I am fully invested in kicking step 4’s ass. Well, let’s just say I have been procrastinating working 4th step in EDA since I joined 3 years ago. So, to be feeling momentum and willingness with the step is pretty damn amazing. So I best get going.
Let’s take a dive into resentments!
The AA Big Book personifies resentments as “the grouch and the brainstorm” (page 66). It likens resentment to poison, which is apt. Consider the phrase: “Resentment is like drinking poison and waiting for the other person to die.”
Resentments for me are often deep wounds that I have nurtured for years. Hazeldon Betty Ford’s great article on resentment states:
It’s revealing to look at the word itself. “Resentment” is close to “re-sentiment”—”sentiment” meaning “feeling” and “re” meaning “again.” So, resentment is literally “feeling again.” This gets to the heart of resentment: recycling old negative feelings or revisiting old wrongs done to us by others.
Resentments are poision with which we infect ourselves so often that it is no wonder we sought the “ease and comfort” of behaviors. Behaviors served us or we would not have turned to them again and again. To be free of the behaviors, we must address the unlying “causes and conditions”. Thus, step 4 is critical for recovery.
The EDA Big Book states that “we must be rid of resentment or risk backsliding!’ (Page 144). The AA Big Book is more explicit and urgent, “Resentment is the number one offender. It destroys more alcoholics than anything else” (page 64).
On page 66 of the AA Big Book, the first 100 speak clearly why anger and resentment poison us. They then go on to tell us one avenue of freedom:
It is plain that a life which includes deep resentment leads only to futility and unhappiness. To the precise extent that we permit these, do we squander the hours that might have been worth while. But with the alcoholic, whose hope is the maintenance and growth of a spiritual experience, this business of resentment is infinitely grave. We found that it is fatal. For when harboring such feelings we shut ourselves off from the sunlight of the Spirit. The insanity of alcohol returns and we drink again. And with us, to drink is to die.
If we were to live, we had to be free of anger. The grouch and the brainstorm were not for us. They may be the dubious luxury of normal men, but for alcoholics these things are poison.
We turned back to the list, for it held the key to the future. We were prepared to look at it from an entirely different angle. We began to see that the world and its people really dominated us. In that state, the wrong-doing of others, fancied or real, had power to actually kill. How could we escape? We saw that these resentments must be mastered, but how? We could not wish them away any more than alcohol.
This was our course: We realized that the people who wronged us were perhaps spiritually sick.
Though we did not like their symptoms and the way these disturbed us, they, like ourselves, were sick too. We asked God to help us show them the same tolerance, pity, and patience that we would cheerfully grant a sick friend. When a person offended we said to ourselves, “This is a sick man. How can I be helpful to him? God save me from being angry. Thy will be done.”
We avoid retaliation or argument. We wouldn’t treat sick people that way. If we do, we destroy our chance of being helpful. We cannot be helpful to all people, but at least God will show us how to take a kindly and tolerant view of each and every one.
As with much of the Twelve Steps, being free of resentment is simple but not easy. All I have to do is focus on the well being of the “sick man”? When I first entered the rooms, I thought the ‘sick man’ approach would never work, but I tried because my sponsor assigned it to me. I was very surprised when it worked with the majority of my resentments.
However, the deeper the pain, the deeper the resentment. There was one person in particular that I resented, so my sponsor pointed me to page 552 of the AA Big Book:
If you have resentment you want to be free of, if you will pray for the person or thing that you resent, you will be free. If you will ask in prayer for everything you want for yourself to be given to them, you will be free. Ask for their health, their prosperity, their happiness, and you will be free. Even when you don’t really want it for them and your prayers are only words and you don’t mean it, go ahead and do it anyway. Do it everyday for two weeks, and you will find you have come to mean it and to want it for them, and you will realize that where you used to feel bitterness and resentment and hatred, you now feel compassionate, understanding and love.
It worked for me then, and it has worked for me many times since, and it will work for me every time I am willing to work it. Sometimes I have to ask first for the willingness, but it always comes. And because it works for me, it will work for all of us. As another great man says, ‘The only real freedom a human being can ever know is doing what you ought to do because you want to do it.
I remember being free of resentment when I was in recovery, and I want that again. Here I come, recovery! 4th step be damned!
Words of Recovery 