Why Taking Inventory of Our Shortcomings Is So Important

It has been said that confession is good for the soul.  It seems that every religion and spiritual practice has a venue for admitting mistakes and asking for forgiveness.  Catholics practice weekly confession.  Protestant congregations each have their own variation of this.  Jews atone once a year on Yom Kippur.  Muslims have a similar day of atonement called Ashura.  Buddhists meditate to clean the mind of impure emotions and thoughts.  Native Americans have sweat lodges where they pray to the ancestors for cleansing.  New Agers consult the Course In Miracles as a path to absolve them from guilt and shame.  We in 12-step programs practice the 4^th step, taking inventory of our shortcomings by admitting our mistakes and misdeeds.

After we as addicts go through the process of accepting our powerlessness over troubling aspects of our life and turning them over to a Higher Power of our own understanding in Steps 1 through 3, the next step is to make a list of our misbehaviors and transgressions.  Until we admit in detail where we have gone wrong, there is no way to make things right.  Without a thorough Step 4, recovery is just a bunch of feel-good platitudes.  

Although most of us share the common characteristic of trying to camouflage and escape from the problems we created, our specific behavioral and substance abuses can vary from one person to another.  Some of us have acted out publicly in bars, streets, and casinos, getting lost in a crowd of fellow out-of-control drinkers, druggies, stoners, or gamblers, while others have acted out in private seclusion.  Whether it’s been in an expensive mansion, a middle-of-the-road condo, a funky tenement, or a dark dingy alley, we’ve desperately turned to the same thing over and over and wound up deeper in pits of misery and self-pity.   

Public or private, we can only turn this around by facing and accepting what we have done.  This is usually a very difficult thing to do.  Our pride and our egos don’t want to fess up.  To do so would make us seem to be very bad people.  In most cases, this is not true.  We weren’t necessarily that bad, we were sick.  For most of us, though our destructive habits started innocently, we crossed the line of being able to control them.  In the process, we undoubtedly did a lot of damage.  Writing our misbehaviors down and disclosing them to others is the path to shedding their power over us.  Seeing them from outside of us gives the ability to relate to them more objectively and hopefully develop the beginnings of forgiveness and compassion for ourselves and others caught in similar patterns.

Taking inventory is an effective way of coming clean.  It is often said that to err is human and to forgive is divine.  Whether it comes from outside, or better yet from within, we humans can benefit from divine intervention.