An Essay on Step Five
Admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.
Hold on. Surely if God created me, He knows how I’ve messed things up. Why should I have to admit my wrongs to Him? Isn’t He omniscient?
Well, yes, God is omniscient. I can’t confess to Him to tell Him something He doesn’t know. I confess to Him because it does me good. When I try to hide my true self from God ... The Psalmist used these words to describe my predicament:
When I declared not my sin, my body wasted away through my groaning all day long.
For night and day thy hand was heavy on me; my strength was dried up as with the heat of summer.
But Psalm 32 goes on to describe the healing effect of confession—
I acknowledged my sin to thee, and I did not hide my iniquity;
I said, “I will confess my transgression to the LORD;” then thou didst forgive the guilt of my sin.
...
Thou art a hiding place for me, thou preservest me from trouble; thou dost encompass me with deliverance.
(RSV)
God will be with us when we confess to Him, and He will free us from the fear we have of facing ourselves and another human being. When we face ourselves, we can’t simply reread the work we did in Step Four. In my case, I had been avoiding seeing myself as I really was. If I was to make a clean sweep, I had to look on my faults in broad daylight to see who I really was. I couldn’t just take the work I did in the Fourth Step and file it away in a secret place; my defects will continue to fester in the dark if left there.
The recovery slogan about only being as sick as our secrets is true. Benjamin Franklin once wrote that two can keep a secret—if one of them is dead. Sharing my admission with another human being provided that second person who destroyed the secrecy. Of course, there were things that I revealed which could only be shared with a trustworthy and discrete person. Some of the things I needed to confess could hurt others. Some weren’t anyone else’s business. And some of the things I wanted to confess weren’t “wrongs.” Just as my sponsor helped me sort strengths from character defects in Step Four, so the one I shared my Fifth Step with gave me feedback that will helped keep me from taking on undeserved guilt.
Finally, this Step led me to see that I wasn’t who I wanted to be. Indeed, viewing myself through Steps Four and Five was a bit like seeing a photographic negative of the person I wanted to be. I began to see the kind of changes that God would want for me.