Preparing a Sex Inventory

Completing a sexual inventory can be uncomfortable. Do you want to complete one? I was always tempted to keep it general and say something like, “This really isn’t my field of expertise.” Or, “My grandmother always told me it was impolite to speak of such things.” Or “The modern woman does not kiss and tell.” This did not fly with my sponsor. Instead, I was encouraged to be as specific as possible.

Oddly enough as I started really giving my sexual inventory my full attention, I realized that my family system had taught me some pretty weird things about sex. I had received some very strange messages and I needed to unpack them in order to understand my own sexual history.

Here is one example of weird sex stuff in my family of origin. In my late teens my father took a job managing properties for a local bank. One day I went into the branch near our house to make a deposit and my father happened to be there. This was unusual. He worked in some big warehouse in the Northside of town where the bank kept all manner of things banks need to keep buildings up and running. I waved at my dad who was sitting behind a glass partition with a woman. I got in line. I knew the teller from high school; he was a couple years older than me. We caught up on his life, I got my deposit and went about my day.

At dinner that night I could feel that my dad was “off”. I felt nervous. I pushed my food around my plate and waited for the proverbial shoe to drop. Soon, he stared at me. He chewed his food. He asked me to explain myself to the family. I had no idea what he was talking about. A wily and inveterate liar at this point in my life, it was hard to keep up the storyline that was designed to keep my father from knowing too much about me. I had no clue what exactly he had found out or how to escape his gaze.

He started, “I saw you at the bank today.”

I replied, “Yes, I saw you too. That was weird you being at the branch. What were you doing?”

“Don’t try to avoid the subject, this isn’t about me. It’s about you.” To make a long, traumatic and in some ways boring story short - he accused me of flirting with “his employee” and acting like a slut.

At the time I just shrugged and told my brothers, “Dad is a wackadoodle.” I did not understand how all these accusatory sexual innuendos were inappropriate and harmful to me. It made me feel awkward around guys and self-conscious. If my friend hadn’t been in a teller’s box surrounded by a nice glass window I’m not sure I would have had the courage to speak to him, much less flirt! As an adult, I know it was simply a polite conversation. As an unhealthy teen living in an unhealthy family, I wondered - am I slut?

It is possible that as you think back on your own sexual inventory, you may have some thoughts, feelings, or curious questions about your own sexual history. Write it all down! If it isn’t helpful for your Fourth Step, your sponsor will tell you. But you may find some interesting backstories that will have your therapist intrigued!

Preparing a Fear Inventory

If you want to do a fear inventory, here are the questions to complete:

1. Who is the person or object of fear (or anxiety)?

2. What happened to trigger the fear (list specific event/s)?

3. How did this affect me? What do I think this event cost me?

4. How did I react?What shortcomings were revealed?

Example:

1. I am afraid of my father

2. He changes jobs often and I am afraid we will lose our home; he cheats on my mother and I

am afraid he will leave us and we will not have any money; he has a hot temper and I am

afraid he will do something that will land him in jail and again, we will be without provision.

3. Get a job when I am 15 and have to lie to various people to juggle the job and my school responsibilities; I try not to eat to see if I can manage on less; I worry obsessively about getting a scholarship for college so I over-volunteer, etc. to the point of exhaustion and begin to isolate from friends and fun.

4. I do not ask adults for help. I do not check to see if my fears are even valid. As a result, I lose

that first job. I feel as if I cannot provide for myself or my brothers. Again, my pride, pessimism, insecurity, evasiveness show up as shortcomings.

In ALL our inventories, do not second guess your feelings or your version of the story. Just write write write. A sponsor and/or therapist can help you sort through all the details!

Fear and Inventories

Resentment is not the only emotion we need to inventory. We also need to address our fears. I learned that many of my fears came from either feeling inadequate or under-resourced. What is the source of your fears?

In fact, this fear is so prevalent when I listen to others share their Fourth Step (Fifth Step work) that I think of it as the “Law of Scarcity”. For as long as I can remember I have been afraid that there was not enough to go around and I wasn’t going to get what I needed. Evidently, I am not alone.

Enough food. Enough money for rent. Enough attention. Enough safety. Enough love. Enough. I grew up with the belief, this anxious feeling, that the world was a barren place and I would need to scrap and scrape to make my way in the world. I feared I would not succeed. Although I have found my own compulsivity baffling, even I can understand that self-starving was intimately tied to this feeling of “never enough”. Every time I thought I was losing out on something others had, my fear ramped up and I felt more justified in my commitment to the “Law of Scarcity” and all my strategies to survive. My inventory revealed this as I examined my resentments, fears and sexual history.

God is our refuge and strength, an ever-present help in trouble. Therefore we will not fear, though the earth give way and the mountains fall into the heart of the sea, though its waters roar and foam and the mountains quake with their surging.

~ Psalm 46:1-3 NIV

If Psalm 46 sounds like crazy talk to you - you are not alone! When I come across verses that sound so counterintuitive to my own experience, I pause to consider my options. Am I wrong? Is the psalmist a nut job? What might I be missing? I also use my imagination to find common ground. Many Psalms speak of fear and trembling and anger and resentment. I have two ways of relating to Psalm 46 - one is to acknowledge that the psalmist has every right to write about his good days - and this is one of them. But my FAVORITE way to read is to use my imagination. Is the psalmist crying out his psalm as he runs for his life? He believes these things to be true, but in his current situation he is tempted by unbelief. Imagine with me the psalmist running from his enemies ,heart pounding, feet barely touching the ground as his arms pump to gain more speed and distance from a situation that has triggered all his unbelief. He is trash talking his doubts, poetically demonstrating the same impulses that a guy in the New Testament also expressed, “I believe! Help me in my unbelief!”

There is much more I would like to say about this fear and how working a spiritual program taught me that the world is an abundant place, but that might distract us from our work!

Recognizing the difference between perception and reality

It was the custom in my family of origin to eat dinner every night promptly at 6:00 p.m. My brother wanted to play in a football league but practice would have required a 6:15 pm dinner schedule and that was not going to happen. Instead, my mother had him sign up for basketball - a sport my brother never had a bit of interest in playing. She sent him off to the local high school to sign up. She gave him a bouncy kickball to take with him to practice. His coaches took pity on him and brought him a regulation basketball to use, picked him up and returned him home after each practice.

We saw nothing unusual about this situation. This was part of our family system and we did not know anything different. Were we kids often disappointed when we did not get to do what our friends were doing? Yes, but that felt more like being ungrateful than living in a home with rigid rules for daily living.

As we inventory and unpack our life events, we may need some help realizing that some of the things that we thought were normal, or the things we blame ourselves for, were not as they seemed to our child’s eyes.

It is also likely that some of the patterns we developed as a result of our particular family system will carry over into all the other areas of our life. My worldview is profoundly affected by the family and culture in which I was raised. This PERSPECTIVE is so deeply ingrained that I am unaware that there may be other perspectives out in the world that would better suit my core values and my sense of self than the ones I was raised with. This tension between my own sense of self and the life I want to create and the world in which I was born into can contribute to my compulsions and eventual dependencies. They may be coping strategies (not particularly good ones) that serve as relief from the tension between what I have been told and who I want to become.

How about you? Are you absolutely content with your life? If so, great. If not, maybe there is more to the story than you ever considered.

Principles for making an inventory

Today, you may want to consider specific principles that you have lived by that may not be serving you well. If you wanted to do this exercise, it would look like another four column sheet:

1. The principle of______________________ .

2. What happened to enforce this principle in my life?

3. How did this affect me? What do I think this way of believing cost me?

4. How did I react?

Principles take many forms but usually are founded in falsehood and cause harm. The principle of prejudice, or the principle that grown-ups do not cry, or that only self-indulgent people practice self-care are all examples of principles that we may resent now that we are learning they are false and have harmed us when we lived by them.

Here is an example that my friend with the problem of naming his resentment put down:

1. I resent the principle that I was taught “Anger is a sin.”

2. My mother taught me that God hated angry people and required me to “put on a happy face”

all the time. If I cried in frustration or got angry I had to hide my feelings to avoid

punishment.

3. The effect this had on my life: I do not know what to do when I feel anger. I repress my

emotions. I am dishonest about how I felt. I have developed depression and stress-related

health issues. I think this contributed to my divorce and my using.

4. I have been selfish in other relationships as a result of trying hard to avoid any negative

emotions, I have asked my wife to take responsibility for my feelings (selfish), I have acted like a victim, my fear of losing control made me super controlling of my wife and kids, and even at work.