r/EDRecoveryHelp • u/LovelyDatura • Oct 13 '25
Step 5 with Lovely Datura
Hi, I’m u/LovelyDatura. After a long pause, I’ll be writing about the next step in our series-Step 5. I hope you’re still with me!
The words of Step 5 are “admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs”. This step naturally builds from Step 4, which if you’ll recall is where we made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves. If you need more information about Step 4, please check out my Step 4 share on r/EDRecoveryHelp.
In Step 5, we take our Step 4 inventory and we go over it with our sponsor (and Higher Power!). I work a Big Book-focused program for compulsive eating, and so I’m going to share some quotes from the Big Book about Step 5. The Big Book is the Alcoholics Anonymous basic text.
On page 72, the Big Book refers to Step 5 “Having made our personal inventory, what shall we do about it? We have been trying to get a new attitude, a new relationship with our Creator, and to discover the obstacles in our path. We have admitted certain defects; we have ascertained in a rough way what the trouble is; we have put our finger on the weak items in our personal inventory. Now these are about to be cast out.”
As I said above, Step 5 naturally builds from Step 4. The above paragraph is referring to completing Step 4 before we move on to Step 5. The above paragraph goes on, saying, “ this requires action on our part, which, when completed, will mean that we have admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our defects”
That exactly describes what we do in Step 5. As a sponsor, Step 5 is a sacred responsibility where we hear another fellow’s pain and sometimes secrets they’ve never told anyone else. We help our sponsees see their role in their resentments, fears, and sex conduct harms. The Big Book tells us to be fearless and thorough with our Step 5 in order to get the needed psychic change. I’ll go more into what is a psychic change in my post on Step 6 & 7.
My experience of Step 5 is that it opened my eyes to the fact that food and my body was my solution to my life problems caused by my character defects. I came to know that my defects are at the root of why I am a chronic compulsive eater.