I'm having trouble with the fourth step [View All]

Also known as the moral inventory. I hear from other addicts that they had trouble with it as well as it wasn't clear to them, and isn't to me, exactly how one should go about writing one. I wanted to post here to express my current understanding of it, and to see if anyone else here could share their experiences with working the fourth step to hopefully give me a hand with it.

"Made a fearless and searching moral inventory of ourselves" - that is the step that I'm working on. It always has helped me, when confronted with a word problem, to get the meanings and the definitions of the words straight at the beginning so that I don't work from flawed assumptions. In my mind, there are four words that bear some extra attention in this step: fearless, searching, moral, and inventory.

To me, fearless is synonymous with honesty as it's use here is concerned. In other words, I should not consider anything "too bad" to leave out of my inventory. I take searching to simply mean that I should be thorough and to consider possibilities that I have perhaps not yet considered. Moral is a tough one, but the definition that I'm trying to work from is the set of beliefs, attitudes, emotions, and assumptions that represent the ethical underpinnings of our action. That definition is perhaps a bit circular, but it's the best that I have right now. Lastly, I take inventory to simply mean a written account of what is contained by some entity - in this case, my character.

So now that I think I have my definitions laid out, I need to decide how to start this. What I'm thinking right now is that I need to take some time and try to recall actions in my life that I regret, that I knew were wrong when I committed them, or that I know now that they were wrong. Something tells me that's going to be quite a long list. After I do that, in keeping with my definition of "morals", I should then try to examine the underlying beliefs, attitudes, emotions and/or assumptions that either motivated the behavior or made me feel okay about doing it. That, as well, should take quite some time.

After I do those two things, though, then I think I can look at what I've written and try to identify a common theme with the things that I've done wrong. As a result, I imagine that will give me some pretty good insight into what the defects of my character are.

So that's where I'm at now. For those of you who have done a fourth step, what do you think? Am I making a mistake somewhere along the line? Are there other things I ought to consider? Any assistance, advice, or observations would be very much appreciated.