Time alone will cure many defects: With time, we eventually see the problems. But removing defects takes time if all we have to work with is time. For example, the first defect we saw was drinking. For most of us, connecting our issues to drinking took a long time, years of evidence and thousands of episodes. In the Rooms of AA, we call this denial.
When we sober up, this capacity for denial does not disappear. Relying on time to identify our defects takes time; time to overcome the mountain of evidence which we deny.
Fortunately, we can accelerate the process and foreshorten the denial time with written personal inventories.
Let me share a personal story.
I had been working with a sponsee for a few months. We had worked through the initial Steps, but as you will see, he was stalled on Step four.
We met for coffee again; he began, “my wife is being difficult again; she does not seem to listen to me.”
I thought for a minute and replied, “this seems to be a recurring theme. Whenever we meet, you raise the same issue, which has been going on for weeks.”
“It is not,” he huffed, “I have never talked about my wife before. You are imagining things.”
“You misunderstand me. I don’t mean that you always complain about your wife; I meant you constantly complain that the world and the people in it are not doing what you think they should be doing. Last week it was your condominium board; the week before, it was your supervisor; and the week before, it was a busy week; you were irritated with a customer, a workmate, and your children all in one week.
I was on a roll, so I continued, “every week, you have another story about your irritation and anger with something that is not going the way you think it should. This is why I have suggested you start a habit of written personal inventories. If you do regular written inventories, these things show up. You cannot bullshit the paper. If you had been doing regular written inventories, listing the things that made you angry, you would have seen this pattern; it would have been there on the paper. You would not have been able to deny it.”
He thought for a moment, then said, “That sounds like a lot of work. Where would I find the time?”
I admit now that I was becoming impatient with him and replied, “Well, you find lots of time to meet with me to talk about this stuff. We meet every week, and you spend most of our time together complaining. So, take a small part of that time before we meet and do a written inventory.”
There was a long silence, then with a deft sponsee backhand, he said, “That sounds like a resentment. Maybe you should do an inventory.”
I had to laugh out loud. He was a clever sponsee; not very disciplined about the Steps, but fast on his feet.
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