Procrastination

Fourth Step Inventory

July 30, 2024 by Ken Wells

READ IT TO ME: Click play to listen to this post.

“Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.” — James Baldwin

I recently completed a 4th step inventory with a good friend. As best I recall it was the tenth 4th step I have done in 34 years of recovery. I wanted to do a 4th step around the self-destructive behavior of martyrdom. Those familiar with the 4th step know that the step can be exhausting, emotional, and difficult. For me in recovery, frequently a theme of self-sabotage will surface that triggers me to go back and do another 4th step. My tenth 4th step will probably not be my last. In one sense as a therapist, I do a 4th step constantly. I help people work through trauma every week. My experience with clients challenges me to reflect on my own trauma.

The fallout from doing 4th step inventory is predictable. It hurts. It is totally exhausting. You sit in vulnerability. You might swear a lot! The 4th step ignites feelings of overwhelm, exasperation, and anger. It affects your sleep. Shame is kicked up. You wonder why the guy who is listening is sitting there looking at you. There is so much to unload that it is tempting to categorize and minimize all the behaviors. It seems like the more you share the more you feel screwed. As you unpack your character flaws, it feels like you are on display (more shame).

During the inventory, you struggle to verbalize the meaning of each flawed experience. There’s an overwhelming sensation that what you just shared makes no sense whatsoever. As you soldier on and throw it all up on the table, there’s no sense of relief. It feels like the experience of going through emotional dry heaves. When you’re done you feel wasted. You feel numb. Your brain feels unplugged. You think you are in a daze. It feels like you were hit by a big Mack truck. You might even feel a little crazy. You are depressed and maybe even a little suicidal (extreme). This doesn’t mean everyone feels this way after doing a 4th step. It does mean I felt all of those things- not just when I did a recent 4th step but some of these strong feeling experiences have been part of the encounter every time I have ever done a 4th step.

So, why would anyone ever do a 4th step inventory? Who wants to sign up for this degree of intense feeling? Here are a few considerations as to why it makes sense.

1. It triggers a shift from the left brain to the right brain experience. Addicts resort to figuring things out on their own. They compute and interpret the terrain of life through the distorted eyes of addiction. Their left-brain approach is efficient in satisfying cravings. It is amazing to listen to 1st step stories that detail the left brain calculation and planning involved in addressing addictive urges. They conceptualize and analyze a given situation and determine a strategy to feed the junkie worm. Addicts are really great at it until they are not. On the other hand, recovery requires a right-brain approach. It depends upon letting go of left brain distortions that fuel addictive behavior and opening the heart of your right brain that shares your emotional experiences in life. This is what Step 4 is all about. Addicts disconnect from their emotions around distressful events and lose themselves in left-brain logic. This leads to using, numbing out, and avoiding painful feelings. Embracing 4th step work is a right brain exercise that later helps the addict utilize his logical left brain toward effective recovery care.

2. Fourth Step work is an exercise that teaches how suffering cultivates healing. James Baldwin, American writer and activist, once said that you cannot grow yourself up unless you learn to suffer. For sure, life teaches that the only way to manage emotional pain is to go through it. You cannot avoid it with attempts to go around it as if there were some kind of detour. Maturity requires that you know and experience grief. Grief is suffering. While there is no need to be masochistic, life always unfolds suffering in many forms. Growing up demands that you learn to embrace suffering and learn the lessons that life reveals within its context. The fourth step work beckons the addict to make meaningfulness from the character flaws that have triggered immense suffering and pain.

3. The design of 4th step work is to transform behavior not just to express emotional flatulence. Baldwin spoke to the New York Times in 1977 that “people can cry much easier than they can change.” For sure 4th step work triggers tears. I have listened to colleagues, clients and addicts alike shed tears about their behavior. You can grieve and shed tears about destructive addictive behavior, gender domination from patriarchy, racial equality, etc, and remain unwilling to do what it takes to transform behavior. The goal of 4th step work is not to provide emotional catharsis alone. It is to establish a solid foundation for behavioral change.

4. Procrastination paralyzes progress. People put off what is dreaded. Doing taxes, exercising, or facing a relational conflict is like doing a 4th step. You put it off because it’s painful. Procrastinating will stunt your improvement. It is critical to move through the pain for the next experience of personal growth. Historically, addicts move through the first 3 steps in recovery with enthusiasm. They put off the possibility of maturation that comes from embracing Step 4. Overcome 4th step fear by “chunking”. Rather than sitting down to embrace the 4th step “whole enchilada”, work with it in bits and chunks. Write down one or two character flaws and their impact on your destructive behavior at a time. Eventually, you will have your first or next 4th step completed.

The fourth step of work is a way to engage in powerful transformation in recovery from addiction and behaviors of self-sabotage.

Keeping the Flow of Life Force Open and Clear

June 18, 2024 by Ken Wells

READ IT TO ME: Click play to listen to this post.

Villages in the mountains of South America depend upon the snow melt and the flow of freshwater that comes from headwaters at high altitudes to flow downstream and provide life nourishment and sustenance. Annually, time is set aside for community members to hike up the mountain to clear out clutter, debris, and obstacles that have gathered and clogged the stream during the winter preventing water from flowing downstream. The entire community participates in the project.

Throughout the course of life it is important to clear out the clutter, debris, and obstacles that clog your life force. There are three dynamics that propel us through the stages of life. There is the dynamic of creation. It’s the place where life dreams come from. Many of you have created unbelievable life experiences, achievements, and inspiration. There is the dynamic that sustains. It’s where long term careers are built. It’s the dynamic that solidifies principles to live by. It’s the space that cultivates resilience. Many of you have amazing stories of bouncing back when you were down and out from business, relationship, or health failure. Then there is the part in life that breaks down and dies.

We are asked to build and create, to sustain sacred principles and resilience that bring us back again and again in the presence of defeat and to break down what no longer works, allowing the ineffective to die.

It’s not an easy pattern of living to subscribe to. For example, some of you have created an amazing successful business in which you have become a leader in your industry. You are a founder. In order for your life force to reach the next level of effectiveness, you need to recognize that the people who sacrificed and played a vital role to achieve your level of success is not the same people who can help you reach the next level of effectiveness. The present stalemate in progress tells you this. You need to bring in new people who have skills and capacities to help you reach that next level. Not only that, what if you the founder, do not have the skills to take your company to the next level that your creativity calls for. Are you willing to step aside and find the right person to lead to the next level? Most are not. See how difficult it is! The next level will require that you rebuild the dynamic that was once successful creating the first level of prosperity.

The dynamic of sustaining is also difficult to maintain. Most founders lose their “beginners’ mindset”. And why not! People have written magazine articles about your amazing success. You have surrounded yourself with people who tell you how wonderful you are. This environment undermines sustaining a hungry spirit that yields excellence.

Addicts in recovery face the same pattern toward cultivating a healthy recovery life force. In the beginning they are urged to create a lifestyle that is built around recovery and not the other way around. It worked! In the beginning, addicts make amazing efforts to make sure recovery is prioritized. Yet, sustaining recovery priorities is hard to do. For many, there is the experience of an intense flame that weakens to smoldering embers because it requires determination to sustain program priorities.

M. Scott Peck writes in his book The Road Less Traveled that life is a metaphor for taking a long journey through the desert. Many stop at the first oasis, set up camp and spend the rest of their lives hovering around the amenities of the oasis. Yet, the life force requires that you pull up stakes and continue the journey all the way through the desert! Addicts must not merely be satisfied with sobriety but dig deeper to find serenity and peace.

How many addicts do I know who are veterans of 12-step meetings with answers galore for beginning recovering addicts but who never translate the principles of the steps to their relationships at home with a partner and family. Sober for so many years but assholes to live with! They live a different type of Jekyll and Hyde life even in recovery!

It’s important to take the journey upstream and clear the clutter, debris, and obstacles that have diverted your life force and prevented you from healing beyond your recovery from addiction/entrepreneurial success and to heal all aspects of living.

Here is a list of considerations:

1. Clear the clutter that blocks life force. There is a myriad of possibilities that become clutter. Here are some:

Codependency to your partner or others whereby you have lost yourself trying to please or caretake.
Resentments that block creativity and life force. You must do the necessary work to clear it out.
Procrastination: an unwillingness to embrace step 4 and stalk shame and other painful character defects and abusive experiences that clog the flow of life force.

2. Remove the debris of incongruence and inconsistency. When you don’t clean out the clutter previously mentioned, you will live an incongruent and inconsistent life that will hinder your progress and undermine your goals that lead to sobriety, serenity, and success. Everybody is inconsistent and incongruent in some way. Few people if any follow through with their stated goals all the time even with best intentions. So what is a person to do? Live in consultation with accountability! Not if, but when you are incongruent to your values, be accountable to a group of people who believe in you about your shortcomings. Consult with them about what happened that triggered your downward spiral. Listen and be coachable. Take in the insight others see that you were blind to. Inconsistency can only be addressed by getting back on the horse and progressing one step at a time in a daily fashion. It will be average and unnoticed until the day you achieve your desired goal of serenity or whatever it is you seek to achieve. Manage the debris of incongruence and inconsistency.

3. Tell on yourself about your dishonesty and hypocrisy. Everyone battles hypocrisy, not just people who go to church! In addiction recovery, it is encouraged to establish a detailed behavioral contract called a sobriety contract.

It has four sections:

Inner circle behaviors that designate acting out in addiction.
Middle circle which identifies the high risk of acting out.
Outer circle which promotes positive behaviors to replace the destructive behaviors.
A list of people for accountability to report addiction management and any relapse within 24 hours.

Addicts in recovery put dishonesty about their addiction at the top of the inner circle of their sobriety contract. Dishonesty and secrecy are breeding grounds for relapse. It’s true for any goal you have set for yourself. You must tell on yourself when you are hypocritical or dishonest. When you live in consultation in this way you will best position yourself to course correct and bring yourself back to the center of value in the goal you have established as important. The art of telling on yourself is a common point of advice that when you follow through will transform your life and secure your goals with regularity.

Following these principles and guidelines will remove the clutter and debris that block the flow of your life force whether you are seeking recovery from addiction or striving to achieve the next level of success in your entrepreneurial journey.

Desperation—Without it There’s No Change

October 6, 2023 by Ken Wells

READ IT TO ME: Click play to listen to this post.

A calling is an inside force to be, create, or achieve a life experience that has not been realized. It is an exploit that cultivates bliss. Even once realized, there is a conscious enlightenment that you are doing what creates deep satisfaction within your soul.

Callings are often missed in life for many reasons. Many people die with the music that resides within never expressed. There are a myriad of reasons why this is true. I would like to suggest only a few that I think matter most for you to consider.

Henry David Thoreau wrote about people living quiet lives of desperation. Many never pursue their calling because they live their lives without marshaling their desperate lives. Rather than being dominated by quiet desperation, why not quietly move the energy of desperation in the direction of your favor? You don’t have to allow the days of your life to slip away into meaninglessness. If you grew up the way I did, you have every reason to feel desperate. In my recovery, I had to learn to take feelings like dread, depression, malaise, anger, shame, loneliness, and desperation and transform them into something helpful rather than hurtful. You will too.

I have been reading Let the Record Show by Sara Schulman, a historical narrative for the Aids Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP). Schulman chronicles the influence and impact of those within the organization who in many cases sacrificed their very lives in pursuit of effective treatment for those suffering from HIV and AIDS. Even though there are tragically far too many deaths around the world from AIDS that are now treatable, the scientific advances that save lives today would not have been in existence had some members of ACT UP not paid the ultimate price of dying in the attempt to save others and their own lives. Schulman’s record is a narrative of desperation. Without it, the hope for healing from HIV + would have never been realized. Clearly, the annals attest to the value of desperation that existed within the calling of many thousands who mostly lived in gay and lesbian communities around our country in the 1980s and 1990s. One cannot read the accounts written of sacrifice and desperation without being inspired by their acts of service toward humanity.

During the past three decades, I have treated many forms of addictive behavior. I have never been successful in helping an addict overcome their destructive behavior without that person being desperate. The 12-step community identifies the experience as “hitting bottom.” It’s the place where you decide down deep that you have had enough. It could be poverty, abuse, a bad marriage, addictive behavior, physical condition, etc., you name it. Only when you are desperate to change your life situation will you access the resources to transform your existence. You take the experience of desperation and move it from being victim to victor. You move the negative energy toward a positive result. You put pictures of past gloomy days of hopeless desperation in your mind that motivate you. You determine in the deep recesses of your soul that, no matter what, you will not repeat those days of hopeless desperation in your addiction or other plight of life. You become hungry and urgent with intervention. You decide to walk to hell and back to create the change you envision. You will put up with whatever discipline, behavioral change, and discomfort necessary to change the desperate environment that creates misery in your life.

Schulmann chronicles this sense of desperation to have been most powerful in a collective community sense. Desperation is the average, common component in everyone’s life necessary to experience transformation toward discovering their own brilliance. Without it, there would have been no ACT UP. Desperation is the component necessary to make peace from war, healthcare for all, and overcome poverty in our communities. Desperation fans the flame of personal and community will.

Callings are stunted and fade from realization when individuals fail to redirect their desperate lives toward transformation. While you cannot do the individual work for another to redirect their desperation, collectively we can change the horizon and landscape that provides more possibility. I believe there is a calling within the community for individuals to answer. We cannot help everyone but we can take time to help others redirect desperation into transformation. The 12-step community identifies these actions as “acts of service” that constitute living out the 12th step.

Callings are muted by discouragement. We tell ourselves “If my situation just wasn’t so desperate!” The truth is that without your sense of desperation, nothing ever changes and callings are never answered.

Are you feeling desperate about relationships that hurt, addictions that dominate, physical conditions that need to change, or feelings that overwhelm you? Move your experience of desperation into transformation. Become desperate to create something different. Decide you will do whatever it takes to end addictive behavior, compulsions with food, procrastination, and negative behavior that keeps you stuck and mutes your response to the calling that beckons within your soul.

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