How this works

The way my Al-Anon sponsor is having me do the four step is in the classic four-column method as laid out in the Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous. In the first column you list the people who are important to you in your life, or against whom you are carrying any kind of resentment. In the second column you list all the resentments you have against each of those people. In the third column you put how the cause of the resentment hurt or affected you. In the fourth column you identify your own part in it--your own character defect. In my first column I have over a hundred names and have done the second column on seven or eight of them. I was going in chronological order but decided to jump ahead to my wife because she is so much topic number one for me these days. Kids are out of the house, we're starting a new chapter of our lives, we've never gotten along better, daily wrangling is a distant memory, we are getting great joy out of doing all the things to our house that we have dreamed of for years, and now is the time to take all the self-defeating brain-garbage out of my side of that relationship and make it everything it can be. So how better to start? By listing all the things that she has done through the years--the 33 and a half years, but who's counting--that have driven me COMPLETELY INSANE. This is tough because I want to be thinking about all the things I love about her but I know I have to do this step right now.