Dependency

Step Four in AA’s addiction recovery program invites us to make a fearless and searching moral inventory of ourselves. The requirement of this inventory is but minimally met if its only yield is a laggard’s list of shortcomings and missteps. The real work in Step Four is to identify and investigate our dependencies. When a dependency is discovered, the remedial act cannot be second-guessed, negotiated or dithered over. We take an axe to its root.