LAA
Love Addicts Anonymous

Step 4

"Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves."

The more we know about the problem the more we know what to change. We cannot be too general. We cannot just decide to change our lives. We must break this down into manageable pieces. We must change our values about love and how we think and behave. For example, love is not worth dying for (value), we will survive the end of a relationship (thinking), and we will not chase after unavailable people (behavior). An inventory can include your history of relationships but it should also focus on exactly what you want to change about yourself, like low self-esteem and shame-based thinking, feeling, and acting. Take a list of symptoms from any good book about love addiction and write about the ones that apply to you. Don't forget to list the things about yourself that you want to keep and expand on. Inventories should include the good and the bad. Discuss in your inventory the people you have hurt. Later, in the eighth step, you will be creating a list of such people. What drove you to hurt these people? What things are you later going to ask God to remove? It is traditional to write out your fourth step, but this is not mandatory. Some people do a fourth and fifth step in therapy on a weekly basis. How you do this step is unimportant. The only important thing is that you do it.

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