Step Four requires self-awareness, concentration, orderly thought, and the ability to translate mental pictures into words. If you can't look inside and describe what you see, you're going to struggle with it.
Now, sometimes people are resistant to the process itself because they have not signed up to it wholeheartedly. An unwillingness to look at oneself, self-justification, and blame will together block awareness or genuine introspection. There's little you can do to help someone who is blocked in this way other than to suggest rereading the Big Book, listening to recordings, going to meetings, praying the set-aside prayer, etc., and considering their priorities. With any luck, the penny will drop.
A different situation is presented by someone who, although somewhat resistant, sincerely wants to get well.
When you or I open up the fridge, we may see neatly stacked items. We can identify and record them. Three bottles of milk. Four apples. A jar of miso. Other people look in the fridge and see a mass of snakes. You ask them to count the snakes and identify their species. They can't do it. First of all, the snakes keep moving. Second of all, they're frightened. Third of all, they don't know diddly-squat about snakes.
The problem, here, is that the mind is blocked by a ... blockage, and the blockage needs to be removed to see clearly enough to unblock the blockage. They're trapped, but they need to be sprung from the trap to acquire the skills to spring themselves from the trap.
With the latter, you can help people pinpoint what is going on, to a certain extent. But if the mind is very disordered, cluttered, and complex, there's a danger of spending countless hours producing results of questionable accuracy and benefit.
Now, Step Four is a mixture of a lot of different self-examination tasks. Some are pretty straightforward. Who do you resent? Straightforward. What are you frightened of? Straightforward. How were you mean to people you slept with? Straightforward. Who would say you harmed them and how? Straightforward. Why do you resent them: what's your gameplan? Very hard. What are the mistakes in your beliefs and thinking? Super hard.
What do you do when you're trying to get a sponsee to answer some of the trickier questions (particularly careful consideration of self-seeking in the seven areas of self: the demands, some of the page 67 questions, and the whys behind the fears), and finding the truth is like trying to use a pencil to stab a particular eel in a bucket of eels?
SIMPLIFY
Basically, the output needs to be sufficient material for Step Five: a list of character defects and bad things the person has done. Anyone can come up with those. As long as you're capturing those, you're good. No need to unpick the twists and turns of flawed thinking. Just go with this simple truth:
THE THINKING IS WRONG: IT'S FLAWED IN A THOUSAND WAYS
The spiritual actions of Steps Four through Twelve will actually do a lot to clear up the thinking even without working on it directly. When there's more clarity, further down the line, sure, work systematically and deliberately on the thinking. But until you're there, give up and stick to character defects and wrong acts.
They have the rest of their life to figure out the detail and work on unpicking wrong thinking. In fact, the best way to help someone learn how to distinguish the true from the false and unpick wrong thinking is to use current difficulties, as all of the evidence is there, right on the surface, rather than trapped in a past distorted by months or years of feverish rumination. Pick a fresh one, and use that as the worked example.
As long as the Step Four is thorough, in that it covers all areas of the person's life, and reflects as accurately as possible the internal and external landscape of the person's life, given the person's current limitations, it's good.
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