The topic of step 5, 6 and 7 at a Sponsorship through the 12 steps workshop in London, UK

OK. Technical fee

to set the tone for this meeting. I actually suggest we open with the Serenity Prayer if that's for those of us who wish to join me.

God grant us the serenity to accept the things we cannot change, the courage to change the things we can, and the wisdom to know the difference. Thank you. The topic of tonight's meeting is work, working a step five with the sponsee. And Tim will share for anything between 30 and 45 minutes on the topic, after which the floor will be opened for questions rather than the typical sharing at other meetings. And with that, I will now hand over to Tim.

Good evening, everyone. I'm just going to share the screen

whilst reminding myself I'm an alcoholic.

There we go

and just

good. I can now see you as well as that text. So we're looking at Step 5 tonight and there's a line here. I'm not going to read the whole thing. There's a line here that

causes some problems,

but they had not learned enough of humility, fearlessness and honesty. In a sense, we find it necessary until they told someone else all their life story. And I used to go to a meeting in Islington on a Sunday evening and

there are a bunch of people there that would do these step fives that would take, they go to their sponsor's house

and they'd go to their sponsors house every Sunday

for a few hours.

And then within a year or so

they made good progress. They were done. So it took about a year. Every Sunday for a year

I

how to spot and see ones that that did.

I don't know if you ever had one that is obsessed with doing inventory.

Every time they call you this, how can I read some inventory? And your heart sinks. And they're always remembering more and more things that they've said or done or thought or felt. And The thing is, it's like some little porridge pot.

Obviously, the purpose here is not to recount in step 5:00 every single thing you've ever thought, felt or done, because that would take as long to recount it took to do it. If you've lived for 50 years, it would take another 50 years to recount all the things. And often actually, it takes longer to recount something than the thing took to actually experience. So very clearly this doesn't mean everything you've ever thought, felt or done, although that's the meaning it it's given. Sometimes

it's it's there's also little habit. I will get to the point in a minute.

There is a habit in in a a.

Maybe you've noticed this habit in particular in Big Book circles,

in particular on in online discussion forums about the Big Book, where the great virtue is to take things literally

and then to ignore things like context and why it was written, who it was written by, who it was written for, what they might have meant by it. And they want any of that. You just want to read what it says.

That's all very well, but

in the Swiss law of obligations, as in a A, we don't just look at the wording, we look at the context. And when you read about early AAI think they would have, I don't know what they would have said about the idea of Step 5 taking a year of Sundays, but I could. I think I can imagine the looks on their faces

when Doctor Bob took his sponses through the, the, the, the formal bit of the program. So once you've got the preliminary out of the way and you just, you do the formal bit of the program. So it's 4567 and eight before you get out there to make amends and get out there to do 1011 and 12,

you're doing about four hours.

So

now one could do that today. My observation I've seen very, very quick goes at the steps, but they, they, they do though invariably need to be done again if they're done in, in the space of a few hours or a weekend. So I think the happy medium is to do it quickly enough

that you get through it, but thoroughly enough that you don't immediately need to redo the steps. And my experience with willing sponsee, six weeks to three months from soup to nuts, as they say, is pretty standard.

And that's not too long and you're good for it. You're good for a couple of years then at least.

Now how this relates to step five? Well, how do you follow this sense of all their life story without taking it literally? I think the idea is this.

What you want is the Step 5 to contain all of the main highlights so that the person you're sharing with has got a sense of what your life has been.

But that can be conveyed. I think that can be conveyed very quickly. Tom W talks about a friend of his who describes her childhood

incredibly vividly and in a way that you can immediately get pretty much a great sense of what it was like. She said I was fat and we moved a lot. Now that's that says a lot. There's an awful lot of detail actually in there,

so I think you can tell the whole story in terms of broad outline peppered with

enough detail.

Have I lost you? Everyone's frozen.

Oh, there, you're moving again. Good.

I thought rigor mortis had set it in for a minute. I think you, you, you can do a good job of Step 5 in somewhere between,

Tom says about 40 minutes. Are they after about an hour and a half, you're not really saying anything new. It's just the same thing over and over. There's the fact is there's a limited number of big ticket events and there's a limited number of character defects. So I think you can fulfill this criterion of telling someone all your life story without it taking more than an afternoon or part of an afternoon.

When we look down

here, where is it? The actual instructions on 75?

We pocket our pride and go to it, illuminating every twisted character, every dark granny of the past.

Now, when I take people through step four, it's a slightly unusual way. What I I've discovered through trial and error over the years is pretty much everyone's hand needs holding throughout Step 4 because they're not only doing a Step 4, they're learning how to do inventory and using their first inventory as the worked example. And unless you walk them through it

and have it, have them discuss it with friends along the way, it'll be an absolute dog's dinner.

So by the time I've completed the step forward of Swansea, I already know everything. I already know all the twists of carriage and all the dark Cramers of the past because they've been revealed as we've been going through. But I think there is a huge therapeutic value in getting everything out in one conversation. First of all, it gives you cognitively a good oversight as to what the problem is, and secondly, because you've conveyed everything

at once and you can walk all the way around it, it seems manageable. And also.

If the sponsor then responds, you know, just normally afterwards rather than, you know, holding up a cross and hissing and telling them to get out,

then that's therapeutic as well. When you realize that all these great big dark secrets and awful misses actually don't amount to really much more than a hill of beans. Not even bore Lottie, just ordinary beans.

I think that's therapeutic. But by the same token, if you haven't gone through the detail, there are so many lessons in Step 4. Unless you've gone through the detail and learnt the lessons along the way, you're going to miss an awful lot. And also, I think a lot of Step 4, particularly how we do the second column and the third column and then all that forgiveness stuff, it literally starts to rewire your brain. You cannot,

in the course of a step 5A2 hour conversation, completely recast how you view every situation you've ever been in, forgive everyone, and do the job of step five of illuminating every twist of character, every dark crown in the past. If you've got someone who isn't cognitively damaged, maybe you could do it. But 19 out of 20 people

are basket cases. When they get to a a incredible there's there's that line

in the big book. Maybe your husband lives in that strange world of Al picked.

So I do that in Step 4. So by the time you get to Step 5, the fever, the fever has abated

and you're now on fairly solid ground, and the job is to just get it all out in one conversation. Boom. So in a sense, the substance of it has already been done. But the third, by the time you finish Step 4, but the therapeutic value of getting everything out in one go hasn't been achieved. I give the example of that in my first Step 5,

my sponsor was was unaffected by it, and that was the single most important thing I think that had happened to me in a a was my sponsor being unaffected by my Step 4. If as a sponsor you find something particularly shocking,

try not to gasp.

It's difficult and occasionally I'm afraid I have gasped. But then, you know, we sort of work it out afterwards. But there are some, there are some you're going to hear some gruesome things, particularly where the person at the business end or the creature at the business end of their behaviour was innocent. That that those are very, very, I find this incredibly difficult to listen to.

The more innocent, the, the harder it is to listen to and the more defenceless whether there's a power imbalance.

But one does one's best to, to keep a poker face. But anyway, I'm getting slightly off track. So what I'm getting to is this. We've done we've, we've got everything out on the table, but we need to have this single conversation where we can walk around it in 40, half an hour, 40 minutes, an hour. So I get people to summarise, if possible, they're Step 4

and also I get, I get them to take step, take step five with a couple of other people.

By the time you've taken it with three people, you're bored of it. Usually after one you're still kind of scared of some of the material. It still has power over you. By the time you shed it with three or four people,

the power is gone.

And they did that an early a, a first of all. Secondly, it does refer, even in the book itself, to the person. Where is it

personal persons? There we go, Topper 74 before we choose the person or persons with whom to take this intimate and confidential step.

People have Some people object to that because I haven't heard of it before, but if you can just get them to talk to a few people that have done it, they usually fine with it.

Anyone that's very sort of prickly about it says, well, I'll talk about it to you, but I won't talk about it to anyone else.

I mean, I won't insist, but I'll say, well, if you want to keep everything very under wraps just with one person, I don't think I'm the right sponsor for you because I've got a different approach.

My experience with those people that refuse to share with more than one person is they want to maintain

the double standards that the stage character that it talks about.

They're still ashamed and embarrassed. They don't and I've said to be why. The only method I know of getting over myself is sharing it myself, or rather the defects and behaviour with enough people that I realize I'm ordinary. If you have a better solution, you go and follow that better solution. I literally don't know of a better solution than that

and I'm not going to cosign not adopting what I think is is the best solution. So go you maybe continue with someone else. It's fine. So I never force anyone, but I don't think you could. And also when you find out what it is, the little secrets that people are embarrassed about, usually they're absolutely in the middle of the bell curve.

It's, I've never heard, you know, falling off the people with the with the most gory

stories often perfectly happy to share them with two or three people. I mean, you don't want to share some of these things at a meeting of course, or budget in the Grapevine magazine or something, and that's a different matter.

So the sort of coyness about inventory, I think it has to be dealt with head on. Anyway, I get people to do a summary

and

let's go back. What have we got? Every twist of character, every dark crown of the past. The twists of character are essentially you might as well read out the whole of the sex inventory. It will take 10 minutes because it's there's not a huge amount of material. If you just read out the words, you're done in 10 minutes. If you've done it properly,

twists of Sorry the Fear Infantry. Again, if you've done it properly, 5 minutes

doesn't, so do those two first. Get those out of the way,

maybe take a small handful of resentments which are illustrative of the whole phenomenon of resentment, and then just read out the highlights from the 4th column and you can slot those. You could. There are two ways of doing this summary business. You gotta take your stack of paper and use little post it notes rather sort of

stationary tags to tag the bits you're gonna read out.

Method #2 is you actually write out a summary. So every twist of character, you go through the Step 4 looking for character defects, and then you give a juicy example of each one. And this is a very useful way of doing it. And because there's a limited number of twists of characters, a limited number of character defects, you only need a good example of each one. As as Tom says,

if you're a thief, remember Step 5,

the exact nature of your wrongs.

If you're a thief, the exact nature of your wrongs is you're a thief. There we go. You've said it. Now, you might want to give an example just so the other person isn't bored and so they believe you, but you literally do not need a catalogue of every single thing you've ever stolen. Similarly, if the exact nature of your wrong

wrongs is you are punishing, give your two best examples and so you can you can have you can get a handle on your twists of character very simply using the Step 4 as the basis. So Step 5 is not read out your step four. I'll come to where that's an option in a minute.

It's taking the the Step 4 as the basis and then fulfilling the criteria. Step 5, twists of character. So there's a limited number of those dark crannies of the past. Start with the worst and move backwards. And dark crannies can be things you did, things that were done to you or things that were just weird and horrible

by the time you've been talking for somewhere between 40 minutes, an hour, an hour and a half, if they've done their job in step four, I mean, they're repeating themselves within half an hour. But give it a few minutes and then say, have you noticed? This is the same as what happened with Jessica? This is the same as what happened with Susie. Can you see? It's the same thing, you know, it's the same thing. You can people that the penny drops

during the course of the step five, you can then say what is there anything else which is different? Look through your papers

and so is there any situation which hasn't in substance already been gone through or is it all just variations of on a theme and it's it's always variations on a theme. You can always the the safety net is later on. What you can do is you can always,

I'll come to the end of step five. At the end, you can always say, well, if there's anything else that occurs to you that you think is a nasty little secret that you feel needs to be conveyed will come and just give me a call and we'll run through those won't take long.

So there's a safety net, though. It's not as though if you don't say it now, you're condemned to never saying it in your entire life. Hopefully though. So if if they've done their job also of getting friends in a A to help them write the Step 4, they've already said anything anyway. So the purpose of this is not necessary to reveal new secrets that haven't hit the light of day is to get a sense of where I have been in belief, thought, and.

Behaviour

OK, so the the the two basic methods, either you get them to tag the step four for the bits they're going to read out in advance, or you get them to write a summary of twists of character on one side of the page. Dark Crown is on the other side of the page. Some people, especially if they don't have a job where they've ever had to write a summary or they in a they've never had an academic conduct or they haven't had an academic situation in 20-30 years, but they've had to write a summary. They just go to pieces. If someone goes to pieces, don't force it. So just bring

the whole step four and then you get them to read and as soon as they start repeating, you say, as I said earlier, you point out the repetitions, say should we go on to the next one? This is the same. And then and then you get through it that way. So you just spot repetitions as soon as they have and get them to skip and go on to the next one. So is there OK? Is there anything materially different about this one?

No, you go on to the next one. Great. And that's how you can, that's how you can get through it in one go.

And that that works in almost every case

there are

with people taking step with others,

it's very important that they trust the person and the person is trustworthy, which is why people they've test driven by, you know, checking that they're doing inventory right with their friends.

Hopefully they've already got a sense of who is safe to talk to and who isn't.

So if you test drive people on a few minor bits of inventory you'll find out pretty quickly. Is this someone you're compatible with?

Although it's tempting sometimes to go to, you know, random kindly old timers in a a all kindly people generally to share your inventory with unless they've done this in exactly the same way.

You're usually going to get a funny reaction and the reactions you'll get are these.

Well, I don't know why you're doing it like this. I don't know why you're taking yes, step five with more than one people. Why, why have you got why don't you use the 14 character defence? Well, this all looks very, very complicated or you haven't gone into this with sufficient depth. I think you need therapy. By the way, I'm a therapist. You know, you'll get all sorts of weird ass reactions which don't help. So although you may know a kindly person doesn't mean that they're necessarily appropriate if they haven't done the step five in the same way that you're doing. If they haven't done the

four in the same way that you've done it, don't show your inventory with them. Because even if they're super

open to the idea and principle,

either they'll think you're not doing it right because you didn't do it the way they did it, or they'll realize you've done it better than they did and they will start to feel guilty and awkward and then turn it back on you. That happens. So you got to be super careful. So keep it with people. I think keep it with people in your Home group who you know who are doing it in the same way where you're speaking a common language. People can keep their mouth shut

if there's any sense of weirdness. Don't. And don't do it with a close friend because that can be weird as well. So people that there's some distance from. So if afterwards you want to go and throw up and never see them again, it's kind of fine, you know? You're not going to jeopardize a friendship by doing that.

What else do we need to know about Step 5? So listening to a Step 5 is the most boring thing in the world,

I have to say. I know we're supposed to be like, really interested in it and really compassionate and fine, fine. But

the truth is my step four was really boring. My inventory is always really boring,

which is another good reason for keeping it to one or two hours so that that you know there's light at the end of the tunnel and the light at the end of the tunnel is not a an express train

hurtling towards you.

If you're going to hear a Step 5 in person, here are the top tips. Go for a walk to do it.

Umm, there's the sense that people are casting their past to the winds, to the four winds, as they're doing the their Step 5.

Some people object to this. They say, well I don't think it doesn't seem seemly enough that they're not. So I need you to be sitting down opposite me paying a tender. Well, if you want that, you can pay a therapist £150 an hour. You know, you can pay for that

when I was 15 years sober. So not exactly, you know, wet behind the ears or indeed anywhere else anymore.

I wanted to do a step five with Brian. And Brian was sober 30 years at the time. And he said, I said, can I do my step five with you? And he said, and he knew that I worked like 9:00 to 5:00.

And he said

I am free next Tuesday. Meet me at my house in Camden at 4:30. I have to be in Paddington at 7:00. You can read it. You can walk with me and read it along the way. He didn't ask if I was free then. He said that's when I'm available and this is how we're going to do it.

And

the day was like today. It was pissing down the whole time. So I was trying to hold an umbrella and my pieces of paper as we were walking down, you know, roads and canals with people passing us, giving me very strange looks as I trotted out all of my various things.

You're allowed to set you, don't you? You're allowed to set the terms for how

you hear the Step 5. Some people want to sit opposite someone for eight hours and love that and the intensity and the intimacy and pouring over any detail. And if you want to do that, don't let me dissuade you. But if you can't face it, it's OK

when someone asks Tom, will you hear my step five? He says something like next Thursday

I have 40 minutes

and he says they'll respond to him, but I have 10 hours of material and he'll say you'll have to find someone with 10 hours of time then won't you?

Exact nature of your wrongs. I'm an ordinary human being. There's not a lot to see.

So I if I'm doing one in person,

I go for a walk. If it's in my I won't don't tell anyone. I don't have sponsees in my home anymore. There were there were some incidents and Jonathan, who is scientific talks, talked about bad energy on more than one occasion.

I don't have people at home but when I did I would clean

you got I'm sorry. You can listen and clean at the same time. Some people don't like that. If they don't want you to clean, ask them to find a sponsor who has a cleaner so they don't have to clean whilst listening to the Step 5.

There are lots of there are people with cleaners. Go to meetings in Chelsea, they've all got cleaners there. Then you'll have you know and that you'll have your sponsors staring at you throughout your Step 5 wondering why? Why

so walks are good

listening to a Step 5. Thanks, Lovely. Listening to the Step 5 when you're cleaning is is good if you're going to meet in a cafe. Some people won't do it in a cafe and I I sort of Fair enough, but park bench will do in that case.

But seat where you can look out the window. So get there first. Get there first. Find a good seat where you can look out. There's nothing worse than when you get there and they've they've, they've nabbed the sea and you're looking at a wall.

There's another seat where you can, where you can look out and you can listen, but you can look out.

And I used to get super involved in detail in Step 5

and I don't anymore.

I think that the great, I think I pour over the details with people in Step 4, fine. But in step five, I think the job is to just get it out in the open. When they're doing step five with someone else you they need to figure out whether some people want loads of input and feedback.

Some people do not. I remember hearing a step five of a bloke many years ago,

I tried to interrupt to say something at one point and the look of pure rage on his face as I backed off and just listened for the next hour and we were done and he was done and it was fine. Not everyone wants feedback and that is fine. They don't want feedback, Fine.

When they're asking people to do step five, they must always find out what the person's

deal is with hearing step fives. So a friend of mine

is even more like

Vulcan Talk Amada Barrister Rottweiler than me. Harbors that may be to imagine. And he won't hear a Step 5 unless he has absolute license to go in for the kill. And they're a bloodied mess afterwards. But it's very, very helpful.

And he's someone that when, when I'm in trouble, I go to him and I, I, I steal myself as I know I'm going to be ripped apart. It's always very, very useful, but it ain't super pleasant always. So you know to find out when you're going to hear a Step 5 from someone else, You tell the sponsees, find out what you're in for and ask yourself, am I up for that?

And to get agreement on what it's going to look like, what it's going to involve. You don't want to just turn up and have a blank check because

odd things can happen sometimes. So I did a step five with Spiritual Paul and some of you may know he died a few years ago.

And I got there and I started to read and within within a few minutes he was starting to, we, we hadn't let let's say 10 minutes of preliminaries. And I started to read and about 5 minutes in, he started, his head was hung down. He started shaking his head back and forth to Tim, Tim, Tim, Tim, Tim. And he talked at me. He'd seen me,

you know,

in meeting. So he got my measure.

And again, I was about 15 years sober and he talked pretty much at me for about four hours and I took notes.

Probably one of the most helpful 4 hours of my life wouldn't be for everyone. And he did that with everyone. He hardly heard anything, but then talked at them. And you know, every single person that I've spoken to who did their step five with him, he was absolutely spot on about everything.

It is extraordinary.

And during the course of the conversation over the four hours, all of the dark crowners of the past got somehow sucked out and laid on the table. Ditto that. The twist of character. So people have got very, very different ways of doing it and that's fine.

Tell them as well if at any point in the step five they get the heebie jeebies,

it's OK to stop

because if you stop and you're wrong and you should have continued, you can always resume with them or you can just find someone

more congenial. But if you get the if you don't listen to your instinct, it can get really difficult because it's a very intimate thing to do. So if you get the heebie jeebies, make your excuses and walk away and then call someone immediately.

Is there anything else we need to know yet? As at the end, once you've finished this, you get them to go home, sit with a pen and a piece of paper, turn off all of the electronics and sit for an hour and ask my say say to your higher power. Is there any other character defect I haven't talked about? Is there any other incident from the past I haven't talked about that I need to talk about

right and down at the end of the hour, call your sponsor, read them out, then you're done. And then over the course of your life, if anything else comes up, you can phone them. You can. You can phone them again.

And I think the last point back to this person is more than one person who always wants to read inventory.

I think one of the key purposes, and this should come out of the conversation in Step 5,

is that there's a limited number of character defects and everything else is variations on a theme. Once you've captured the nature of the character defect, being worrisome and fretful,

being controlling, being dishonest and manipulative,

overworking, being excessively concerned with appearances, you don't have to get the name of the defect. You just have to name the pattern.

Once you've got those, you don't need to then spend the rest of your life reanalyzing everything again and again and again and again and again. Simply the jobs say, oh, it's that. So when I'm, when I'm engaging in worry fret brood, I don't need to look at the detail of what I'm worrying, fretting and brooding about. It's the fact of it which is the problem.

Similarly with with, you know,

mental attack on whoever I don't need to I it doesn't need to be endlessly analyzed. So that's the big thing that should come out of this is the analysis is there to get you to the conclusions, which is here are my defects of character

for six and seven.

And now you once you've got those, you know what you're working with and there's no need to pour over the workings endlessly. And that's a very important message that should come come out of step five. I think that's pretty much it on Step 5. So I'm going to hand it back to you, Alistair, see if there any questions.

Thank you, Tim.

Excellent.

The meeting is now open for questions for Tim, which can be done by the raised hand function in Zoom, or you can message me through the chat function and I will ask him directly. If all all else fails, please wave your hand at the camera and I'll try to get to you. And we try to round up as as close to the hour as as possible, But if there are more questions, hopefully Tim can say on it.

So with that, I'll open it up for questions.

James,

Thanks, Alastair. James, alcoholic. Thank you, Tim. And my question is, do you think there's a significant difference to Step 5 or doing Step five with somebody when it's their first time that they've ever done Step 5 and when it's a person who maybe has done it once, twice, three times previously?

Or is it the same?

No, there, there's very definitely a difference. If it's the second one,

I mean, we've got to define what we mean by first one.

If someone's in AA for two years and then they drink for 10 years and then they come back, the first Step 5 when they come back is like a first Step five ever because it's covering years of carnage.

But I think it's absolutely the case

that once you've done what in a particular bout of sobriety

or period in in recovery, once you've done a step four and five and you've basically covered the past going back to the childhood and all that. I think one must be very, very strict with oneself about not letting the inventory process and Step 5, turning in turn into what Clancy would call socially acceptable self indulgence,

acceptable self absorption. And there's a

with a A in the steps. It's rather like Goldilocks, you know, the porridge is either too hot or the porridge is either too cold and actually the porridge needs to be somewhere in between. So you know what one lot of a A don't do. Never, never, ever touch the steps. I'm all right. After 20 years, I don't need the steps. If you have been to Canning Town

or by contrast, you've got, I've done the steps every year for the last 37 years, and every time it's this great production number with these endless truths and peeling the layers of the onion. Oh God, spare me. I like the middle ground, but you do it thoroughly. But you don't turn it. I don't want to turn my whole recovery into the Tim's inventory show.

Really. No. At some point you've got to change and let go of all this crap.

So I think particularly with subsequent steps of four and five, they should be brutally succinct. And if you look at the

experience of other traditions, it's very helpful here. So the, so Anglo Catholics and the Episcopalians in America, I think I'm right in saying that I'm not very good at Christian dominations, but there we go

have something called the, I think Catholics do it to sacraments of penance. And what they do is they give people a list of character defects, a complete list of character defects. There's a list in the Saint Augustine Prayer Book, which is a splendid little volume,

and they say, right, go away here, Here's a complete list of human character defects. And it's an absolutely brilliant list by the way,

my favorite one of which is is beautifully expressed

the initiation, collection and retailing of gossip. I just love that phrase, the retailing of gossip. I say go away and come back and tell us which of these character defects you have. Give an example of each and you're done. You've done it in an hour, you're done in less than an hour. So I think it's very important with subsequent ones to be to be brisk and non self indulgent

where cleaning house in order to make ourselves more effective in the world. It's not an end in itself. It's I remember someone saying in a meeting I shouldn't be recorded saying this. This is all very dangerous. I heard someone in a meeting once saying

the journey of recovery is a journey of journey into the discovery of self.

Oh God, there's, there's this. I'm just an ordinary person. There isn't a huge amount of this guy. There's a life to be lived out there

and that's what I want to be getting on with.

So it's a means. It's a means to an end. Now, the reason for saying that is because the first one is very important. So although

when it's someone's first experience of a step four and five, you do your best in the Step 4 process and in the preparation for the Step 5 to get them to be succinct and concise

and to, you know, chivvy them along a little bit.

Sometimes they just need to talk and you have to break the session into two or three to get it all out. And if it's the first one, that's important because there may well be things that which have never hit the light of day. Sometimes there's stuff that doesn't get written on the step four that needs to come out in the Step 5,

so I'm super lenient with the first one. You do your best to keep it contained, but if it if, if, if it breaks the banks of the river, fine. You just have to let it because you can't constrain the experience. The other thing as well with this method,

that of of going through the step forward, a fine tooth comb. So everything's been read out already. I don't think I've had an experience of a Step 5 which has taken more than 40 minutes.

Everyone's fine with it and everything's out already. Where you get these incredibly intense strained step fives where you're trying to get all the secrets out, get a handle on the patterns, do the rewiring, reframe all of these situations with huge amounts of resistance going on. That's what happens if you don't lead someone step by step through the step four. I found that before I did it, the way I currently do it, two out of two out of three-step fives was were deeply unsatisfact

for half a dozen reasons. And then you have to spend the next six months catching up and making and compensating for the mess created by trying to do too much in a Step 5. And that's the problem with the step the, the, the sort of traditional a a methods is, again, I shouldn't really be saying this on tape, but the traditional way of doing is you sort of send your little sponsee off into the darkness with their worksheets. And when they come back six months later, sort of blinking in the light

to read it out, you realize it's an absolute. It's a, it's a shit shower. It's a dogs dinner. I haven't understood it. It's a complete mess full of self justification. Missed the point completely. And then you're trying to redo the Step 4 as you're doing the Step 5 and get them to write stuff that you can't do a good job of anything. If I may quote Ron Swanson from Parks and Recreation, it is better to

ho last one thing

than to half ass two or more things. So with Step 5, this aim of getting everything out onto the table in one go. If you've satisfied, if you've achieved all of the other possible objectives during the course of the Step 4, the Step 5 is left with a as a clean experience of just get everything out on the table at once.

And I dread it's, I'm sure you've had this with people who have had a lot of mental illness.

There's a huge amount of step work in the Step 4 involved in reframing situations to help people see them rationally and sanely. And, and that that takes time for the water to seep through the parched ground. It can't be done in the context of Step 5. So you get everything else out of the way 1st and then you don't have the problem of the constraint in Step 5. So I hope that's answered the question.

Yeah. Thank you, Tim.

Thanks, Tim. Any other questions for Tim?

If there is a gap, I can cover steps six and seven in about 3 minutes.

And can I ask one question? Just the big

some detail. It talks about choosing the right person and talks about doctors and psychiatrists and even members of the family. I think

you mentioned that people not maybe not willing to do with multiple people, but have you ever had experience of someone saying, well, I'm not going to do it with you, I'm going to do it with my psychiatrist or a doctor or

yeah. OK, So I think this is there's a there's a couple of topics here. The first one is the question of doing your Step 5 with

a therapist or a psychologist or a psychiatrist.

And the question is one of domains is very important that the Step 4 be a moral inventory far more than it is a psychological one. It does involve rewiring the thinking

and looking at where your thinking is skewy and not where you've been trusting false ways of assessing situations. But it's chiefly a moral inventory.

And then in step five, it's the exact nature of your wrongs. And so it doesn't fall within the domain of, of, of most, there are going to be exceptions. It doesn't fall that that that the therapists are not there as moral guides.