We make a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves in Step 4

I had a lot of experience with searching and fearless moral inventories before coming into my first 12-step fellowship, but it was a new exercise the first time I turned the spotlight on myself rather than examining other people. Why is it so much easier to see the speck in someone else’s eye than to find the log in our own? It’s a timeless and universal human tendency. I believe our hesitance to examine ourselves the way we do others stems from fear and a faulty sense that we are supposed to be perfect, free from defects. It takes a certain amount of faith and security that we are loved and accepted by someone – our Higher Power, our group, our family – before we can start examining ourselves fearlessly. It’s too hard to admit that we have character weaknesses until we feel somehow worthy, faults and all, of love and compassion. We need a new level of self-love and compassion to remove our protective armor so that we can even begin to examine ourselves morally and find our areas for improvement, those barriers that keep us from experiencing the best life that we can have, from forming the connections with other people that we yearn for underneath all of our protective armor. Step 4 is about taking off our armor so we can examine what is underneath, the wounds, the warts, and the beauty. –Elizabeth L.

Did you enjoy this article? We would encourage our members to use this post, and others like it, at their meetings, or for private reflection. We also encourage you to share this post to other fellows to help the compulsive eater who still suffers. Please let us know if you have an idea for an article or an upcoming theme, or have any questions or suggestions. Email our editorial staff at [email protected].

The experience, strength, and hope expressed in this article, reflect the individual OA members and does not represent OA as a whole. Other OA groups and service bodies are welcome to reprint articles from Experience, Strength & Hope Newsletter without permission. When reprinting from other OA newsletters, be sure to credit the source.