The old saying "AA ruined my drinking." Came about from those who relapsed after experiencing a measure of healing from the 12 Steps. Once we have taken an honest 5^th Step we have, effectively, burned the bridge back to complete denial of our disease. Once we have admitted to ourselves, to our Higher Power and to another human being that we are, for instance, a drug addict, we cannot go back into total denial of the fact. A part of us will always know exactly what we are doing to ourselves.

Our 4^th Step revealed to us the nature of our wrongs. Now it is time to admit them and dump them off our shoulders. After the 5th Step has been made, we can no longer indulge in alcoholic feelings and behaviors without knowing what we are doing to ourselves.

Before we begin with the details of the 5^th Step some definitions of terms are in order:

1. "wrongs,"—the items listed under Column 2, "Behaviors," on our 4th Step inventory;

    

2. "nature,"—the items listed under Columns 3 and 4, " Feelings " and "Beliefs" on our 4^th Step inventory.

Note that the 5^th Step specifically states that we are to admit the "nature of our wrongs," not necessarily the wrongs themselves. The specific behaviors and events are not important to our healing process as affected by the 5th Step, but the feelings and beliefs that motivated them are important. We cannot fix, or change, or alter history in any way, but we can experience emotional and spiritual healing of those disease symptoms which have shaped our history as we perceive it. We may not be able to change history, but we can learn from it. Our past does not come equipped with an eraser. For example, using the first item listed on our sample 4th Step inventory, it is not so important to admit that the alcoholic involved hit his wife causing a multiple, compound, comminuted fracture of her left distal radius requiring surgical pinning and six months in a cast. It is important to admit that physical violence against his wife was the result of his insane jealousy and his own feelings of inadequacy and personal worthlessness.

This leads us to discuss a frequent confusion between the 5th Step admission and "confession and absolution." The two are not the same, though it is acceptable to make one's 5^th Step in a confessional booth with a priest if one feels more comfortable in that context. Western religious confession is a sacrament of the church in which one goes to a priest and admits their sins (or moral transgressions). They are then forgiven those sins, are prescribed restitution, and assigned a penance (or punishment). By contrast, the 5th Step can be heard by anyone and is an admission of disease symptoms (not moral flaws). It does not necessarily require any form of restitution or penance at all other than changing your ways. Many persons in recovery consider that they have already done their penance simply from years of punishment from their disease. The only thing in common between the two experiences is the sharing, with another person, of the results of our thorough self-examination.

When choosing a person to hear our 5th Step we should be careful to select a discreet person whose integrity and confidence we trust. It need not be someone in a 12 Step program at all. A doctor, clergyperson, therapist, or anyone else will do. Many choose their sponsors to hear their 5th Step, but this is in no way necessary. The healing process begun by the 5th Step is not contingent in any way upon the person who hears it. That person may or may not share some of their own experience and may or may not make comments or suggestions, it does not matter.

Along with denial, another issue addressed by the 5th Step is intimacy. Generally, addicted people have little or no ability to experience true intimacy, in spite of the fact that we generally have a tremendous capacity for it. In this context, "intimacy " is the ability to relate to another human being with honesty, openness and trust on an emotional and spiritual level. For many of us, the 5th Step will be the first experience in our lives in which we will have taken the risk and faced our fear in order to allow another person to fully know us. This Step is the first of three Steps (including 9 and 12) which absolutely cannot be done without the participation of another person. It is where we rejoin the community of humanity. The 5th Step is an experience of intimacy. This issue will be examined in more detail later in this chapter.

A third issue is the timing of the 5th Step. After the 4th Step inventory has been completed, it is often noted that many painful memories have come to the surface. Associated with these memories may be feelings of guilt, remorse and pain. As we have seen, such feelings provide fertile soil for our disease to grow and if these feelings are not resolved we may even find our sobriety at risk. For these reasons it is not wise to delay the 5th Step, but to use it as soon as possible in order to begin the process of healing our feelings and beliefs about ourselves, which is the ultimate objective of the 5th Step.

Everyone has a different impression of their 5th Step experience. They range from exhilaration, a feeling of a weight lifting, a sense of accomplishment, or a sense of having performed a duty. This spectrum of responses is normal and in no way impacts on the healing effect of the process begun by the 5th Step. We should try not to approach our 5th Step with any preconceived expectations of how we should or ought to feel afterwards. We should not allow ourselves to judge the efficacy of our 5th Step experience based upon our emotional response to it. In modern times, considering all the therapists and counselors we have probably seen, the 5^th Step may not be the first time much of this material has surfaced. That is no matter.

Why is it necessary to reveal our inventory results to another human being? This is a common question regarding the 5^th Step. Why can't we be content with revealing this information to our Higher Power alone? The answer to this question bears directly on the first three Steps and on our addictive tendency to live in our own self-created illusions. We saw from our 1st Step work the negative results of having relied upon our own perceptions: (1) We created our own unmanageability and (2) Our disease is one of perceptions. The most important thing that we can learn in the early days of recovery is that we simply cannot trust our own perceptions and evaluations to be reasonable and sane. For us, trusting in our own perceptions, especially emotionally charged ones, is like a blind person trusting in their own color discrimination. We cannot trust our own evaluation of our 4th Step data any more than we can trust ourselves to make emotionally-charged decisions alone. The results of any such attempt are sure to be subjective and very likely damaging to us. Trusting solely in our own self-evaluation is a dangerous mistake.

The word "dependence" always seems to evoke a negative reaction from most of us. The last thing any of us wants is to be dependent. We are taught from our childhood that to be dependent is to be something inferior and juvenile. When we finally grow up we are bombarded with the word from our doctors, therapists, our television sets, talk show hosts and authors of self-help books. They all seem to tell us that there is something horribly wrong with being dependent people.

Through the working of the 12 Steps we learn that there is healthy guilt and unhealthy guilt (or toxic). We also learn that there is such a thing as healthy fear and toxic fear. So, of course, there is such a thing as healthy dependence and toxic dependence. We learn that it is healthy to feel guilty when we do something that we know is harmful to ourselves or to others. It is not healthy to feel guilty over things we have not done or things that we have imagined. People who do not have any sense of guilt are termed psychotic, and society is often much safer when these folks are locked up in an institution. It has been said that the world would have been far safer if Adolph Hitler had had a heightened sense of guilt. We learn that it is healthy to feel fearful of situations which have the potential to harm us or our loved ones, but it is toxic to fear our fantasy projections of the future. Prolonged experience of toxic fears are known as phobias and are diagnosable by professional psychologists or psychiatrists as mental disorders. Another example: It is healthy for one to fear driving on the wrong side of the road. This is a practice that has the very real potential to get someone killed. It is toxic fear when one is afraid to drive to work because they think some crazy person might just drive on the wrong side of the road and run into them. The difference lies in the ability to discern truth from fantasy. Guilt or fear over fantasy situations which exist only in our minds is toxic for us. On the other hand, feeling guilt over something that we have actually done wrong is healthy and provokes in us the response of making an amend. Fear over real danger is a necessary survival mechanism -- a healthy instinct.

The same is true of the word "dependence." There are healthy forms of dependence and there are unhealthy forms of dependence. Beginning with the 1st Step we learned about the toxic form of dependence -- nowadays generally called co-dependence. These are the things, situations and people which we use to mood alter away our pain -- to fill the imaginary void that we believe lies at the core of our being. In the beginning of recovery we are confronted with the negative results of our dependencies. The results of these (sometimes catastrophic) forms of dependencies are always the inevitable unmanageability we uncover in Step 1. This form of co-dependency is inevitable when we believe that we are defective, incomplete people with a hole in our center -- the hole in the doughnut. The belief in some kind of fantasy is what lies beneath all addictive, co-dependent behaviors, and we all come into recovery owning a large share of the real estate on Fantasy Island.

Step 2 shows us that there is at least one form of dependence that is healthy, this is the dependence upon our Higher Power. This Higher Power-dependence is natural to children who are rightly dependent upon their physical creators–their parents. This is perfectly healthy and natural and is based upon our normal human needs. Just as children depend upon their parents to have their basic needs met, so too can we depend upon our Higher Power, to meet our basic human spiritual needs. Dependence upon our Higher Power is a natural, normal and healthy form of dependence.

In Step 5 we discover another healthy form of dependence. It is in Step 5 that we first encounter a Step which must be accomplished with the aid of another human being. There are only three Steps in all of the 12 Steps which directly involve and require the active participation of another person and Step 5 is the first of them. Inter-dependency is the other form of healthy dependence presented in the 12 Steps. We have feelings, needs and wants which cannot be met without the help of others, and this is one reason why we cannot get sober without the help of others. Some people try going it alone (sometimes for years) only to get more ill, but none of us can get sober alone. We all have a need for the help of others, because we are not gods capable of meeting all of our needs by ourselves. The 12 Step recovery process is called a "we program" not an "I program." Because recovery and sobriety can only happen when we help one another, in unity, service and recovery. We must go to another human being and ask for his or her help in order for us to heal. This inter-dependency is the second form of healthy dependence.

The 5th Step leads us to one of the foundations of true humility. Humility requires a recognition of our human limitations, and the fact that we are human means that we have limitations and boundaries. Some of us believe that we do not need others at all and some believe that we are nothing but a mass of needs, constantly clinging to anyone who will allow us to grab hold of them. The recognition that we have needs that we cannot meet alone is the foundation of our very humanity and the bedrock of true humility. It is through the recognition of our limits, our human finitude, that we also recognize our strengths—the things we can do for ourselves. The 5th Step begins the process of re-introducing us to the human race by showing us how to depend upon other human beings in a healthy way.

The toxic forms of co-dependence upon people, situations and things empower our addictions, compulsions, and ultimately bring our self-destruction. The (drastic) difference between healthy dependence and toxic dependence is the difference between truth and fantasy. Unhealthy co-dependence is dependence upon things, people and situations which have no ability to meet our true needs. Co-dependence is the dependence upon things, people and situations to meet imaginary needs which are not really needs at all. Imagined needs that are based in our belief, our faith, in untrue things drive us to manipulate things, people and situations. We go to extreme lengths to ensure that these imaginary needs are met and we expect others to meet our fantasy needs in ways no one can ever do. Here is where we enter the "Fantasy Island" metaphor. Our fantasy beliefs include things like the belief that we are incomplete, defective, morally bad, irredeemable people. With beliefs like that it is no wonder that we come into recovery not being able to tell the difference between fantasy and reality. The 5th Step restores a piece of truth, a piece of reality to the picture of our lives. The piece is called ‘True Needs" and it requires us to acknowledge that we have needs which can only be met with the help of other people.

There is a side of the 5th Step which is not directly addressed at all in any of the official 12 Step program literature; nor is it addressed in any of the official standard manuals, workbooks and commentaries on the 5th Step. The person hearing the 5th Step is left out. Since the 5th Step involves the experience of two people, it is important for us to reflect on those of us who either have or will hear the 5th Steps of others. How would it affect you if someone approached you and said something like, "I need you to help me do something that I cannot do alone. I need you to allow me to trust in you more deeply than I have ever trusted anyone in my life. I need something that you can provide for me that I can in no way provide for myself." That is a pretty heavy thing to hear someone say and is what any person is asking when he or she asks you to hear a 5th Step. For the individual who is not accustomed to being asked to hear 5th Steps it can be a frightening experience. It is the first excursion into true intimacy in relationship to others that many people have ever had in their entire lives. We all come into recovery hindered and sometimes incapable of experiencing true intimacy. True intimacy requires that we be open and honest. Since we all come into recovery hidden behind our walls of isolation and denial, we have no idea why it is that we know nothing of intimacy. Of course we don't, we can't, but the 5th Step shows us that a healthy interdependence upon others is the foundation of true intimacy. The word "intimacy" implies two people. It is another experience that we cannot have alone and is predicated upon the recognition that we need others. True intimacy implies humility, the recognition of our human limitations as well as our strengths. It is a strength and asset to provide a humble and intimate attitude to those who are revealing to us their 5th Steps.

We tend to think of humility as a recognition of our weaknesses and limitations, but it is just as much a recognition of our strengths. When we define light we are also tacitly defining its opposite–darkness. In defining life, we define death. In defining fear, we define love. In defining and accepting our limitations and needs, we also define and accept our strengths and our capacity to meet the needs of others. Humility defines what we are not (namely, Gods), while at the same instantly defining what we are. (participants in a Higher Power). Humility debunks our false grandiosity, while at the same time demonstrating to us our true grandeur as participants on a cosmic level in The Force.

There is a spiritual strength into which we tap when we hear someone’s 5^th Step. This strength is the spiritual power that lies within the core of each of us. It is the image and reflection of our Higher Power, our creator, the ultimate Source of our healing. Whether we are approaching this Power in the first 3 Steps or another human being in the 5th Step, we are ultimately tapping into the strength that comes from only one Source -- one Power greater than ourselves, a Power which transcends all of us. In sharing our experience, strength and hope by hearing a 5th Step, we become channels for the healing virtue of the same Higher Power we met when we turned over our will and our lives to the care of "God as we understand him", or don’t understand him, as the case may be. This is why the 5th Step instructs us to reveal our inventory "to God and to another human being." It is through the help of that other human being, serving as a channel, that we begin to open the way to a deeper spiritual relationship with this Higher Power which we need not pretend to understand.

Higher Power-dependence and inter-dependence upon others form the foundations of a healthy sense of humility as understood in recovery. The first 3 Steps begin the restoration of a healthy dependence upon our Higher Power. In Step 5 we begin the process of restoring a healthy inter-dependence upon other human beings. Two sayings from the recovery tradition speak directly to the 5th Step:

1. "You have to do the things you hate and fear the most" and

2. "Humility is at the heart of all the 12 Steps."

Those two sayings are just as true for the beginner fearfully making a 5th Step and for the person entrusted with hearing it.

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