Writing Multiple Fourth Steps

I recently added In This Moment Daily Meditation Book put out by Co-Dependents Anonymous (CoDA) to my list of daily readings.

The May 5th entry talks about making a "searching and fearless moral inventory."  Part of the entry goes on to say "The hardest part of doing my inventory is breaking through denial.  I can't inventory something I don't know exists.  Once I'm aware of a behavior, I'm usually willing to write it down, share it, and ask that my defect be removed.  Getting there takes time and that's OK with me today."

One of the things that has been bothering me lately is that I managed to go through a full Fourth Step without spotting my love addiction.  When it came time for me to do my Fourth Step, my sponsor "followed the book."  There was an actual spreadsheet I was given to fill out.  It had tabs for resentment, fear and sex.  Each tab had columns to fill out (although to be fair the sex tab had a list of questions I had to answer about each of my sexual relationships):  "I have a resentment towards/of (bb pg 64)"  "because or why (bb pg 64)" "my instinct for (...) has been/was affected (12/12 pg 42)" and so on.  It took me over three months to fill in the entire thing, and my printed Fourth Step came out to somewhere around 90 pages (although to be fair it printed in fairly large font).

And yet somehow I didn't see a glaringly obvious defect: and what's more my sponsor didn't see it either.  (At least if she did, she didn't tell me!)  It would only seem natural that addictive patterns would show themselves in these types of inventories.  The fact that it remained hidden was a mystery.

This baffled me, but reading this reading shed some important light on this for me.  I'd always thought it silly that I'd need to do Fourth Steps in multiple programs.  The "fearless and searching moral inventory" wasn't going to wear different hats.  But now that I have a new addiction - and a new defect - I have something to write down, share, and ask to have removed.  I need a new Fourth Step because I couldn't inventory something I didn't know existed.