A.A.’s Step Five: Confession as the Antidote for Shame

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Facing a list of your character flaws is often a very shaming experience. Just as the sense of hopelessness that followed the first step (A.A.’s Step One: Confrontation With Reality) is softened by step two, the fifth step serves as an unexpected antidote for the shame many feel after step four’s inventory.

But step five’s relief only comes after completing this step and facing the prospect of undertaking the fifth step usually evokes fears of even more intense shame. As described in a previous post in this series, Twelve Step recovery is filled with paradoxes.

Again, there are many ways to understand the meaning and implications of each step[i], and I am not speaking on behalf of A.A. What follows is only one perspective on step five filtered through my experience as an addiction psychiatrist.

My goal is to offer thoughts on the psychological depth contained in the Twelve Step approach to recovery from addiction (see A Meaningful Definition of Addiction Recovery).

Step Five reads:

Admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.

The searching and fearless moral inventory of one’s character, so personal and private during the fourth step, becomes the outline for step five. The fifth step’s goal is to reduce alcoholics’ shame and increase connection. The method for achieving this is to increase one’s transparency.

Step five is an act of confession that begins privately and then expands to include communicating your worst characteristics to another trusted person. Confession starts with God, who can paradoxically be assumed to already know our deepest secrets.

However, there is a huge difference between viewing God as an omniscient being spying on us and a willingness to be fully known by a Higher Power. Voluntarily acknowledging the exact nature of our wrongs to a God who already knows commits us to a deeply honest path of transparency.

Step two developed a belief in a power greater than ourselves that can restore us to sanity (AA’s Step Two: Looking Beyond Your Self for Hope), and step three encouraged turning our will and life over to the care of this Higher Power (A.A.’s Step Three: Surrendering to What You Know Is Right), it makes sense to trust that admitting our character defects is likely to be looked on beneficently by any God worth his or her salt. Confessing to a caring God opens us to the better nature of our conscience as the arbiter of the truth about ourselves.

The path of transparency then turns to admitting the exact nature of our wrongs to ourselves. By “exact nature,” step five pushes people beyond the general categories of character defects developed in the previous step and toward recalling specific events during which one’s flaws were most glaring.

Examples of self-centeredness, blaming, and resentfulness, for example, need to be acknowledged and owned. Confessing the exact nature of one’s wrongs with oneself acknowledges the reality of past behavior and destructive attitudes. God knows this is difficult, and experiencing God’s caring is essential, as you own the shadowy and unattractive side of your character.

Finally, step five calls on people to present a full accounting of their wrongs to another person. This level of transparency and vulnerability requires choosing someone who can be deeply trusted. Most A.A. members do the fifth step with their sponsor or a spiritual guide.

The important point is to choose someone who understands the role of receiving someone’s fifth step, and this usually means someone who has already worked this step themselves. The proper response to hearing someone’s fifth step is mostly engaged silence. Confessing is an act of courage and being met with comments, suggestions, or analysis interferes with the process.

Step five requires only one person to speak honestly and another person to listen empathically without judgment. While the listener may ask for clarification at times, the important question, once the confession ends, is to ask how the process of working step five was experienced.

The unspoken message delivered by listening to a fifth step is that nothing heard is so bad that one cannot feel empathy for how hard it is to share such intimate details. While many of the behaviors and attitudes described may be unacceptable, the essence of the confessor is fully accepted.

What happened in the past is past because owning and sharing it all begins a transformation. Transparency helps our better nature start coming more fully to the surface and most people feel a weight has been lifted from their heart after working the fifth step.

While the Twelve Steps offer a blueprint for recovery and A.A. offers a like-minded community of support, the power of a good listener can be experienced in other settings, including good psychotherapy. Nearly two centuries ago, Nathaniel Hawthorne expressed this power in The Scarlet Letter, paraphrased as follows:

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If a listener has the power borne within to bring his/her mind into affinity with another’s that this last shall unawares have spoken what he/she imagines only to have thought, if these revelations be received without tumult and acknowledged not so often by an uttered sympathy as by silence, an inarticulate breath, and here and there a word to indicate that all is understood …then at some inevitable moment will the soul of the sufferer be dissolved and flow forth in a dark but transparent stream bringing all its mysteries into daylight.

Such is the power of the fifth step. Now the work of resolving one’s character defects, or at least draining them of the power to dominate one’s life, will commence in steps six and seven. Since these two steps are intimately connected, I will look at their significance together in my next post.