time I go to kick that ball, the ball moves, and I fall on my face. 

And so, when you're in an intimate relationship with someone, you have to trust them. Well, over and over again, our arguments would be, she would say one thing, I would hear another and I would immediately go into my fear that she's attacking me. And over and over again, she kept saying, “No, that's not what I meant.” And I'm like, “But that's what I heard.” So learning to deal with my inability to trust.

Being driven by my fears drove me to insanity. It really did. And when I finally let go of that and said, “Ok God, help me to see what I'm not seeing because I am blind to this.” My fears have totally put blinders on my eyes. And that is the grace filled moment. That's when I started to see that God is forgiving. God loves me and He wants me to trust Him because I don't trust myself. 

[00:41:01] Justin B: Thank you, Bill. All right. So, so far we've dove into the resentments, negative emotions portion of step four. We've dove into the fears portion of step four. Now we've got the harms portion. 

Bill, why don't you walk us through a little bit about the harms portion, what that looks like and why that's vital to do and how it's affected you. 

[00:41:23] Bill K: Well, the harms for me were the realization that I have hurt other people by my actions. I go back through my life and I realize that there were so many people I hurt, so many people from my callousness, from my cruelty. It could have been different had I not been addicted. And so they lead to my amends, but I have to go through and expose those who I have harmed. I can't just ignore it because they are a blight on my soul. And, in that process I'm able to see what it is that I've done, how my actions hurt others. It was selfishly driven and they were all about my self esteem and my needs and not their needs.

And so for me, those harms became a big part, a huge part of my inventory. And I had to list them all out and I knew I had work to do on every one of them. Some I could make amends to, some I couldn't. But it was the realization that my behavior and my choices have harmed others.

They're not just done in isolation. We all think that they are, but sin affects all of us, all those that are around us. And I had to separate them from, “What were the harms that I did before my marriage?” and “What are the harms I did during my marriage?” And, they were very distinct and very, very real.

It helped me because I had to come to grips with all of those. They were the boogeyman, right? They were the things I was afraid of going back and having to deal with. But this inventory helped me to put it into the light of God, to expose it and to help me find a way and a pathway to peace to deal with it.

[00:43:28] Justin B: Yeah, thank you for sharing that, Bill. You know, with the resentments, the negative emotions, the fears and the harms, and we've already touched on this earlier, but I'm going to come back to it again. We are really looking at those defects. We're looking at the “bad stuff” in our lives.

You mentioned that your sponsor said, “Hey, let's look at the good stuff.” And  often, when I'm working with others, I say, “Ok, we've gone through this. Now let's look at the strengths and blessings you have in your life.” How did the positive things fit into your experience in working step four? Did you work that while you were doing it? Did you do it at the end? Talk to me about that. 

[00:44:06] Bill K: Well, what I saw was, in writing my inventory, I could see almost like a punctuated equilibrium that I would have grace filled moments when God would help me through a situation. We often pray to God, you know, “Fix this and I'll be good if you just help me through this.”

But I realized that there were times when I did make the right choice and didn't do something I shouldn't have done and God helped me see these as teachable moments. And so, in going through it, I realized that I wasn't as bad as I thought I was. I made some bad choices, but luckily I didn't make any bad choices that were irrevocable, that couldn't be fixed. 

There were times when I betrayed a friend. There were times when I had promiscuity in my early days. But then there were times when I chose not to do that and to stay in sobriety and stay in grace filled moments. So I realized that it was a path, I was actually on the path, the narrow path to God. And other times I was off the path. 

So it gave me the illumination to see that I was not all bad, that there was a lot of good, that God was working with me, that I was not a failure, that I was a success in many ways and a failure in other ways. And so I could take the good with the bad. I couldn't just dwell on the past of the negative. I could also relish in the moments when God loved me and helped me and protected me. 

[00:45:44] Justin B: Thank you for sharing that. So Bill, before we start wrapping up, is there anything else on step four that you feel you really need to talk about that maybe we haven't touched on yet?

[00:45:53] Bill K: Probably the greatest thing is the willingness to do it. In writing it down. I felt like God was talking to me. It was like this personal conversation that He said, “I see the things you've done wrong, Bill, but I've also seen the things you've done right. And I want you to know that I loved you despite all those things, and because of those things.”

And it was like, he held me and he loved me, and he told me, “Don't be afraid. Don't be afraid. Don't shy away from this step because it's so important.” And in that process, I felt like God just came and dwelled in my heart. And, you know, I've shared this before. I have had a joy that God has given me that I cannot take away.

The more I give it away, the more He fills it up. I have felt set aside. I have felt that God wanted me to share this with you because it is His grace, His love that saved me. His redeeming power. And in the fourth step, it's when God says, “Let's take a look underneath that hood, Bill. It's not all bad, and I can help you get through this if you just let me.”

And so, step three is the surrender. Step three is my willingness to let Him guide me. Step four is walking with Him, like on the road to Emmaus. And He's showing me all the things that I did wrong and the things that I did right and relishing in the things I did right and helping me shed tears on the things I did wrong and giving me the courage to face Him, to take away that fear and allow His grace to enter.

And that is what Step 4 has done for me. It's opened up my world and allowed me to feel God's love. 

[00:47:55] Justin B: Thank you so much, Bill. I don't know if I can add anything to that. I think that's a great way to wrap this up. Everybody, get into the steps, whether you're an addict, whether you're the betrayed, get into the steps.

It is, well, in my experience, the best way towards healing. Not just my own relationship with myself, my own relationship with my higher power, but in healing my relationship with those around me, my family, most importantly, and those that I interact with on a regular basis. 

Everybody, keep coming back. It works when we work it. So work it. 

Bill K: Work it. 

Justin B: You are worth it. 

Bill K: We are worth it. 

Justin B: Absolutely we are.